Last Saturday in Kampong Cham

To start with our last Saturday in Kampong Cham I really should put it into context. Friday night the 5 afternoon language group and our man Calleb all went to a Khmer night club with lovely Milia from the Mekong Crossing Cafe, 2 of the waiters and the 2 cooks as chaperones and boy did we need them. It was an utterly bizarre experience and unlike the rest of my VSO-ers who had been last weekend to the same club it was a first for me and all our khmer friends. 

The routine goes something like this; live band plays, people walk around dance floor in a anti-clockwise circle slowly whilst doing khmer hand dancing. 40 minutes later band stops, dance music comes on, dance floor turns into mosh pit, chaperones drag you away from any inappropriate gyration, drink jugs of beer watered down with ice....repeat until time to escape.

So the 8am lesson on Saturday morning so that Dara could go to PP to see his family was hampered slightly by us going out on a school night. However rather than bringing an apple for the teacher we brought a couple of Durian fruit (see above). For those uninitiated to dorian fruit they smell like a very ripe camembert or very smelly socks. The fruit sat festering in the classroom during our lesson while certain members of the group struggled to form sentences in english let alone khmer.

The taste of a durian fruit however is a completely different story. At the end of class we divvied it up and it was a perfect creamy, custardy consistency and tasted fabulous and a little bit like a sweet soft cheese.

We spent the afternoon at Man & Woman Hill where today there are two temples with a valley of Buddhas between them and in the 70's the temple was  converted into a prison and mass burial ground for some of Pol Pot's victims. Below is a lion statue guarding the entrance to the temple and if you look closely you can see a worn out area on its back where bad things happened to people, 1000s of men, women and children. 

A little bit of a temple mixed with the rubble of the road, buildings didn't do too well under Pol Pot either.

Louise and her one woman mission to be in everyone of my photos

We walked through the collection of Buddhas and I felt oddly at peace which is probably how I lost my camera case. We somehow managed to walk past and not acknowledge the collection of skulls that were recovered when the mass burial ground was uncovered. Unfortunately in this beautiful country the opportunity to see mass burial grounds and skulls again is disturbingly high.

We walked up the 177 steps to woman hill and the temple on top. From here we watched the sun set over Man Hill, got savaged by giant biting ants, took silly self timer photos and this is when I realised I had transferred all my attachment on to this group of four people and tomorrow we were all going to our separate placement weeks and I was going to miss them all quite a lot (apart from Katie, because she is a fellow Battambanger!).

Pete's ides for the EP cover.

It is just another goodbye, another new beginning.