Does your country have elephants?

November 22, 2016

"DOES your country have rice?"

Sopheak was leading us through the tropical forest on our day off in Senmonorom.

"No", we said. The strict answer would have been "yes" but there's too little to notice.

"And elephants?"

"No, no elephants."

He hesitated, probably wondering what sort of country wouldn't have rice or elephants.

"What's it like, your land?"

"Cold."

He laughed. Sopheak, in all his 42 years, had never known a cold day. In the tropics it is wet or it is dry but it is never cold. Not that that stopped people putting on an extra layer in "winter".

"And mountains and colourful birds?"

"Yes, mountains, big ones, but no colourful birds."

I wanted to explain that European birds are so dull that bird-watchers in Britain refer to many as LBJs - little brown jobs.

"But," we said, "we do have birds with wings a metre across."

He stopped and imagined that, standing in the mud in his flip-flop sandals. He lives in a village of precisely 905 people. He has six children, the oldest 16, who attend the village school. He is a self-sufficient smallholder, eating what he needs and selling or exchanging the rest with his neighbours.

No worry about electricity or water bills. There's no electricity and water comes from a well.

Cambodia is still recovering from the slaughter of intellectuals - well, almost anyone, frankly - in the Khmer Rouge era. The government is rated one of the most corrupt in the world.

Cambodian politics aren't as elsewhere...

A bar owner in Senmonorom did his best to explain.

"Every so often the prime minister comes out to a town," he said. "His cabinet is all rich businessmen anxious to keep their place in power. So the prime minister talks to the people and says 'I will build you a school', or makes some other promise. And then he smiles and looks at all the other politicians and says 'Now, which of you gentlemen would like to pay for it?'"

Vietnam, so close but hard to get to because few of the border crossings are open, must seem another, glitzier world.

The bar owner smiled. He was a brown-eyed Australian.

"Not everybody thinks this way or necessarily thinks about it at all," he said. "But the slang name for a Vietnamese translates as..." - he checked with his wife - "land-grabber." Vietnam is accused of nibbling at the borders.

Callum had been backpacking across south-east Asia from Tasmania when he stayed in one of the town's many guesthouses. There he met the landlady's daughter and fell in love. Six years later, they married. Now they have a daughter who, like her parents, is at home in both English and Khmer. The daughter plays around the bar and hostel that they run on the edge of town.

Callum and his wife run a bar and hostel on the edge of town

Sometimes when you travel, you just yearn for a proper cup of tea

It was Callum who phoned Sopheak for us. Everyone here has a cell phone and there's coverage even in villages with no electricity or running water. And with Sopheak we set off on the back of motorbikes to walk in the forest.

A dark-haired Parisienne had told us that morning that the night's rain had been blamed for her seeing no wildlife. And that, apart from spiders and a puzzling crab, was how it turned out for us. In fact it rained in the afternoon as well, turning the tracks into slippery custard puddles of slime.

What impressed was Sopheak's knowledge of his surroundings. He was at home. He saw nests that we missed, pointed to where a family of six had spent the night, drunk too much and died in the blaze they set off in their stupor.

And then he wriggled sideways through gaps in the trees to hack and clean an arm's length of bamboo. He cut it beneath one of the rings and, bamboo being hollow, he had created a long cylinder in which to prepare our lunch.

Two holes in the side of a tree were his next target. He lit a fire in one and scraped the melting thick resin into a bottle. He explained but for the moment it made no sense.

"Now I light another one," he said. "A bigger one. And then there will be resin for the next people."

The flames flared and the wood glowed. He left them for a few seconds, then flattened them with a handful of leaves.

We dropped to a clearing beside a wide waterfall. He directed Steph in preparing meat and vegetables to drop into the bamboo tube.

We scrambled down to the base of a waterfall...

He scrabbled a cone of twigs and poured on the resin and lit it. He added fallen wood from the steep grass bank. He chose a Y-shaped piece and used it to prop the bamboo at an angle across the flames, rotating it as it charred. Inside, our meal cooked to perfection.

Where we were sitting on fallen trees, he explained, had once been under water. The next part of the story was hard to understand but I think irresponsible logging - there's a lot of illegal felling in Cambodia - had widened the falls and the water now fell shallower.

We knew illegal felling was rife and it was confirmed when we heard a distant chainsaw. But we weren't to think, Sopheak urged us, that the stretches of grass and anaemic bushes were the consequence of deforestation. These open stretches so apparently easy to sow were actually the least fertile. It was where the trees grew that the land was most productive, which after all was why the trees were there. Logging may bring money from timber merchants but it also created more land for farmers.

Well, we hadn't seen the birds and animals we'd hoped. But we had learned more than we'd expected.

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