Banlung Ratanakiri Province Cambodia, April 2009. It is cool in the morning here, much cooler in these forested hills than the rest of Cambodia. The wind stopped blowing some time ago back in Angkor, and this is a welcome change. My two traveling companions and I and meeting a man who is to take us into the north of Ratanakiri at seven o’clock at a restaurant nearby. We walk there, and meet him along with a Frenchman who is also coming with us. His name is Mel. He is a twenty two year old carpenter from Brittany who is in between jobs right now. He is using the time he has to travel around Southeast Asia. “Il faut profiter,” I say to him. He nods. He does not seem impressed to find an American who speaks French (they never are). We eat our bowls of hot steaming noodles and set off from the town in a pickup truck.
The road stretches on over forested hills and deep ravines filled with thick jungle. The bamboo clumps around the taller trees make it difficult to see what exactly is beyond the edge of the forest, but sometimes you can see a house or an animal. The road is wet and rutted in certain parts. Small houses of wood, straw, and woven material appear sporadically. Some people are walking along the road carrying handmade axes or fruit. We finally reach Voen Sai, a village on the bank of the Sen river.
After eating a lunch of fish, rice, and vegetables we leave in a boat along the river. Mel declines to go with us. We are going to a Chinchuit village that has a very unique cemetery, and the only way to get there is by boat. Our captain is old man dressed in a white shirt and straw hat, and who is ethnically Chinese. He tells us he speaks Chinese at home with his family, but he speaks Khmer to everyone else. I would have guessed that he speaks some form of Cantonese, but when I speak the few Mandarin phrases I know to him he seems to understand. I can only understand bits and phrases of what he says to me in Khmer. “There is a Laos village over there, a Chinchuit village over here, this river flows from Vietnam into the Mekong,” are some of the phrases that I understand.
Villages and fishing boats dot the banks of river, but it is mostly jungle that we can see beyond the water. We arrive on a great big sandbank, and make our way to the shore up a series of steps carved out of the earth.
The entire village stares at the white invaders, but it does not faze us (we are completely used to it). I’m thinking that this is where Walter E. Kurtz would have been if he were not a fictional character. Upon arriving in the village, we meet the headman of the village. He is a short, dark little man who wears a purple velvet sports jersey. His wife also comes out of the house to greet us. A cigarette rests between her lips, a simple sign of how different this place is from those we have discovered before. The headman shows us the way to the cemetery. The bodies of the dead are placed in coffins underneath the family home before they are taken here and buried.Small roofs are built over the buried coffins, and on top of the roofs are carved wooden boats. Statues of wood or stone are placed at the corner of the structure to indicate who is buried there.
There are sometimes two people buried next to each other. Banana trees are planted around the graves as indications of how the person is doing in the afterlife. If the trees are growing well, then the person is doing well. If not, then they are doing poorly. We are told that the people here only eat meat when they have sacrificed an animal to the spirits of their ancestors. One can see the racks where they have killed pigs, and the piles of ashes where they cooked them. On an alter in front of some of the graves, flies buzz around the horns of a buffalo that were saved from some nights ago. The smell is still pungent. When we leave, we offer some money to the headman as thanks.
We take the boat back to Voen Sai and meet up with Mel. From there, a bamboo ferry takes us across the river to a village on the other side. Our guide leads us by foot some kilometers into the north to a stream where people are swimming. We are exhausted, so we strip off our clothes as well and go swimming. The current is very strong, and it is hard to swim upstream in certain places. On the
banks of the river, there are some women who are selling fruit and smoking tobacco out of rolled up banana leaves. There is an elderly lady with a cloth wrapped around her head who is smoking out of a pipe. I try to speak Khmer to these women, but they have no idea what I am saying. After we have finished swimming, we walk to the house where we will stay for the night. It is a wooden structure on stilts surrounded by a garden, and the family who lives there is ethnically Laos. The lady of the house welcomes us, and her son introduces himself as, “Whiskee.” We instructed that we should bathe, and we follow the family down to Sen river. We remove our clothes again and dive in. My feet are encased in mud, and I am not sure if I am really cleaning myself or simply just getting wet. The women bathe along side us in sarongs, and we notice that it is very hard to get back up to the river bank because it is so slippery. Having washed ourselves, we go back and relax before eating a meal of rice, vegetables, and eggs. We sit and eat on straw mats, and the lady of the house serves us some twenty year old Laos rice whisky. It is a clear liquid that comes from jar with some of the grains of rice still at the bottom. With a single small glass, each of us drinks a little bit. It is surprisingly delicious. She also ties a white piece of string around our wrists and blesses us with good luck for the coming new year.When we have finished we are led through the darkness to the neighborhood Wat, where many people have gathered. It is Khmer New Year, and everyone has gathered to celebrate what could be considered Christmas, New Years, Easter, and your birthday all wrapped up into one giant party. Lights are strung up all over the complex, food and drink sellers have set up stalls everywhere, and a monk who stands watch over the stereo equipment blasts Kareoke music. We follow our hosts to the abbot of the Wat, to whom we over incense to. In response, he blesses us with a prayer. We go to the vihira, which has been opened on this occasion, and pay our respects to the big wooden Buddha there. We are then invited to dance. Khmer dancing involves a three-step movement in the form of great big moving circle that revolves around a central point. Men dance in one line, and women dance in another alongside their male counterparts. At one point, our guide brought over a couple of sixteen year old girls to dance with me and another male volunteer. The two of us did our best not to balk, but we respectfully kept our distance.
We grew tired of the dancing after a while, and the two other volunteers and I decided to retire at a drink stall across from the Wat. We hung out and talked before we went home. We slept on straw mats that night in a house that creaked with every step taken upon its wooden planks. In the morning we made our way back to Banlung.
