Chambok homestay

To get a real taste of Cambodian life, we decided to do a homestay in a village in the countryside. One very bumpy taxi drive later and we arrived at a place called Chambok (http://chambok.org). The community there have set up an ecotourism site, so they don't have to rely on farming for a living. We couldn't have been welcomed by friendlier faces, all desperate to practice their English on us. There were a couple of tour guides with excellent English. The others had limited English and their general answer to everything is to smile and say "yes" (which they feel is preferable than silence or saying they don't understand). This caused some concern when I asked our guide if there were crocodiles  in the lake in which we were swimming...smile..."yes".

There are different activities on offer, and we partook in a trek up to see a 40ft waterfall (which started aboard an ox-cart!) and we were taken by tractor to a local lake for swimming.

Ox-cart ride

Welcome dance from the village's dance group

40ft waterfall (aka our shower for the 3 days)

How we felt after the trek

So our home for the next few days was a house on stilts in the local village. It belonged to an old man, Mek Chee, who spoke no English, and our Khmer is limited to say the least. The room was basic and we got little sleep on our first night. Our senses were overloaded, with the jungle sounds (some of these I decided it was probably best not to picture which animal they belonged to...), total darkness, and the relentless heat. We were determined to get a better night's sleep on the second night, however, this was disturbed again, as Tim decided to add his own sound effects to the jungle chorus. He threw up everywhere. Nice. It was difficult trying to communicate this to our host in the morning, but I'm pretty sure he was aware of what was going on, as the walls were basically made out of paper. We gave him some Scottish shortbread to say thank you and sorry for the disturbance. He seemed a bit perplexed by the shortbread, however, when we collected our bags later on we saw the tartan wrappers blowing around his garden, so it seems it went down OK.

The food was all prepared by the 330 women in the community, who took turns to cook for the tourists, guides, and the members of the NGO which had helped set the project up.  It was big effort to cook so much food, but then they only had to do it roughly once a year.  Their food was delicious, if not exactly what we westerners were used to. On the last morning, we were offered porridge for breakfast. Our western (and slightly delicate) stomachs were really looking forward to this. You can imagine our disappointment when the dish below arrived. So it seems Cambodian porridge = mushy rice. Oh well, at least they brought us a side dish of chicken to go in our porridge (!)

We loved our stay at Chambok, and meeting the people there. It is admirable how they have pulled together as a community, and protect and look after the poorest families.