Cambodia: Fish, Pigs, and Rice

Cambodia since I am leaving tomorrow to return to Manila. I have been working hard over the last 3 weeks to get my work done on the agricultural assessment for Cambodia. Basically this involved a lot of reading technical journals, reports, and papers on anything from the nutritional value of fortified rice for low income families, to the different ways to prevent pig smuggling between the Vietnam and Cambodia border, to the what is wrong with the Cambodian rice sector. And I assure you these are the best ones. Though I also had a lot of meetings with different donors and government officials who always seem to be happy to talk to you when you say that you would like to spend millions of dollars on their behalf. Anyway that is the boring stuff.

I did get to play a little which was quite fun. I got into an ultimate Frisbee league with a bunch of expats which is surprisingly large. For one game about 50 people showed up all from various parts of the world not Cambodia. I had a few good plays but the main outcome of the game was that I forgot to apply sunscreen in a few spots and paid for it DEARLY. I have also been wandering around some various markets whose roofs were designed for people no taller than say 5’6”. They are also quite packed with wall to wall, or perhaps in this case shack to shack people. It is also interesting that you can go from one vendor selling t-shirts, to another giving haircuts, to another chopping a fish head off. All in about 3-4 steps.



After a while I chose to do some more touristy things around the country and went to Angkor Wat which is this 1000 year old temple, which I hear is on the cover of the latest National Geographic. It was quite beautiful and the Cambodians did not really care what you did as long as you paid them $20 to get in. Thus we could basically climb and walk, step, jump, etc pretty much anywhere that we wanted. But unfortunately I decided to walk into a very dark room, while looking up, and stepping off a stair that was about 1.5 feet tall. My step unfortunately was into a 2 ft hole in the ground and I messed up my ankle pretty bad. After some colorful language on my part I was able to hop/hobble out of the temple, whilst sweating profusely into a Tuk Tuk (Think a motorcycle with a little wagon on the back) which took me back to the $20/ night hotel (And that was the expensive one. They have the $2 variety as well) where I remained largely bed bound for the rest of the weekend.

The trip home was rather interesting as well. We were driving in a large bus, down a road that was described to me by a Cambodian colleague as one of the best roads in Cambodia. This is very frightening to me, because this road makes any small two lane road in the U.S. look like a huge interstate. Not to mentioned that we were sharing the road with every motorcycle, horse drawn wagon, bicycle, tuk tuk, truck, car, tractor, carts filled with anything from dead pigs, to mangoes, to bags of rice. Not to mention most motorcycles/mopeds carried at minimum two people usually much more. The record that I saw was 5. It was pretty impressive/scary. If Mark and I sat on one of these things it would literally scrape against the ground. That is only the players involved, it is a whole other thing to see the dance of these vehicles traveling down a poor constructed two lane road driving pretty much wherever they wanted.




But in tems of my ankle I am more or less okay, I think. I am hobbling around much less these days and it helps when your work is largely in front of a computer all day and requires very little moving.

Other than that some pretty random observations.

• It rains here A LOT. And pretty much everyday when I am about to go home. And that rain often turns into flooding which prevents cars from driving on the roads. My first experience having to walk through flood water in my business clothes was less than fun. It involved taking off the shoes, rolling up the slacks, and wading barefoot trough some pretty yucky yucky poo water. You imagine it I bet it was in there.
• They have an Obama brand car battery here which is pretty funny. Their tag line is that it is “Super Powered”
• Fish is disgusting, because they serve it with virtually everything head, tail, and all. A real low point: fish ball soup; not my favorite tasted a lot like scales
• No matter where I go in the world, whether it be Bangkok or Phnom Penh, if there is a tuk tuk it wants to take me for boom boom. I think has to do with being a foreigner. They think that’s all we want.
• Crossing the street in Phnom Penh is much like playing a game of frogger. With no cross walks you just have to find your space and run like hell. Also, mopeds will stop for you, cars will not.
• There are lots of mosquitoes during the day, the big ones come out at night
• If you have 6'3" 200+lbs, you have to be used feeling fat. XL in Southeast Asia = Medium in the United States