Wat a Ride

8-10-08

Here at the training village we are kept pretty busy during the week. We have four-hour long language classes in the morning, followed usually by some sort of teacher training activity in the afternoon. This takes place six days a week, so obviously when Sunday rolls around we are all looking for a chance to let off some steam.

This Sunday was no different. I slept in until the extremely late hour of 7:00am, then spent an hour and a half doing laundry (doing laundry by hand is probably the most tedious experience imaginable). After an outdoor shower by the same well I did my laundry next to, I lay down in my hammock (hammocks are the greatest thing ever) and read a book until some other PCT's rolled up. Since my house has a large “courtyard” area under the stilts and is fairly quiet it has become the de facto staging area for most group activities, which is cool. One of our LCF's (an acronym which basically stands for a language teacher) was going to accompany us on what we had decided would be a “long bike ride.”

There are three LCF's in each training village. All of them in Tuk Phos are in their 20's with the youngest, Linda (yes that's her name, I know it's not very Khmer but she is from here) being only 21 years old. She's also the coolest of the LCF's here (not that the other two aren't awesome), and she was coming along on our bike ride.

We headed in the direction of the mountains to the south-west. We rode for quite a ways until we got to a fork in the road. At some point in the past Linda had heard that there was a waterfall somewhere in the Tuk Phos area, and since she knew it was down this road we decided why not to try to reach it. And so we headed down this dirt road. We stopped at a school along the way for a break, and after making an offering to the small Buddha statue there we continued on down the increasingly narrow and rough road. At some points the road was more pothole than road, with some areas where the road was literally only about half a foot wide. Since it's the rainy season there was a lot of standing water and mud too. I am extremely thankful that I spent about a month or so getting reacquainted with bike riding, because otherwise this road would have been the death of me. I'm still a bit surprised I survived the journey. It must have taken us a good two hours to get to this place through some of the roughest roads you can imagine.

But almost everywhere along this road there were either houses or rice fields. People were out in the fields planting rice, driving water buffalo, or even running small little markets. When we stopped to ask them where this waterfall was they would tell us things like “15 kilometers. Too far.” or “10 kilometers, too far. You should take a moto.” How these people not only survive but thrive out in the most rural of rural areas I do not know. We must have been a dozen miles from the nearest town, such as it was, and the roads were completely impassable by car. Hell, there were parts that were impassable by bicycle, and yet there were still houses and people out there. It amazes me.

Two hours into the trip I was beginning to think of this journey less as a fun day out and more of Linda's Death March to the Mountains. But finally we came to the wat (a Buddhist temple) and the waterfall. And, quite frankly, it was worth it. The wat was actually only about a year old, but was a pretty sizable one with fourteen monks. The waterfall was beautiful, and we were right at the base of the mountains. We ate a picnic lunch there and poked around. In retrospect I should have stayed away from the water, but I had climbed over rocks on Lake Superior, these little boulders around the base of the waterfall would be nothing, right?

After dangling my legs in the water and wetting down me hair I turned to go back to shore. Then I slipped on a rock and banged my elbow good. Some passing monks laughed at me. Monks can be jerks. After Linda bandaged me up (it was a pretty large scrape, and bleeding quite a bit) it was time for the journey home. This journey was hellish; it was the height of the day, and we were already tired exhausted from the ride out there (and injury, in my case). But, two and a half hours and one nasty sunburn later, we were back in Tuk Phos, which seemed like a metropolis as we rolled in.

I called up the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer) and she assured me that no matter how dirty that water had been I probably wasn't infected with anything. And she assured me my sunburn would sting like I would not believe, since the doxycyclene we are on for malaria prevention makes us much more sensitive to UV rays. Then I had Linda help me to apologize to my host family for disappearing for the day. Not knowing that we were going all the way out to this waterfall I had not told them I would be gone for lunch. My host mom scolded me, clucked over my sunburn, then made me eat all the rice she had prepared for my lunch.

Just another Sunday in Cambodia.