Kampong Chhnang and Kampong Tralach
The alarm. It’s always too early, until you’re awake enough to think of what awaits. Today, after the normal struggle with the choices for breakfast aboard the Jahan, we board long small motorboats. Destination: a small town along the riverbanks called Kampong Chhnang. The orange life vests draped over shiny steel chairs make a stark contrast to the green grass on the banks, and the ochre color of the water – evoking scenes from the movie “The Lover,” based on the novel/memoir of the Mekong Delta’s most famous author, Marguerite Duras. Ashore, a short bus ride over flat red-dirt roads brings us to a pottery-making area.
Rather than noisy factories with busy workers, we’re greeted by smiling dwellers in the Aundaung Russey Village. By now, we’re used to the openness of the people in Cambodia, but it’s still astonishing to feel the absolute warmth they offer to foreign visitors. It’s clearly in their nature, it’s engrained: the genuine smiles, the bright faces, the readiness to greet and accept us. We’re allowed to gather around a young woman working on some pots – interrupting herself every few seconds to look up at us, smile, nodding her head with a show of gratitude while we watched her. Then came the amazement when we saw that instead of spinning a platform around and around to work on her clay pot, she shapes it by walking around it herself, slightly stooped.
“I can’t believe it,” says one of the tour members. “I can’t believe she’s walking around it like that.” Then it was explained to us that she’s adhering to an age-old tradition in Cambodia: you pat the clay with your hands, then with wooden pieces that look like miniature boat paddles. You do this more effectively if you’re standing up and walking around the pot.
We continued the visit with a quick walk to more traditional stilt houses where women displayed small clay candleholders, bells, and piggy banks – made in the shape of elephants. One wonders what these are used for, as they’re too small for money bills, while coins aren’t used in this country. We milled around the village, visiting a few more houses where the open areas are filled with mounds of clay, as workers calmly but efficiently pounded blocks of clay into dozens and dozens of clay cookers, while others covered them with tin sheets and painted the inside a blood-red color. All throughout our visit, children gathered around—like children in other places we’d visited—curious about the foreigners, but also allowing themselves to be photographed, picked up and held, and all displayed the same natural hospitality.
Back on the motorboats, we cruised past fishing boats, floating houses and trees rising up from the riverbanks, reaching for the sky, the stilt houses with corrugated tin roofs showing through the thin branches and leaves.
Returning to the Jahan, we enjoyed lunch as we sailed down the Tonle Sap River. In the afternoon, we were challenged to a never-before-experienced ride: a two-wheeled ox-cart to the village of Kampong Tralach, north of Phnom Penh. “It was bumpy,” someone said. An understatement, perhaps, and there were fears that all photos taken on the ride were blurry – which would have been a shame as there were plenty of picturesque scenes with rice paddies, and villagers going about their day.
Later, we sailed and docked at Prek Kdam, a silversmith village. We went from house to house, watching workers pound small sheets of silver into shapes. Of course, we created much commotion asking to buy little silver bracelets, elephants, or spoons that would later remind us of this moment. Here again, children were everywhere, and they and their parents were all smiles as we walked by. “Hello, hello,” many of the tour members said, placing the palms of their hands together in front of their chests, easily as if that gesture was customary and native to them. And of course, the Khmer villagers responded just as easily, breaking into an English greeting of “Hello” as if the word was a Khmer word.
