Smile!

Hello, hello, hello!

This is what I sound like in fast forward as I bicycle down the little lanes of Kompong Chhnang. It is easy to tell I am off the beaten tourist track by the response of the people - every child and quite a few adults waves their hands and cries out "hello"! And oh, the joy, when the funny foreigner on her bicycle waves back and smiles and cries out an echo hello. The faces of the people just crack into the most beautiful smiles imaginable - for them, to be seen, noted and smiled at by a foreigner is something unique - and then they break into giggles at their own daring for crying out hello in the first place.

The people are also very willing to share whatever they have with you. Often I was beckoned in to drink a mug of home brewed palm wine; however, I have declined after the first mugful, (technically beer-can-cut-in-half-ful) offered by a poor family living in a very humble house on stilts with pigs under it. Palm wine is bitter and yeasty and so acidy, that it can make stomach fluid envious.

I was especially touched by this lady, who sat by the roadside manually hacking bits of stone into gravel - a back breaking endeavour if there ever was one in this heat. When I first rode past she beckoned me and waved a single, yellow mango in the air pointing to it, clearly beckoning me to come and share her mango. It was the only food she had with her for her lunch and I very politely declined and thanked her. However, when I rode back down the road an hour later, there she was still, hacking gravel by hand and determinedly waving her mango at me. Again I declined, but she was wasn't about to let me go away empty-handed, but called me over and shyly wiped a largish chunk of gravel on her shirt and presented it to me. There was a silvery vein of some metal - or possibly fools gold - on the grey rock. Apart from the mango all she had to offer was the gravel she was chipping - so she gave me the prettiest piece. Fools gold or not - I think that was as princely a gift as I have ever been given.

Today I arrived in Phnom Penh, after a harrowing trip, which should have taken two hours but took considerably longer as I waited by the roadside for three hours for the nine o'clock bus (not the nine o'clock bus). Unfortunately, in Phnom Penh the response you have to give when you hear a cry of "hello lady" is "no thanks" - usually to a motorbike ride or tuk-tuk. I miss the innocent countryside already.

As some of you may have noted, I am not on-line daily and sometimes so many images and thoughts have accumulated in the meanwhile, that I write two entries at the same time. So Smile, you Black Magic Woman!