Day 6 – Drive to Phnom Penh, Flat Tire, Stop at Pottery Maker, $3 Lunch, Phreah Reach Traop Mountain, monkeys, Don’t Follow Google Maps in Vietnam
We were up early as usual. The heavy rain from the day before had ended, and we enjoyed a delicious buffet breakfast at the Battambang Resort, which was included with our room. We had a long 5-hour drive from Battambang to Phnom Penh ahead of us, so we decided to leave early to break it up with a few stops along the way. While it was not a planned stop, we pulled over at a roadside stand that was selling lotus flowers for food. Rather than letting them flower, you can eat the seeds either boiled or raw (I preferred the raw ones).
It was a few hours before we made our second stop. We were searching for a lady who makes traditional pottery. In the mountains, clay is plentiful, so the local villages are well known for their pottery. Just before the potter’s home, however, we stopped for Kirsten to use someone’s toilet… it was not her favorite local experience. It was a local person’s home, with a squatting hole in the ground and a ladle to flush everything down. As we returned to the van, however, our driver noticed that we had a flat tire. Fortunately, he had everything he needed to repair the tire on the spot, including a cigarette lighter-powered pump and a hole patching kit. While he worked on fixing the tire, we walked the final kilometer to the potter’s home.
We were shown how for hundreds of years, the locals in this area would knead the clay for the pots, make a hollow base without a bottom but with the top lip of the pot and let the clay dry for some time. She had prepared a second pot a few hours earlier so she could show us the final process of shaping the main part of the pot into a round bowl and then patted down the bottom a little at a time to close off the bottom of the pot. She did all of this without a spinning wheel which is how the ancient potters would do it. She just circled her creation over and over again, which made me think she must be dizzy. In the end, she had one more pot to add to her collection of hundreds waiting for a hot day to start a fire and cook them into their final product.
By the time we were done and had purchased a few small souvenirs, we were on our way again. We stopped at a local restaurant where the meals were all about $3 each. It was local food from a very new restaurant. This area of Cambodia is fairly remote and does not have many international tourists. Local prices seemed to be about half of the tourist restaurant prices.
We drove another hour or two to our next stop outside of Phnom Penh. Here we had an opportunity to get sweaty in the evening heat and climb about 300 to 400 steep steps up to a shrine. It was good exercise as we climbed up the mountainside steps. Halfway to the top were some large pools of water with tons of small fish. It was at this location that we noticed dozens of monkeys of all ages swinging in the trees around us. Some climbed down to check us out to see if we had any food. If you have food on you, I have been told they will come for it. We finally reached the top, where we had to take off our shoes out of respect. The climb was worth the panoramic views of the valley, rice fields, and many temples below. The 100 to 200-year-old shrine was tall and intricately carved. Quite a job to build it on this high point of the mountain.
We had to cut our stop at the top as someone was burning some garbage which made for some stinky smoke at the top of the hill. It was rather unpleasant and spoiled the experience a bit. It was around 5 pm, however, so the end of the day for the many vendors that were packing up the flowers and drinks they were selling for the pilgrims and tourists coming to this holy site.
We decided to take a shorter route to Phnom Penh, which was a mistake. After following Google maps for about 20 minutes, we had to turn back. The dirt road got smaller and rougher. It was a scenic drive into some very remote villages and along rice fields, but the road worsened, and it was apparent that it would not get any better.
We turned around and returned to a slightly longer route for our 1.5-hour drive to Phnom Penh. We arrived a bit after dark, following two short stops to fill our patched tire with air. Ultimately, we made it to the Ohana Phnom Penh hotel after dusk. The city’s lights were up, and it was busy with traffic and nightlife. After checking in, we had a bite to eat at a restaurant across the street before taking an hour-long walk along the river to the Grand Palace. The Palace had not been open for the previous 2 years, so we decided to at least get some photos in the evening lights of the city. We stopped at one of the many 7-Eleven stores to get some snacks for the next few days and were surprised to learn that it was cash-only here, like many other stores in Cambodia. It is a cash-based society, and not many places accept credit cards. I shared a delicious Magnum Ice Cream bar with Kirsten as we strolled the rest of the way home, zig-zagging along the edge of the street to avoid the cars, scooters, and other things that were on what could have been a sidewalk at one time. Space is too precious in this city to have sidewalks. There are not many of them.