Rural Cambodia

Blake Priddy, Matt Hansan 

Reporting on the activities of Saturday, December 29, 2012

Today we started out with a long two-hour bus ride heading out to Bo Pha Phnom Phen. Our always laughing tour guide, Veng (sort of pronounced like Wayne), posed for a picture with us.  On the way we stopped for a picturesque view of some Lotus flowers and tried some Lotus seeds. After we arrived we hopped on some speedboats and headed out to meet Lung and Ding, some new friends of ours. We met our new Cambodian pals at the ancient capital city of Cambodia. It took about 30 mins to speed boat out there but it was a fun boat ride so it seemed like nothing. We docked at the ancient capital and were greeted by a bunch of Cambodian kids from the village. The kids were so nice and happy to see us. We were led up to some ancient temples and the little children accompanied us and picked us some flowers. Two of the little kids, who were named Lung and Ding, gave us some flowers and walked with us the rest of the way. After climbing back down the steep stairs we headed back to the boats. Before we got on the boats we spent some time with the local villagers and Matt bought about 50 gumballs for two dollars and distributed them to all of the kids in the village. After all of the kids were satisfied with their gumballs we headed back on the boats to eat lunch. We had lunch at a local place named the Titanic, which made us feel super safe after we noticed it was basically held up by bamboo sticks. It was here that ate some fried Cambodian chicken, or as our guide Wayne/Veng calls it FCC, their version of KFC. Everyone enjoyed the meal and we left with full stomachs heading out to another temple built on the top of a hill. On the way there it began raining, steadily getting harder and harder. We reached the temple and began trudging up about 400 steps in the rain, though we did have umbrellas with us. We reached the top and were greeted with an amazing view that allowed us to see all the land around the temple for miles. We didn’t spend much time at the top because of the rain and so we headed back down and hopped on the bus to head back to hotel.  From our bus, we could see how 80% of Cambodians live:  on less than two dollars a day, working in rice paddies and tending to cows and chickens, with few modern conveniences.