Being touristy

Again I was mistaken by thinking I could sleep late as someone knocked rather roughly on my door at 8:30 on Sunday morning. I thought it was the cleaning lady and therefore chose to ignore the knocking. I persisted though and I finally rose just to find Rath standing in front of my door looking rather appalled at the sleepy state of me and saying: “You’re still sleeping? But it’s already 8:45!” He told me some friend of Ruth’s has arrived and that he’ll do a tour of the surroundings with her and that I should be ready in 10 minutes if I wanted to come.

Ruth’s friend turned out to be 70 year old Gunda who had received the trip to Cambodia as a present from all her friends for her 70^th birthday. She is an artist, speaks a very interesting kind of English and is utterly delightful.

Off we went to Wat Kor Commune again to look at the ancient houses, again, but this time with a very experienced guide who charmed food of the old ladies living in the houses so that we were invited to drinks and fruit twice, got thorough tours of all the houses we visited, were told all the stories there were to tell and met loads of marriageable granddaughters that were especially introduced to Rath. Since Gudu is going to stay at one of the ancient houses for the next couple of days we had a good talk with its owner, in French and then moved on to the fruit and agricultural village where Rath showed us pineapple trees, jack-fruit trees, dragon fruit trees, tamarin trees and tomato trees (ordinary tomato plants). We tried our way through many different types of exotic fruit to finally arrive at a beautiful lakeside restaurant for lunch. We had an opulent meal, fried vegetables, morning glory on fire and Vietnamese soup and then hung out for a while in the hammocks.

Next stop was again, the vineyard and then the Banon Temple. To reach the temple one must climb about 300 steps, and Gunda even overtook some rather chubby Dutch tourists half her age but was a bit out of breath when we got to the top. The view was breath taking, only impaired by some very disturbing music from a nearby wedding party. The Banon is from an even earlier period than the temples in Angkor so people in Battambang Province pride themselves with giving the Kings in Angkor the idea of building such impressive temples. Banan is also one of the killing sites of the Khmer Rouge Regime, and some people’s bones still surface on rainy days since they never got a proper burial. Up on the temple we were followed by a family of 3 always eager to help us, give us flowers, cream the mosquito bites etc. to earn a Dollar or two. Back down again we had a sugar cane drink which was actually quite refreshing and then dropped Gunda off at her traditional Khmer house for the night.

At dinner we listened to the Khmer greatest hits. Khmer favorites include singers such as the terrific Celine Dion, the hot Enrique Iglesias, the cheesy Ronan Keating and some great Chinese Pop Singer whose name I can’t pronounce and who sings the all time favorite “Winter”. All these songs were with video and karaoke version to sing along.

While we were singing and dining Rath received a never ending phone call. Turns out, some girl called him believing he was her boyfriend and pretty angry that he never called back. He says, he never met the girl and never even heard her name. They argued some time and she always accused him of cheating on her and forgetting all about her. It was so funny, her dude works in Phnom Penh though and has the same name as Rath and apparently the same phone number. She wouldn’t believe him that he was not her boyfriend and then excused herself because she had to put some tiger balm under her nose to calm down a bit.