Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2059204&l=b072f&id=1101094
The next morning I caught a minibus to Ban Lung in Ratanakiri province, which is the northeastern-most province in Cambodia and which borders both Vietnam and Laos. I had planned on taking a shared taxi, but as it turned out the minibus was cheaper and I was even guaranteed my own seat, an offer I obviously couldn’t refuse.
Though I’d heard horror stories about the potholed dirt road from Stung Treng to Ban Lung, in the end the minibus handled the bumps quite well and the ride was surprisingly comfortable. We arrived in Ban Lung at 11am, and I managed to find a guesthouse that had rooms for $5 with cable TV—crucial for watching the Super Tuesday results come in.
I dropped my pack and headed into the town, which is really just a market surrounded by three or four dirt roads. Still, at population 17,000, it’s the largest town in the province. If indeed I was looking for the middle of nowhere, I had found it.
For a town of 17,000, the roads in Ban Lung had a surprising number of cars and trucks on them, and considering the roads were dirt and it hadn’t rained in months, it wasn’t surprising that the entire town was covered in orange dust. The roadside plants were orange, the wooden buildings were orange, and when I bought a bottle of water from a shop, even that was orange. The dust in the air was so bad that the vast majority of residents wore surgeon’s masks when they drove their bicycles and motorbikes; some even wore them while walking around town. I, of course, had no mask, and so I spent most of my time in town holding my breath.
I ate lunch in the market—a tasty bowl of noodles, bean sprouts, and other vegetables in a coconut milk-based curry. Once again I attempted to make conversation with locals (with limited success), and once again my lunch cost 1500 riel. Apparently these market prices are standard.
When I’d had all I could take of the market, which was somehow even dirtier than its counterpart in Stung Treng, I rented a bicycle ($1) and headed east 5km out of the town center to a place called Boeng Yeak Laom (Yeak Laom Lake). There I found one of the most peaceful places I’ve come across in all of Southeast Asia—a clear blue crater lake, nearly a kilometer in diameter, created 4000 years ago by a volcanic eruption. Still covered in orange dust and sweat from the bike ride, I wasted little time admiring the lake from the shore and quickly plunged into the refreshingly cool water.
I spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing in and around the lake; I found that it was too hot to spend much time on the shore but too cool to spend all my time in the water, so I rented a raft from a local kid for 2000 riel (50 cents) and before long I was floating comfortably half in and half out of the water in the center of the lake. A few local kids swam out to talk to me, though no one spoke enough English to get past “What your name? Where you from?” I thought back to the beloved Four Questions from India: what’s your good name, where are you from, how old are you, are you married? Southeast Asians seem to be far less concerned with marital status—I don’t think I’ve been asked once since leaving India.
As the sun started to set I reluctantly paddled back to shore and set off on my bike back to town. A dozen trucks passed me between the lake and Ban Lung, and by the time I reached my guesthouse my hair, t-shirt, and swim suit were orange again. I decided to rent a motorbike the following day and hopefully stay a bit cleaner.
That night for dinner I ate the famed sach kooang Ratanakiri (Ratanakiri grilled beef), which is brought to the table uncooked on a plate and grilled at the table, something like Korean barbeque. Though the meal was expensive ($2.50) compared to normal Cambodian prices, the beef, which was marinated and covered in spices, was more than worth the splurge.
The following morning I rented a motorbike ($5) and drove west out of town toward three waterfalls that were scattered off the road back to Stung Treng. One of the waterfalls plunged into a beautiful jungle gorge, and I swam through the pool to the rocks underneath the falling water for a much-needed high pressure shower. A group of local kids showed up a few minutes later, and we splashed around for a while before my back started to get sore from the powerful falls.
On the way back to town, I passed a Khmer family riding down the road on an elephant, marking the first time I’d seen an elephant in Asia being used for anything other than tourism.
Back in town, I stayed out of the sun for most of the afternoon and tuned to CNN for the Tsunami Tuesday primary results. Sitting there watching US politics in remote Ratanakiri province in already-remote Cambodia, I couldn’t help but ponder how the world was getting smaller. And does a smaller world mean fewer adventures?
That night I went to a local Khmer restaurant—one that didn’t even have English translations on its menu. I asked for fried noodles with vegetables and chicken (always a safe bet), and the restaurant owner, in laborious English, said “Chicken… bone… ok?” I assumed he meant that the chicken had bones in it, which I said was perfectly fine. But when my food came, the chicken turned out to be only bone, presumably added just for the flavor. I guess I should have taken the broken English a bit more literally.
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