Early Onset, Nostalgia

     On Thursday, as is my custom, I began to absorb the fact that I was approaching the end of my stay at the Project, so immediately I started feeling nostalgic.  The symptoms of that nostalgia in my case are excessive use of camera and feverish drawing and a perception (OK, MAYBE a MISperception) that EVERY little thing is important and of course must be recorded.

      So here are a (mercifully reduced) selection of photos from Thursday.

This was my muzzie net-covered bed.  The net successfully (I think) kept all bugs at bay for the duration.  Sure, it had some holes in it.  Some previous guests had repaired some of them with band-aids, but not me.  I had brought needle and thread with me, as instructed, and sewed them up.  If I do get malaria, it will be the result of my extraordinarily poor sewing skills.
    


I loved the grass roof of my little house.  It smelled absolutely wonderful, like sweetgrass back home.  Despite heavy rains almost every night, and sometimes during the day, no rain ever fell in my house, and all the Charlottes seemed snug and dry.  After a pleasant encounter my first night, my household gecko never showed itself again, though at night I frequently heard its "chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck," hopefully as it pursued tarantulas.

     I spent the day alone with the mahouts sketching and photographing the Big Four--genial Gee-Nowl and roly-poly Easy River and my favorites Buffy and sad sad looking Happy Lucky.

In the afternoon Jack returned from Phnom Penh feeling well enough to prepare for his flight home to England on Saturday.  
      And so 4:30 brought the last bath time with the Big Four.  I don't think I will ever tire of watching this video, uneventful as it is, and I hope you can experience some of the serenity, camaderie, and well-being it brings to me!

10 Minutes of Elephant Washing from Northpith on Vimeo.

A routine sets in belatedly

     In the morning Patrik and Katte left.  I had really enjoyed their company and was sorry to see them go.  One of the reasons is that so few men volunteer here.  I'd like to think I'm doing some good work, but I can think of any number of guys back home--Kurt?  Wayne?  Marc?  Charlie?--who could contribute so much more to the place with their skills and strengths.  The fact is, however, that most of the people who want to come here are soft-hearted animal-loving WOMEN.  And now, so soon, after moving so many banana trees so quickly and without regard to so many  bugs, Patrik was gone.

     Another guy showed up though, this time a Brit named Mark from Newcastle, and he too was prepared to work hard and to enjoy Tul's cooking!  Megan and I spent the morning sketching Buffy and Happy Lucky, with the following results, and I spent the afternoon scrubbing the mold off a bamboo wall in a new building on the Project's grounds in preparation for it to be varnished.
      It was not a day of noteworthy events--no runaway elephants or banana buying expeditions, but yet a thoroughly good day that left me with time to contemplate some of the previously unstated features of this place.         
     For example, there are monkeys here--gibbons and what Jemma called "shanks," apparently black shanked douc langurs if my extensive two-minute internet research is correct.  We never see them.  They are very shy.  I keep scanning the treetops in the valley thinking I will see one, but no luck.  Of course, it doesn't help that I can't wear my glasses since they slide down my nose so constantly they are more of a bother than anything else.  So I don't wear them.

       There are also these huge cicadas who have a voice that sounds--no exaggeration--like an air raid siren.  Incredibly loud and piercing.  And then there is a bird, again heard but not seen, that continuously sings,  "When the caissons go rolling, go rolling, go rolling"  and, maddeningly, NEVER completes the phrase.  
       Really, not very many birds considering what seems to be a highly bird-friendly environment.  Jack told me, and I'm not sure whether he was kidding [as is frequently the case around Jack], that the local people eat anything that remotely resembles protein, including birds.  Jemma told of a recent incident in which the cleaners found a rat in one of the houses and asked her for help.  She opened the door and proceeded to attempt to chase the rat out.  The cleaners had a different idea and CLOSED the door, CAUGHT the rat, and you can guess what they had for lunch that day.
    This was the kind of quiet day I like.  I feel so much more comfortable now than during my first week.  Megan and Becca have decided to leave after only one week rather than the two they'd booked.  The bugs are too much, and they're ready to move on, they say.  They generously offered me their week, so I could have stayed a third week for no extra cost.  Tempting as the offer is, I'm looking forward to going home.
 

Ja, wir haben bananas

     There are apparently several entrepreneurs in Sen Menorom who drive tourists out to the Project so they can spend a day with the elephants and/or volunteering.  I'm not sure what the arrangements are, but I got the impression that if one agrees to work a half-day that they get their meals and housing at a reduced rate.  
     But in any event, Tuesday morning brought a pair of one-day-only guests Patrik and Katte from Germany.  They both spoke embarrassingly good English (embarrassing because, despite three years of studying German in high school, I'm still not at all sure whether I even got the title of this blog right!)
     They were a delightful young couple.  Katte is serene, self-contained, and pleasant, and Patrik is filled with nervous energy and curiosity. 
     They were certainly up for the morning's activities, which was . . . a banana-buying trip to neighboring farms.   What an adventure this was!  Jack was still in Phnom Penh, so Jemma drove his fabulously beat up truck with all of us volunteers, plus Xerex the Great Dane, clinging to it somehow FAR back into the woods.
      It reminded me fondly of the old days when I would be bouncing through the woods at home with my dad, and he would tell me to get out of the truck and see if I could find the road!  
     There were times during this banana-shopping excursion when we did in fact lose track of the "road."  Plus, the ground, being pure red clay, was wet and slippery, the terrain was sometimes steep, and Jemma was unfamiliar with the foibles of the truck.  ALTHOUGH, I must add, Jemma is clearly no amateur when it comes to driving in non-urban settings.  She comes from a rural area in Australia and obviously knows her way around a rough road.  And she tackles everything with cheerful gusto, including paths that are roads in name only.
     Jemma thought we were picking up 75 young banana plants for planting at the Project and was surprised to hear from the farmers that Jack had ordered 200 plants!  The farmers had already dug them up and they were waiting for us, each from 3 to 8 feet high and ranging from 1 inch to 4 inches in diameter.  It was apparent that no elephant at the Project was going to be dehydrated for some time.
      We all fixed our minds on NOT thinking about spiders, scorpions, and snakes, and loaded all the plants into the truck.  The farmers thought we were quite amusing [or at least I CONCLUDE they did.  Maybe it's just that Cambodians laugh much of the time, or at least when we can't speak their language] and were happy to show us their farms and let us make faces at their children.  Both Becca and Megan are really good with children and draw them like magnets.  A sweaty good time was had by all, and somehow the 200 plants and all of us managed to get back to the Project.
     No photos of this excursion, regrettably.  It was too labor intensive to even carry a camera.

      In the afternoon, we all set out with the Big Four, and two of the elephants suddenly developed a plan to visit the OTHER valley, where the OTHER five elephants hang out, the place called "Heaven."  At first you don't really notice that an elephant is "running away."  All they do is head in a specific direction and keep ambling in that direction.  But they progress at a far faster rate than you'd expect, and before we knew it, the mahouts were running after them shouting "Eng!  Eng!" with much the same effect as when I say "Down" to Aramis--that is, none.  Eventually, with much cajoling and ear-pulling, they got them under control.  For your edification, this is what a runaway elephant looks like:

We rewarded their reluctant obedience with especially nice baths and had time for a brief clean up ourselves--the need for which, incidentally, CANNOT be overstated--before another of Tul's outstanding dinners, accompanied by my own concoction, a jungle cocktail made of grapefruit-flavored electrolytes dissolved in bottled water and VODKA.  You betcha.

A stab at meditation in Mondulkiri

     If much the same thing hadn't happened to me, it would have been funny to see Becca go from a supremely confident young woman to a scared little girl in the span of a few minutes.  All it took was one look at the spiders living in their little house, and both Becca and Megan were virtually in tears.  I kept hearing screams coming up the hillside from their house to mine.
      Now.  I can't claim that the spiders give me warm fuzzies either, especially since Jack casually  mentioned to me in passing that some of them are tarantulas.  They ARE large and creepy and omni-present.  Their eyes DO glow most eerily.  However, I got used to checking under the toilet seat before each use to see if anyone was lurking there.  I decided to forego washing my hands when one was in my sink.  If I DID have to get up in the night to go to the bathroom (and I reduced my fluid intake to avoid that necessity), I took a flashlight and simply bypassed any spiders who happened to be on the floor.  And of course, as you know, I called them all "Charlotte."  But it IS true that they simply did not terrify me to the extent that they terrified both Becca and Megan.
      They were not consoled by the consistently wonderful meals Tul gave us.  The whole fried fish he served up was among the best fish I've ever eaten, and the freshwater prawns and the stuffed squid?  Marvelous!  What DID give them some consolation was the short squat pleasant "little" elephant named Easy Rider.
     All of the elephants seem to form friendships with one or more of the others, and Easy is "best friends"--sounds like second grade, doesn't it?--with Gee-Nowl.  I spent Monday morning with these two, and a very rewarding morning it was.  Perhaps it's vanity, but it sure seemed to me that both remembered me from my hanging around the previous week, and while they were grazing, both approached me and made that wonderfully content purring sound I came to love so much.  We all would say "butter butter butter" to each other and feel better for having done so.
     I'm going to take the risk of sounding pretty crazy here, but as I sat on the ground watching these two graze and sketching them, I was overcome with a sense of well-being.  I was reminded of MANY years ago--when I was having a crisis-filled senior year at college--that I had an obviously memorable dream, in which I was in a field of grazing horses.  The horses were all content and I felt truly companionable with them, and they were all fat, and they were all the same pleasant shade of brown.
     It was jarring to look around and find myself right smack in the middle of my old dream, only it wasn't fat brown horses, it was fat brown elephants.  And it was pleasant.  OK, OK . . . I know. 
     I was so moved I thought well, maybe THIS is the time I should take up meditation and see if I can capture this feeling of amazing calm well-being, so I sat there on the grass and tried LIKE HELL to rid my mind of all the external crap.   All of 15 seconds into this endeavor, of all things, a CHAINSAW started in the distance!
     I tried to take it in as simply part of the country and its burgeoning economy struggling to get going, but I failed totally and wound up angry and worried.  So much for meditation!
     But anyway, here are the day's sketches:

    







And here is the video I took that morning which is my favorite from the whole trip.  Please view full screen if you can.

A Visit from Gee Nowl from Northpith on Vimeo.

No More Boredom in Sen Menorom

     Sunday morning found me enjoying a strong cup of Mondulkiri coffee and some bread with my old friends at the Green House, in beautiful downtown Sen Menorom. Now, why on EARTH did I fail to take a photo of this fine establishment? It has a wonderful open air jungly feel to it, featuring bamboo floors and plants all over, and good Khmer food, and French fries that taste incredible to one who's eaten Khmer food for more than a week. But its most important feature is the remarkable friendliness of the staff; on your second visit, you're greeted like a long lost friend.
     One of those good friends, Thea, was waiting for me with his motorbike. Perhaps I should mention that Jack had specifically warned me AGAINST taking a motorbike ride (feeling, I suppose, with some justification, that my balance left something to be desired) but after meeting Thea, I decided to disregard his warning. That was a great decision.
     I've never been on a motorbike before (or even a motorcycle) and I did not expect it to be so very exhilarating. After so much hot humidity, it was so refreshing to get the wind in my face. We drove about 20 miles, I think, to Bausra Falls, which I believe Thea said were the largest waterfalls in Cambodia. It was mostly deep rutted clay roads there, and mostly heavily-wooded scenery.

Hear the dulcet tones by clicking here.

On the path to the falls, these two gentlemen were playing these strange instruments, sort of guitar-type of things with gourds for sounding boards and . . . . . well, here they are playing the melody that has hardly left my head since I heard it. Notice that children are children everywhere, and this one looks on the verge of death by boredom.


OK, so maybe they're not the most ANIMATED musicians since Mick Jagger, but, still, . . . .

By this time, Thea decided (rightly) that I was pretty inept at using my own camera, so he took over camera duties for the rest of the trip. He is therefore to be credited with these great pix of Bausra Falls, which were really beautiful. There are two falls separated by perhaps 200 yards of user-friendly shallows.

   




Thea told me this sign said something like "Look out! Slippery! Steep drop off."

And here I am, looking out at the slippery steep drop off.

And THEN we had lunch

     So much happened in the morning that it's going to take a second blog entry to finish out the day.  I can't remember the last time so much happened in my life that I needed more than a paragraph to tell about it, much less TWO blog entries.  Here goes.

     After Thea (pronounced, by the way, TEEah) and I left the falls, he drove me to a little Bunong farm nearby.  He had somehow gotten the idea that I was interested in all things agricultural and was intent on showing me stuff that was growing .  We first went to this lovely little farm; we simply pulled into their yard and Thea started taking pictures.  No one seemed the least bit surprised or disconcerted by our stopping in, and they seemed to have no reservations about us looking around.

     At first I thought Thea was saying they grew RYE there, but then I realized that it was indeed rice.  


There is a special kind of rice that grows on high ground here.  Apparently the rainy season provides enough water for it to flourish without paddies.  Here's some, which is, as you can see, interplanted with corn.




















                                                                                                                                                                                       And when it's drying, it's reminiscent of a harvest of wild rice drying back home.    
























This woman was making, of all things, DOG food (and for those of you smart alecks out there, it's NOT Cambodia where they eat dogs.  That's KOREA!!!)










 These two women were taking some fruit and vegetables to market and were most obliging about having their pictures taken.  Some of their produce looked familiar (like the bananas) but most did not.

     From the farm, Thea and I went to a coffee plantation.  I had never seen coffee actually growing before and somehow had never imagined it looking like this.

We had lunch, including coffee grown on site, at a pretty little restaurant located right on the plantation, 

 and I was delighted to see this funky little hydroelectric plant fully operational there.

Thea then showed me real live pepper plants.  I mean REAL pepper--you know, the stuff we all sprinkle on our food every day.  This too was a surprise to me, so I wrestled my camera away from him and took this picture of Thea himself in a pepper grove.

     Then it was back to the Green House in Sen Menorom, where I again pounced on the computer in the selfish hope that Scott might be suffering from insomnia so that I could chat with him by instant message, but [sigh] no such luck.

      However, the two young American women who were scheduled to volunteer at the Project the following week WERE there, authoritatively and diligently teaching English phrases to a young Khmer gentleman.   It continually amazes me how hard so many Cambodians work to LEARN--they seem to think that learning English is key to improving their job and financial prospects.  I hope they're right!

     Becca and Megan and I chatted until Jemma showed up with the truck to take us back to the Project.  Jack was still sick and planned to go to Phnom Penh in the morning to see a doctor.

      So it was with a genuine sense of homecoming that I found myself back in my little house overlooking the Elephant Valley, watching the jungle form its own clouds.

Saturday, my only boring day

     I felt quite bereft after they'd gone, and Sen Menorom is not exactly a thriving metropolis with tons of diversions.  I explored the market, where unrecognizable (but interesting looking) meats, vegetables, and fruit were on display and lots and lots of STUFF.  I bought some coffee that was grown in Mondulkiri and some shampoo and then had the rest of the day to contemplate the past week and to read the book I'd brought with me (for no particular reason, Orange is the New Black, which I liked).
      I found I had forgotten to mention some interesting things that had occurred in the past week.  There was just so MUCH!  One of the things I forgot was GIFTS!  Remember the gifts I agonized over?

      One was Linda's luxurious home made soaps, each bar lovingly made with the most exquisite western nose in mind.  I gave one each to all the ladies present at the project.  Jemma (having an exquisite western nose) immediately loved hers.  But the Cambodian ladies were clearly befuddled.  The smells were unfamiliar--maybe the chocolate soap seemed like something that should be eaten.  Jemma made her best efforts to pantomime washing oneself with soap and to describe the smells, but these ladies were a hard sell.  Here's Jill's photograph of THAT transaction.

      



     Another was the knives I brought as gifts for the mahouts.  You may recall that Mitch at the Trading Post had gotten some small Buck (American made!) knives for me at cost to take over, and those were an absolutely unqualified success.  The mahouts LOVED them and indeed treasured them too much to carry.  Pluk, the head mahout, was the only one whom I ever saw actually carrying his knife, so I quickly took this picture.  Thanks, Mitch!

         But by far the most appreciative gift recipient of all was Jack himself.  In fact, he said it was "the best Christmas ever!"  He had emailed earlier that he longed for up-to-date reading material (as well as something to satisfy his sweet tooth), so I took him a stack of New Yorkers and a Chicago Tribune.  He buried himself in these, and we heard hardly anything from him at all except the rustling of candy wrappers.  Here he is in the background, and I must add that he was remarkably ungenerous with the POUND of candy I'd brought.  
     This, by the way, is the dining room and universal gathering spot at the Project.   Every meal we consumed here was delicious, authentic Khmer food prepared by Tul, who is a very talented chef.
     By evening, I was getting weary of feeling bereft and crazy to make contact with Scott, so I meandered over to the Green House, where I had three--count'em, THREE--Margaritas and French fries and made acquaintance with three new friends.  One was Thea, a young Cambodian teacher, who was eager to learn more English and who supplemented his $20/month salary by giving tourists motorbike trips during his holidays.  I made arrangements to go for a trip with him the following day.
     The other two were a couple of Frenchmen traveling through Cambodia together.  One was an engineer and one was a veterinarian, who regrettably had NOT made arrangements to go to the Elephant Valley Project, but who was a member of Veterinarians and Agronomists Without Borders, an organization I'd never heard of but which I was very glad to hear existed.  As you can imagine, and especially while consuming Margarita #3, I filled them in about the status of the elephants, and a fine time was had by all--well, at least by me!
     I suddenly was able to instant message with Scott and that made me so acutely homesick I was teary-eyed, though that too may have had something to do with the Margaritas.