037 Ants for Breakfast, Frogs for Dinner

At 8 o'clock in the morning, my arms still sore from yesterdays kayaking, I wait in front of my riverside bungalow.
I just spent my last Kip on some food for the road. It doesn't make sens to take Laos' currency out of the country, as it can't be exchanged anywhere. Then the small boat arrives, which will take me to the place where the international bus will pick me up. This place is nothing more than a shed and a sandwich stand at the edge of town, with about 40 other people waiting and filling out immigration forms. The VIP express bus will take us to the Lao-Cambodian border, where there will be a guide to help us with the immigration procedures, and from there straight on to our final destinations. We don't have to change buses, or so the enthusiastic travel agent in the island's only village assured me. Alas, only the part about the help with the paperwork turns out to be accurate. I wasn't going to one of the further away stations, so my backpack had to go in last. Consequently I went into the bus as one of the last as well, and surprise surprise, ended up with no seat. That's a VIP bus for ya.

We drove for 20 minutes to the border, where we waited for a long time, I think close to two hours, to get our passports stamped. This was not really a problem, since the guys from the bus company where taking care of the standing-in-line-waiting-for-grumpy-border-guards tombola, while we the people enjoyed a nice cool almost-noon-road-side-beer from the conveniently located bar between the two country's boarder checkpoints. The bus guys even promised an extra minivan for the people who didn't fit in the big bus. 

I was talking to a Scot who was on my boat that morning, and was also about to cross the boarder. Richard told me about his plan to go on a trek in a nature reserve in the north of Cambodia. I was planning to go a bit further south to Kompong Cham, mainly because it was halfway between here and Angkor Wat. I had no real plan of what I would be doing there, and Richards' plan sounded really good. Like all the other Scottish people I ran into on my tip thus far, Richard is a very cool guy with a good sense of humor, so I asked him if I could join him on his forest expedition, with which he was fine.

 

After changing buses three more times; having an argument with the driver about me changing my destination and having to pay more money even though it was closer by; the bus driver getting confused about something else and forgetting about me; and sitting folded up in an eight person minivan with fifteen people, Richard and myself where dumped on a crossroad and pointed to another minivan that would take us to the forest.

That very full last minivan was really something, by the way. At some point we stopped to pick up another passenger. The driver opens the sliding door, sees that there is really no more space in the back nor in the front, closes the side door, walks back to the driver seat, slides it all the way back, and tells our latest passenger to sit in the driver seat. And then, lo and behold, he sits on the same seat, practically on the guys lap, and drives us. Only in Cambodia.

Compared with that, the last minivan of the day is quite roomy although Richard has to squeeze his legs past a plastic shopping basket with two live ducks in it. I get my roll of colored Mentos confiscated by a little girl, but I don't want to talk about it.

The road that took us off the main North-South route and into the wild hill region starts off really bad, with very big clouds of red dust every time a truck passes us by on this bumpy dirt surface. Then we reach more smooth earth to drive over, and a bit later even a sealed road, its tarmac so smooth the vans' CD player starts functioning again. The driver opens the windows (no more dust) and for about twenty kilometers we travel fast and with a horrible soundtrack to accompany us. Then we suddenly come to the end of the tarmac, and after a bit of smooth-earth interlude, we are back again to red dust and bruised behinds until we reach Ban Lung, the capital of one of Cambodia's least developed regions, Ratanakiri and home to many ethnic minorities.

The office for hikes in the national park is closed when we get there, but a man claiming to be there just by coincidence conveniently offers to take us on a guided trek in the jungle the next day. We agree, pay him an advance to buy food for the trek, and walk back to our hotel, hoping he wouldn't just run off with our money.

He doesn't, and the next morning he is there with two motor driver to bring us to the starting point, a small village half an hour of dust eating away. Here, we meet up with his younger companion who will carry the food and cooking gear during the trek. 

Our guide shows us very quickly that he is the master of the forest. Besides his work as a guide, he practices forest medicine. Walking with Mr Yok through the forest makes you realize that every second tree has medicinal roots, leafs that taste like lemon, sap that can be made into glue to catch birds with, or fruit that can cure snake bites. 

Our young bag carrier is called Yak and is seventeen years old, doesn't speak English and spends most of the time walking in silence, sometimes listening to music on his mobile phone.

Mr Yok, however, is a constant source of stories, unsolvable riddles and jokes. Together with Mr Yok (first name New) and Mr Yak (first name not divulged), Richard and I walk through the hot landscape. We start out in a village, traverse an area of slash-and-burn agriculture, where tress are cut and vegetation burned down to make space for rice cultivation and fields of cashew trees, and enter the primeval forest. In a matter of years, Mr Yok tells us, these huge trees will also have to make way for farmland. When the production of the surrounding fields will fall in a couple of years because of the exhausted soil, farmers have to move on to sustain themselves. It is a sad realization, and at first I feel angry with these people destroying their surroundings. But then I realize that that's a bit of a hypocritical approach, since these farmers don't have many better options. And besides, wasn't the western world once covered in forest, now rendered into fields and cities? It is only that we managed to cut most of it down a little earlier. As long as no sustainable way (economically and environmentally) is on offer to the subsistence farmers here, forest will make way for food and survival. 

But for now, the forest is still here in all its splendor, enormous trees draped in Tarzan style vines towering above us.
Mr Yok is a member of the Tampuan minority, and as such grew with the forest. He is also an animist, for whom all things have spirit that must be respected. It also means that he can find a million things to eat wherever he goes, including lots of things I don't usually see on the menu. He ate (and I tried as well) red ants, pressed between two leaves to subdue them. When we were pausing at a small stream, he lifted up some rocks in search of crabs. When caught, he lifts their upper shell off their bodies with his fingernails, and eats them with their legs still spasming. He told us that it is good when they are still alive, because it is 'funny'. But Mr Yok is not a cruel man, he is merely making use of what the forest offers him, in a much more natural, albeit unnervingly direct, way than when I buy meat in a supermarket. At night, he goes out into the stream next to which we camp, a headlight lighting up the water. When he comes back twenty minutes later, he sadly proclaims only to have caught sixteen frogs. The fat larva he finds in a dead tree trunk gets burned beyond edibility when it is left too long in the cooking fire, unfortunately.

Big swathes of the forest are made up out of bamboo, technically not a tree but a grass, and as such one of the fastest growing plants on the planet. Because the stems are hollow but very strong, it can be used for many purposes. Mr Yak is carrying, among other things, a very big knife, not unlike a machete, with which Mr Yok is able to cut fantastic things out of a piece of bamboo in less time than it takes you to say 'panda bear'. He makes cups, chopsticks, a small spoon, and even a device with which he can cut his beard. Later, the same knife is used for cutting a way through dense undergrowth, cutting fish and peeling onions. A truly versatile implement.

Mr Yok also tells us a lot about his tribe, where people used to start smoking at seven, learn to ride a motorbike at nine and married at twelve. Things are changing a bit now, but people still build their own houses in the forest, speak their own language before they learn the official Khmer in school and are proud of it.
We walk for a bout five hours on both days of the trip, and sleep in hammocks under the stars next to a stream with a natural pool. It was an fantastic trek, incredible how much you can see, do, try to eat and learn in just two days if you have the right guide.