I Heart Kampot

So once again I feel should begin my blog with an apology to my readers. I have been a tad derelict with my travel blogging but please forgive me as internet connections in Cambodia very slow and spotty at best or completely incapable of loading a single web page in many instances.

I write now from Bangkok as I prepare to fly tomorrow to Krabi province Thailand for a look at the beautiful cliffs, karsts and beaches of Railay but tonight I want to tell everyone about the rest of my Cambodian travels.

After four days in Sihanoukvile I departed for Kampot via my usual minibus. Kampot is another town of southeast coastal Cambodia east of Sihannoukville with a rich french colonial legacy and a sleepy mellow vibe of gentil decay. The ride from Sihanoukville was packed with interesting and gorgeous scenery. The Cambodian countryside during the rainy season is absolutely amazing. Its the greenest wettest most fertile looking place I've ever seen and every inch of the place is covered in life. Almost all of the houses are built on stilts and every yard is under water with some houses having a dry path to the house or a dry patch underneath the home that is usually used as a combo barn/cow stable/scooter parking space/living area. In addition to living in the middle of large rice paddies most homes also have a small rice paddy planted in what westerners would consider the front yard. In the rainy season these front yard rice paddies make happy environments for the family Water Buffalo and are filled with fish, crabs, frogs and other forms of edible aquatic life which also add to the bounty of the land. In addition to the water Buffalo I already mentioned, which appears to be a requirement for Cambodian citizenship, every house seems to come with a least one cow, a minimum of two dogs, three cats, three chickens, one pig and no less than four children. Bear in mind that these numbers are more like the bare minimum not the average which would be much higher and I've made no mention of the various birds, snakes, leeches, insects, and microbiological life forms that inhabit these same fields but believe me Cambodia is a bubbling green cauldron of life.

I took it as a good sign I was the only white tourist onboard the minibus and indeed Kampot did prove to be a relief from the backpacker scene of Koh Chang and the trashier down and out broke backpacker and dirty middle-age hippy scene of Sihanoukville. Don't get me wrong I certainly wasn't the only tourist in Kampot and there were quite a few western expats who had elected to make Kampot their homes but the tourists in Kampot are more of a healthy side line and not the entire economy as the case has been in some of the places I've visited so far. The town is set along a nice lazy river with the green hills of the Elephant mountain range framing the sunset to the west of town across the river. In Kampot I believe I found the true character of Cambodian people. They are kind, gentle and friendly to a fault. They love to chat up visitors with no economic ulterior motives whatsoever and everywhere you walk or ride your scooter you are greeted by the infectious smiles and cries of "HEL-Looow!!!" from the children as they run out to wave and greet you. Its heartbreaking really and it brings a tear to my eye to think of their sweet little Hellos, their smiles and their exuberance. My second day in Kampot I realized that I had been smiling a lot. More in fact than I probably had smiled in the past two years combined and I've decided its all true, you know the cliched platitudes about smiling being good for your mental and physical health, smiles being contagious and so on. Its all true I tell you and the Cambodians are completely up on it.

Its hard to believe that just behind the smiles and the gentle eyes of this seemingly happy land lie a very dark and sad recent past.

Ladies and gentlemen meet Tree.


Tree, the gentle Cambodian Rambo

I hired Tree to accompany me on a cyclo ride around the Kampot and Kep countryside as my guide and he was kind enough to share his incredible story with me which I must pass along. His story is exceptional but its all the more incredible that a story like Tree's is not such an uncommon story for Cambodians of his generation. Anyone in this country who lived through the war years has a story of heartache, suffering and deep loss. I heard so many and they were all so, so sad.

When America's war in Vietnam spread into Cambodia Tree was a teenager and his father was a Army Captain under the Lon Nol goverment/army. Tree's family lived a comfortable middle class existence as city folk in Sihanoukville where Tree's father earned a living overseeing shipments of American war supplies arriving in Sihanoukville. Sihanoukville in the late sixties and early seventies was not a beach tourist destination but rather an important SE Asian shipping hub and a major transit point for US weapons and supplies headed to Vietnam. (Nixon and Kissinger were also secreting bombing the Cambodian countryside at the time attempting to kill Viet Cong but also building a strong base of support for the Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge) In 1975 with the US fleeing Saigon and the indo-chinese region, the Lon Nol government found itself with few friends and under heavy assault from the Khmer Rouge and their communist Vietnamese allies. The Lon Nol government quickly collapsed and Cambodian descended into years of madness and unspeakable suffering as Pol Pot attempted the grandest and most hare-brained social engineering experiment of all time. Tree and his family became an enemy of the state overnight and like all middle-class city folk they were forced to relocate to the countryside where they would be re-educated as good, simple-minded communist agrarians. Tree's family assumed different identities to protect themselves but in 1977 Khmer Rouge dramatically expanded their ideological purging as they became more fearful, paranoid and violent.

One evening in October 1977 when Tree was seventeen, after surviving two years of famine, disease and brutal forced labor, the soldiers came for Tree's family and everyone knew the jig was up. Tree's father, mother, two sisters, and one brother were all tied with their arms lashed to a bamboo pole behind their backs and their necks tied to a long bamboo pole one behind the other. The soldiers marched them about ten minutes outside the village and blind-folded them beside a large ditch. The soldiers then proceeded to strike everyone in the back of the head with a hatchet working their way down the bamboo pole where Tree was the last member of the family. When Tree regained consciousness it was almost nightfall and he found himself badly hurt lying face down in the ditch. His blindfold had been removed and his neck had been cut loose from the bamboo pole but his arms were still bound tightly to the pole behind his back. His entire family was dead except his sister beside him, who was being butchered by the soldiers with long knives right before his very eyes. Tree somehow made it to his feet and ran like the wind into the adjacent rice paddy before the soldiers were able to get to their rifles. Tree spent the night playing a game of cat and mouse in the rice paddies with the soldiers before making it to the safety of the jungles/mountains which lie between Sihanoukville and Kampot. For two years and two months Tree lived like a wild animal in the jungle. He ate only fruit and wild potatoes he foraged from the jungle. He had no way to make fire and was too afraid to try for fear that he might reveal his presence to the Khmer Rouge. In December 1979 from the jungle Tree heard and saw explosions coming from the town and he knew the Khmer rouge were finally on the run. Tree came into town to find the invading/liberating Vietnamese in control and the townspeople aghast at his beast-like appearance. During the twenty-six months of living like a jungle animal Tree had become a wild jungle animal. He had long crazy hair, wild eyes and he was exceptionally filthy. The shock of what he had been through plus 26 months of not speaking to a single soul had also rendered Tree unable to speak. Not knowing what to make of Tree and suspecting that he was perhaps an AWOL Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese imprisoned Tree for three months. During that time Tree regained his ability to speak from the limited human interaction he was afforded from his prison cell and he eventually convinced the Vietnamese of his identity and his story.

Tree joined the Vietnamese army and went on a Khmer Rouge killing spree of biblical proportions that I believe would eclipse the blood spilled by John Rambo, Old boy and "The Bride". Tree single mindedly hunted and killed Khmer rouge Guerrillas for the next fourteen years. In 1983 Tree started to get a little soft and took a few days off (seriously, like maybe a month total spread out over fourteen years) to get married and father four children between 83' and 92'. In 1993 with the Khmer Rouge resistance decimated and reduced to tiny insignificant numbers hiding in small pockets Tree decided he had finally drank his share of blood and avenged his family. He retired from the dangerous business of Khmer kill'N and went to work for the UN disarming land mines with his bare hands and feet. I learned from Tree that stepping on a land mine isn't lethal, its the stepping off that kills you. Tree once was unfortunate to step on, then off of a landmine, but he said he was lucky it was a relatively weak Soviet mine and he was able to keep his leg although its' never quite been the same. One day when Tree was a more reckless man with a heart full of vengeance and rage he told me he was single handedly chasing a small contingency of Khmers through a mine field, guns blazing at top speed, so while he instantly knew he had stepped on the mine he was powerless to arrest his step off of it.

Back to 1993; Minus any fancy equipment Tree spent the next two years walking through mine fields trying to step on land mines so he could locate them and disarm them. Despite the best efforts of Tree and men like him, it is estimated that there are still about seven million land mines strewn about remote bits of Cambodia still waiting to blow some poor water buffalo or a clueless child to bits.

After the UN ran out of known mine fields for Tree to walk around in Tree settled in Kampot and got into the tour guide business and led hikes up to Bokor Hill station on a daily basis for the next twelve years. Having done part of the climb up to Bokor once I can tell you it is a really difficult slog and I was exhausted for two days afterward. Since 2007 Tree has been taking it a bit easier and focusing more on his scooter rental business and less on the Bokor Hill up and down guide business. Although Tree has disarmed thousand of land mines and knows a local herbal remedy for Cobra bites he has developed a real passion for life as of late and I think both he and his family believe he may be nearing the end of his luck supply. Taking the lead for the dangerous and very taxing treks up and down the mountain to Bokor don't really seem worth the money anymore to Tree so he saves his Bokor Hill climbs and local area caving tours for better paying customers and the good weather these days. Good for Tree. I paid him his asking price with no haggling, tipped him, and bought him pepper crab and beer in Kep although he was such a modest man he feared I might capture his picture sitting too close to the open beer can. There's so much more I could tell you about Tree, like how he got his name, but I this post would go on forever and I must sleep. What a guy. What a life. What a story.

God bless Tree.

I miss Cambodia.


next post, either Siem Reap and the temples of Ankor or Railay...?
Hhumm...