Middle Cambodia

We visited the small city of Kompong Cham which is situated in central Cambodia on the banks of the Mekong river. The river is really brown at the moment on account of the rains having started, and its very very wide. Wide like the Nile wide, not like the Yarra river wide!

Kompong Cham is also the site of the only bridge that crosses the Mekong in Cambodia. In Phnom Penh (the capital) they still use barges to get everything across the river, a little backwards but considering how much of a monstrosity the bridge in Kompong Cham is compared to the rest of the infrastructure in Cambodia you can understand why. We did a tuk tuk tour around the area for the afternoon. Our tuk tuks were propelled by very cheap but cool looking Chinese motor bikes, and lovely Khmer drivers who were more than appreciative of our custom.

First stop was one of the local weaving villages. The area around Kompong Cham is famous for its fantastically coloured and detailed Khmer scarves which we found out have a thousand and one uses: cover yourself while bathing, sun hat, turban, veil, neck scarf and to make your head flat on top so you can carry stuff around on it etc etc. The lady who demonstrated the weaving to us had the biggest goiter that I had ever seen, but she seemed happy and healthy enough!

Anyhow, it takes two days to make a scarf and they sold them to us for $2 USD. Which is not a lot of money. The village kids followed us around from the minute we got out of the tuk tuks and were so excited when the got to see their faces on our digital cameras. The village kids also taught us the game where you have to kick your shoes to knock over a pile of rubber bands, we were all really bad at it but it was pretty fun.

Next stop was a temple, Wat Henchey on the top of the "man and woman"hill. It had a beautiful garden and the most impressive library building I've ever seen. The top of the library had a massive smiling Buddha head on it, which beats the state library in my books any day! Oh yeah and there were monkeys - we hate monkeys.

Next stop was Wat Nokor (another temple) where we had a cultural dancing show put on for us by the local orphans, they were all very lovely kids and one of the little girls adopted Me - she was so so sweet. They live off the money from the donations they get from the cultural show, so we gave them a good one! After this we had a little afternoon siesta and then we headed to one of our tuk tuk drivers house's where his wife had cooked the most magnificent spread for us. The highlight of which was the fried crickets, cheap beer and the traditional Khmer coconut chicken curry which was the best one that we have had by far. It was a brilliant night, we got to eat dinner on their bamboo floor in their house on stilts. We also got to talk to them about:

• prices of houses -$12 000 USD in this case, for 1 big room,1 bedroom, bathroom and kitchen, home loans - they borrowed money from the rich peoplehow to make money - fattening up pigs is a good option when there are no tourists that want to take tuk tuks!
• weddings - they get changed about 5 times and their parents pay for everything!

Even though these people were poor and live very simply compared to us they were obviously very happy, even if a lot of their time was spent worrying about how to make enough money to feed their family. We have had a few reality checks on this trip already and this fabulous day in Kompong Cham was one of them.