Busy few days! We met up with old Muso Gez, Noony didn’t want to be involved with the rhyming names so she kept her’s the same. We left Noony out of the conversation for about 20 minutes whilst we caught up about old friends and fierce enemies. The pizza kept us relatively entertained, Noony had to be different again and had a burger. Having not seen him for a few years, the dark Cambodian backdrop did nothing to dampen our spirits and conversation. The beggers asking for money to help fund schoolbooks and shoes for the local school or something was a downer. I mean I’m just trying to enjoy my Italian pizza. After the crying turned to a distant echo we made our excuses and left.
Noony walked behind Gez and me as we walked through town stopping only to look at the stuffed crocodiles. They were in a human fighting pose and they looked ace. I thought to myself, “Where do they find these crocodiles that already know how to fight?”
The next day I found the answer.
A girl staying at the hostel, (which is a brilliant hostel; free coffee, water and breakfast. Noony will give a better review I’m sure) said to the staff they could see crocodiles from their window and, being a lousy eavesdropper, noisily twisted my wooden chair round, crossed my legs and stared intently. They asked if they could go see them. The young daughter of the owner said yes, but the mum said to just take up to the top of the building and look down. We were a bit disappointed, even more so when our camera died after just one photo. When the mother left the daughter said to come with her, so we put on our shoes left at the foot (boom boom!) of the hostel and squeezed through a gap between the metal fence and wall and meandered into the crocodile farm owner’s garden.
We climbed onto the four foot high scaffolding to look at these marvelous seven feet crocodiles and their strong twitchy back legs. We only later found out that feeding time was about half an hour after we left and considering these creatures only get fed once in a while I knew tucking my toes in behind the wooden slates was not a paranoid delusion.
Today we went to Artisan Craft Centre which was set up to teach 18-25 year olds the art of stone and wood carving, metalwork, silk painting and, to a lesser extent, nude drawing; they asked me to put my clothes back on. To learn that it was free (for both us and young Cambodian apprentices) was inspiring and goodies made were sold in the shop. We bought a little metal elephant that you can open up to find empty space. This let me know that it was hollow.
Our tuk-tuk driver that we had kept for the past three days not only spoke good English, but drove slowly and well! This meant we could lean back and enjoy the view. Of desolate housing, working toddlers and polluted river fishing. It certainly does open up your eyes, or it would have if dust hadn’t kept flowing behind my new Ray-Ban sunnies.
Upon writing this Noony’s hour long masterpiece about Angkor Wat was deleted by the blog. She is furious and is currently writing a letter to the head of wordpress. No wait, it’s the blog again.
To finish I’ll tell you that my favourite quote this week came from the street children at Angkor Wat trying to sell cold drinks, scarfs and paintings. They were incredibly insistent and followed you even after saying, “No, thank-you” about 30 times. We decided to be much firmer with our responses so when asked if we wanted a cold drink I replied, “No, thank-you. I DON’T. WANT. ONE.”
“Oh, you want two?”
Pez and Noony go away 