Time off

After our first team of volunteers depart, we have a full week before the next one arrives. We spend Sunday afternoon relaxing by the pool in a leisure club, which serves either cold red wine or warm white wine, besides ice cream and snacks. Then Monday is a full debrief of the whole programme – what worked, what didn’t, what can be arranged better and whose responsibility it is to make that happen. On Tuesday we write reports/balance books etc, and then on Wednesday, Rob and I set off for Kratie, in eastern Cambodia, to see the Mekong dolphins. It takes seven hours on the bus to get there. We stumble off the bus, find a café and order orange juices. The café we have stumbled into is actually a community project – guesthouse, restaurant, tour operator. They make a big effort to source everything locally, where possible, develop picture recipes to teach illiterate rural women how to make shakes and smoothies, and have a push to reduce their environmental footprint. We eat there several times, in order to support their work, although the menu promises cook your own buffalo steak, and does not in fact deliver this (we don’t have…maybe tomorrow…)

The following day, we have a luxurious lie in until at least 8am, and then wander down to the Star in the Community guesthouse for pancakes and coffee. We are too late to hire bikes from there, but they point us to a place two blocks down that rents out bikes for a dollar: proper metal shoppers with Sturmey-Archer gears. We pick up a map of Koh Trong – a large island in the Mekong parallel to Kratie Town, and manhandle our bikes down a steep dirt slope to the ferry, a rickety wooden fishing boat that has a worryingly large amount of Mekong sloshing about in the bottom. At the other side, the dry season has exposed about a quarter of a mile of sand banks around the island, and the slog to push metal bikes through burning hot river sand is the hardest work of the day.

Having eventually reached the island proper, we stop in the shade to drink water and get our bearings. Then we set off on a packed dirt track, passing dozens of children who wave and shout hello! There are butterflies and dragonflies. We pass a pagoda, and ancient stupa (burial monument) and bamboo groves and jackfuit trees (jackfruit grow to very large sizes on tiny little twigs surprisinglly low down the trunk) At lunchtime, we park the bikes at the top of the bank on the west side, using the rope lock we were given to tie the frames together, change into our swimming costumes and scramble down the dirt banks to the Mekong, for a paddle and a packed lunch. Brie sandwiches, hurrah! We watch some of the local boys bringing their cattle to the river to drink, and splashing about in the water with them. There is a village made of houses on boats floating downstream of us. After lunch, we pick up our bags, retrace our steps, and it’s at this point that I ask the important question: Where’s the key?

Well, it was me that locked it…. After ten minutes of desperation, I find the key lying in the ground where we changed our clothes. It’s attached to a yellow cellophane ribbon (which I could easily have attached to something), and the ground here is deep loose dirt strewn with bamboo leaves and twigs, some of which are also yellow, so it takes three false starts and a small miracle to find it at all.

After the hard slog back across the sands and up the river bank, we have exactly enough time to return the bikes, get a cold drink and a shower, and meet our arranged transport to see the dolphins. This is via motorbike taxi: one person on the back of one small motorbike with a local driver. Don’t even ask about crash helmets, which are technically legal, but not enforced. Mission Direct policy states that these are not to be used, but we’re on time off and Rob Safety said I could, m’lud.

(As I’m typing this on Saturday, we get a phonecall to say one of our team is in hospital after taking a fall off a moto, although he’s talking to us, so it can’t be too bad.) We take about half an hour to travel the 15km north to Kampi, weaving in and out of other motos, chickens, and at one point swerving off the tarmac entirely to make room for an oncoming truck. We pass rural houses, some run down thatch, some shiny new wood, most dusty. One has ceramic cobras by the door, possibly something to do with the legend of the Buddha being sheltered from a rainstorm by a huge cobra, so that he could meditate in peace.

As for the dolphins, they are well worth the trip: I’ll let Rob blog about them.

Worrying noises to hear: your moto driver yawning. Still, he took one hand off the handlebars to cover his mouth….umm…