Going to the village

We were invited to go on a visit to the village that most of the children originate from. This was a chance for them to visit their relations. I would encourage anyone who is curious on village life here to watch the videos below. We tried to get a few of the normal everyday events that happen in the village.

We started the day in the truck. A number of westerners came along to help look after the children and to stop them from falling out as we drove along.

The trip to the village was a very bumpy, hot, dusty affair. We still felt the aches in our posteriors three days later. We took this video in one of the quieter bits when it was safe to stop gripping the truck. The thumb disappears after 10 seconds. It was just there while Stan was trying to get a grip on the camera.

When we finally got to the village, we expected the children to scatter off to see their relatives and old friends at the village. Instead, they were oddly separate from the village. It was a bit sad. We didn't know if they were shy, or perhaps embarrassed that they used to live here or just now living a life so far removed from farming given that they are lucky enough to go to school.

Stan pulled out his phone and played a "Shaun the Sheep" episode hoping that the village children would come watch, but they were too shy. A couple of them were obviously wanting some attention and they were playing with a very old broken toy (the front wheel of an old kid's tricycle). The video below is of the village shop and the children playing with the broken tricycle.

We walked around the village and found a few ladies preparing a feast for us. Boiled fish in a rice soup.

Another typical village scene is the communal pump which provides all the water and is the communal shower.

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We had lunch. The fish porridge you saw earlier and some fruit. We helped serve so we didn't have to eat the fish porridge. They also had some noodles, so we were able to eat something.

After lunch we had one of our most surreal experiences in Asia. The villagers came from miles around in their Sunday best and wanted to put on a dance party for us- 1 pm in the afternoon! They started their generator and cranked up their speakers to well past any level they may be rated for and proceeded to dance under a tree. At first we wanted nothing to do with it. But they begged and begged for half an hour and we were told by Mom that it would make them very happy, so Stan went out and joined them. He was told to feel the music and to wiggle his hands around. Nicole still wouldn't go, instead preferring to take humiliating photos of Stan and the others dancing. Eventually she joined us and despite looking like total idiots we had a fun time and the people loved us joining in.

Some other interesting things in the village were:

The village keeps all its ice in sawdust on the ground next to the shop. It can last a long time like this and they use the ice for refrigeration and to make ice drinks as treats. I think they get a new load of ice every week or two.

It is sad to see the squalor in which they live. Trash is thrown away anywhere and no care is taken to make their home clean.

A typical house.

After a fantastic experience of rural Cambodian life, we jumped back in the truck for the long hot trip back. We stopped for ten minutes along the way so the boys could go for a swim in a mud hole and they could show us a new chicken farm near the village.

After this we went straight home. The littler kids were falling asleep and we were scared some would fall off the back of the truck, so we spent most of the trip holding them in which meant we were not holding on ourselves. This meant an even more uncomfortable trip than the way up. The temperature was around 38 and there was no shade for the whole trip.

Would we do it again? For sure, but maybe not so quickly!

Food

Food here is on the whole delicious. We have been eating out along the street a lot at night. One can get something daring and interesting like snake or spider on the side of the road.

Snake on a stick.

Fried spider with chili

We haven't tried the spider yet, though last time we were here we had some snake to eat. It was far too chewy to be nice.

One interesting dish Stan has tried is cooked with red ants. The ants make their nest on a specific type of tree and from this tree they acquire a slightly lemony taste which they give to the meal they are cooked in. It was quite nice and as long as you didn't look to closely at your fork you would never know you were eating ants.

Zoom in to see the ants cooked in!

Our favorite places are in the cheap side of the road restaurants.

Hopefully this inspires some of you to come visit us and enjoy some new exotic foods.

Funny things we see on the road

As we drive about on our little moto, we come across some very strange sights. Not all of these were taken by us. Some are shared via facebook or other forums. We have seen most of these as we drive around.

We wish we had a gopro so we could record things as we drive around. Then you too could experience the
terror of a huge bus hurtling towards you at 100 km per hour in your lane with no where to turn.

When driving in Cambodia, you must remember only one thing! Every bus on the road is trying to kill you. Most trucks are too, but they are usually too overloaded to go too fast leaving you enough time to get out of the way. A bus, however, seems to actively hunt you down. We saw a bus accident which had ploughed through a tuk tuk. It was horrific. We hope to never see that again.

We followed these guys for 1 km unable to overtake as they trailed some steel behind the bike.

Not a big load by local standards, but we always imagine it dropping on us as we follow behind.

Near hospitals and clinics we often see people riding down the road holding an IV bottle over their heads as they don't want to wait in the clinic. The first is a photo we took, the second photo is not ours.

This is not a photo we took, but something you can very occasionally see in Siem Reap. Even the locals will stop and stare.

The following photos are not ours, but I have included them here to show you the kinds of things we pass on a daily basis.

We'll try and (safely) take some photos of what we see on the road here. I think the new google glass product would be great for this. (Google glass has, among other things, a voice activated camera attached to a pair of sunglasses.)

Things we see on our shared roof

We share a roof with all the neighbors. From one side of the roof we can look across the river at one of the Buddhist temples in the area.

The rooftop is also where our neighbors hang out their washing. It appears that today is hat washing day.

Occasionally we see something a little strange outside on the roof. Last week we saw a whole lot of crocodile skins getting dried out (apologies for the absence of a photo). This week we have a bunch of crocodile heads getting dried out on the roof.

As we see new things, we'll post them up here.

How we got a clean shower

Our water comes from the ground and is pumped to a big tank on our roof. From there we get the water delivered to our sinks, toilets and showers via gravity. The first few times we use the water it smelled terribly of copper. The smell has somewhat cleared up, but we are still having a lot of sand and dirt in our water. This makes showering feel like a fruitless exercise. But it is more comfortable to be dirty than sweaty!

Stan has been looking around town for a few weeks trying to find a sediment filter and the hoses to put a filter in our shower. The results are not pretty, but we hope that we'll now have clean hair.

You can see the hose going down from the faucet to the filter. Then up to the Philips water heater.

Here is the hot water system we had to have but in all honesty we rarely use it.

This is the state of the filter after one test shower. Before this it was pure white inside.

Hopefully, after a few days we'll find out if our tans are real or a result of muddy showers. Perhaps they'll will wash off and we'll find ourselves back to the pasty Australian white again. We may even get the shower walls to stay clean and get the hoses white again.

Getting online

One of the first things we wanted at our house was a reliable internet connection. This would provide us with our communications back home, our entertainment and a way to work collaboratively with others. Once we found our house, Stan jumped on his bike and again rode all over town searching for the ISPs. Like everything here, there is no address. You just are given directions and told it is near "such and such" a landmark.

We went to a number of different places with all kinds of pricing. Some wanted $30 for a 1 mbs connection. Some wanted $90 for 4 mbs. We came across a deal whereby if we prepaid for 6 months of an 8mbs ADSL connection, they would upgrade the connection to fibre optics for free. This seemed an excellent choice and we arranged to go to their office.

At the office we were assured that we may be able to get fibre, but this was subject to a site visit. The girl jumped on her moto and followed us home. The site visit lasted for all of two minutes when the girl looked at us very sreiously and told us that the installation fee would be very expensive as they had to run the fibre a long way. "Extra $50, so sorry", she said. Well at one one hundredths of the price in Australia, what could we do but agree. We prepaid 60% to get the ball rolling and settled back to wait the three days they had promised us. Two days later as we were riding home, we came across a guy kicking a spindle of wires down the road.

Following him was a guy along the road swinging the cables around and trying to throw the rolled out cable over a tree along the road.

Meanwhile all the cable was left in the street for people to drive around.

Once the cable was in place, another guy climbed the electricity pole with a few zip ties and put it in place.

Eventually they got the fibre all the way to our flat and out of curiosity Stan asked them how far they had to run the cable to reach me. "We used one and a half spools", they told him (one and a half kilometers). A very good deal for $50.

Three guys then went to work on our living room floor. One configured the router and fibre box. Another pulled out an expensive box to join the fibre cable to the terminator cord. The third held all the cables in the right location. After 20 minutes they realised they did not have the right equipment to protect the cable where they joined it to the house connection. One guy was sent off on the motor bike and came back a minute later with what we thought was the correct cable. We were wrong. He came back with a bottle of water. They proceeded to throw the water out and one person stayed outside for five minutes shaking and waving the bottle to make it completely dry. They used this bottle to connect the external fibre cable to the cable inside our house.

So now our internet connection at home runs through a water bottle and looks like this:

In some ways we can laugh at how this connection was accomplished. But for all that, we must confess to having better internet than at home in Australia (at half the price). We find it a little funny that having traveled from one of the wealthiest nations to one of the poorest nations we are able to receive better connectivity (when the electricity is on) than in Australia.

Our speeds on an 8mbs fibre connection are as follows: ( http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3326179528 )

Siem Reap by night

For those of you who are interested in what Siem Reap is like, we'll try do a few posts about various aspects of living in Siem Reap. For the most part we'll try and concentrate on all the positive aspects. One nice thing about living here is that once the sun goes down and it cools down, the town looks very beautiful. Most of the trash that seems to be all over the place is invisible and we can walk around town enjoying the Siem Reap atmosphere.

Walking up towards Lucky Mall the most famous "mall" in town.

Looking down Pub Street in the evening

A hotel is hosting a monthly "Fair Trade" market.

The only nice mosquito in Siem Reap all lit up.

A giant grasshopper or preying mantis. Maybe you can tell us what it is?

Near the old market.

The bridge across the river.

As you can see, it is quite beautiful to go for an evening stroll. We'd encourage you to come visit us!

Teaching and break time

We have been doing some teaching. This is hard work in a unbearably hot classroom with children at different levels. Thankfully we share a class this time and that lets one of us help the slightly slower kids in the class catch up.

Nicole checking their writing.

Mercifully (for the teachers) break comes, but it seems far too short.

Across the fence we can see their old room that all the children used to live in.

This is slowly falling to bits.