Aww, more Ncv’s and French too- the worst kind, except for Israelis that is: let us be honest here, when French are good- as customers that is- they are good, but the good ones are few and very far between indeed. These were typically bad ones, six bitches abreast, saying oh it is too expensive and we are students, and go for the brunch menu, and take kebabs- I throw in fries for nothing and the water they order - I do not charge for water… ..And as I am down to my last 200 riel (about 20 cts,) I am in a bit of a bind here, and no position to argue, as much as I would like to throw them out, I frankly can’t afford it. Plus they come recommended by some very good French indeed- so I am stuck with that twittering bunch, fries, best beef in cambo for the kebabs- that are meant to accompany some other dish at the expat brunches... well I will do my best I keep telling meself in the kitchen enz. Enz and I do and they twitter and twatter and ask for more water and more fries until I have to tell them no more potatoes- true too, so push to shove dinner for 6, twenty four dollars in total, and then they hem and haw and want the bill split, and I say no, and of course they ask dumb questions and want my life story, not at that price I think and they niggle and naggle and how can somebody not French speak such good French and I say.. Well it happens you know and then my nasty side kicks in (as I am severely fed up and a true bitch) and they insist on my life story, I give them, well a new one: as in sob! ‘Fell in love with the wrong guy and he was with the French secret service- and now I am getting quite a bit of fun out of this one and go on… the truth: my family lived in France for quite some decades… and the truth also is much wilder than the story… now those hateful cows have scrammed and at least I will be able to feed us tomorrow, and stock up- up to a point.. As I think maybe there will be some nice and fun people arriving in the next day or so…

eclipse in cambo (style)

ooh yeah, an eclipse, and a big one too, we heard... after the fact, phones and internet had been down. And it is rainy season too: did we have an eclipse?, i asked Bill. oh yes', he said, kinda forgot to tell you.. remember the other day, when it was so cloudy and then it got so dark and we said, wow, that's gonna be one big rain.. '??". "yeah i do remember". well," Bill said, "that was an eclipse." Oh. wow.

It's Creepy crawler fest all right.

It’s Creepy Crawler fest

.. As a rule I do not have a problem with all those critters, six, eight or whatever legs or none at all... In the rainy season of course they tend to move inside, as like everybody else, they do not relish getting wet. Most of the time a can of spray will do the job. This year is particularly good for spiders, small and big, they weave their nets, and weave and then some. spider webs everywhere, so, I do take a broom several times a day to them, and manage to keep those at bay. Not so the newly homeless spiders that skitter and scatter everywhere in search of a safer spot for their nets.

Most of the other critters do get taken care of by Caruso the monstrous gecko- about a foot tall, tail not counting. He is a noisy fellow who lives in the roof, and is only very rarely to be seen-mostly at night in the half dark to scare the wits out of anybody to come across him. Caruso is at perpetual war with the cat; so far it’s a draw.

There is one little critter I do have a problem with, and sure enough I met one yesterday.

Our bathrooms are open air, quite romantic provided it does not rain.

I even have a bathtub and a water heater. Although it does not work: we do not seem to have enough power to run it. Every time I tried to use it so far I knocked out the power in the entire neighborhood. Not quite an option. So I heat water on the stove like everybody else, or shower- cold. A few sunny moments, made me lust for a bath. Leaves and debris had accumulated in the tub, so I set to clean it… and there it was: a red and black millipede, stinger poised. Aww, I hate and fear those. Although their sting will not kill you, you might wish it would, the pain is excruciating. This one, well not the biggest I have ever seen, but still. As they are not the strongest swimmers, I plugged the tub, and put the faucet on. That did the job- after a while. Fine or it would have been were it not that on closer inspection, all the leaves drifting in the tub had come to life. aww!! Leaches, hundreds of those nasty little heat seeking bloodsuckers, like weaving like little needles.  I have not too big a problem with them, but I hate to give them a free meal!!! (And pretty they are not. A tourist on a trek once asked me: how do leaches mate??? Normally we would have looked that one up, but then decided we could very well live without any knowledge of the secret sex life of leeches. Ehem).

 

Now the question is how do I get the leeches out of the tub?? Not even gloves will keep them away; they will just climb and suck on and climb some more until they find a nice piece of skin and get to work…

 In the end I left the tub for what it was and took a shower….the leeches? Still floating on leaves in the tub.

 

 

.

and may the force be...

Telecommunications in Cambo.. Have gotten a lot better over the years, at least in the lowlands, up here, well not quite yet. We still gleefully call out ‘may the force be with you’ whenever somebody tries to use a phone, say, during a thunder storm.

 The three big providers are not called Mobihell, camshit and scammitel by us for nothing. And now after month of precarious and expensive- internet via the mobile phone that did not work most of the time anyways, it seems we are getting ‘real’ internet, or so they say. A Vietnamese company is taking advantage of the proximity of their country to our little outpost. So of course, I paid up: come today they say, make cable today, tomorrow internet. (That was a week ago.).Yeah sure, of course they did not come. So I made a stink as the powers that be that had not given me a receipt… and a young man with a ‘station’ came, looked around and said not bring cable. And left. That is what they did not do, and I did tell them so. And back to the shop, tell them again, and a fourth time, and a fifth. Now it seems they are doing something in the street, the cable or whatever- presumably. My friend Olga from wwf says that once you have it, it is surprisingly good, yeah, but when, when. The telephones service meanwhile has broken down completely in town...

Something somewhere must have been hit by lighten, a storm or both yet again... ahh the joys of the rainy season!!!

And here it is, and fast, a miracle!! (The installation was well a bit fun, Elvis tried to bite one of the monteurs who was stringing the cable from tree to tree, the geese did bite!!

Then they did not quite get that I will use the lappie in two (!) locations- oh horrors!!- easy pug-unplug, move-plug back in. or so one would think, no cannot do they said ( can of course, so I let it go and move the thing around, got them to leave me with enough cable for just that. How these guys ever got Angkor Wat together is beyond me!!!), but who cares: internet, hooray, finally!!!

 

What is it with people and sharpies?

The bullies look truly fearsome, and I would think that when they approach a stranger,-

  Running towards him or her looking like something just recently and hopefully only temporarily released from Hades or some other unsavory Stephen King place, they would scare the daylights out of whomever. Not so: it is happy little Iddy, skipping away like a baby goat, tail wagging, from whom the strangers flee in horror: just yesterday she was merrily chasing three Korean businessmen trough the banana trees. The businessmen yelped “chine dog! chine dog! ooouaah!” It took quite a bit of diplomacy to calm them and get them to sit down and have a beer…. (The whole thing ended with the bullies going free and Iddy doing time on a leash- grossly unfair. But it seems that she has to learn not to approach strangers. I’d rather not that she- nor do the other dogs for that matter do such thing anyways. But that is because I am afraid that the dogs might come to harm, i.e. being stolen and eaten or tormented in some thoughtless way as in children and so….

In the end the Koreans stayed - a big thunderstorm that hit helped of course. All went without further mishap: as Koreans are notoriously accident prone hereabouts, it was a lucky break: in my old guesthouse in snookyville I would automatically reach for the first aid kit upon their arrival, usually highly necessary- one once fell out of his bed and broke a collar bone…they also tended to drown when going to the beach or get their toes into the spokes of their motor bikes.(don’t ask.).

Iddy tends to get into inappropriate barking jags though: it is not always easy to shut her up, I tell her, in a rather sarcastic tone that she:” acts like a Dutch keeshond, is she a Dutch kees hond? - ooh how utterly utterly baaad.” That tends to do the job.

As none of us has been able to go to Phnom Penh recently, we all are out of dog food, and have to find other ways to feed the beasts: rice, and boiled bones and some meat tend to do the job. Yesterday a friend told me she fed hers with instant noodle soup. Great idea!! So I bought some and dished it up: three dogs and a cat looked at me like:” what is this? Are you a chef?? Surely we are not supposed to eat this crap???”” Is all you getting “I said. They looked me up and down and filed out to the avocado trees to steal some…looks like noodle soup is out…

 

rain and more rain and NCV's

..As the rainy season drags on and on, roads get muddier, bridges give the ghost and we hope for the odd sunny day to do some basic drying out.

 Strangely enough, quite a few tourists still do make it into town. Certainly there are more of them around than there were in the years before.  Sadly most of them are what in the local service industry nastily and gleefully is referred to as NCV.s: or – of no commercial value (s). There they are, expecting a room for a dollar a meal for 50 cents whilst carrying   500 dollar backpacks…and 5000 dollar cameras...

Basically they expect us- the restaurant and guesthouse owners (Khmers and westerners alike) to finance their holidays.

The other day a young Frenchman arrived from the bus station on a moto, sat down in the coffee shop (together with the driver) got a cup of coffee, and began to annoy us is stupid questions. Bon. A customer is a customer is a… so we answered and answered and answered then some...  No, he finally said, 8 dollars he would not pay for a moto bike (with driver) to go to the bousra waterfalls (32 km each way). He would walk, he said and left (without paying: neither for the coffee, nor his moto driver) and for all we know he is still walking.

I am sadly reminded of my sihanoukville days when a sizable number of guests started every sentence with: what’s your cheapest /- room/ beer/ food/ boat trip etc...

 Well they found our little outpost here all right.

Needless to say it is a bit of a challenge to keep the quality of the food in the restaurant up to standards. The logistics are challenging at the best of times, now with the supply routes interrupted regularly by storms and rain and mud slides it gets stunning. (And could be quite fun were the customers inclined to pay which they are not. Of course I could buckle down and feed them crap and get a bad rep in the process. Nor an option).

So I soldier on and hope for better customers, dreaming of making pates, roasting chickens and ducks and serving Chateaubriands again, and of course I dream of being able to go to pp for some nice shopping as in olive oil, butter, cheese, cream and so on.  Instead I cope with the market. In general I do love markets, hustling and bustling places and one never knows what one might find. Not so the local market, hustling yes, bustling,  no. Mud everywhere and we have to wear our jungle boots just to get through...

There are some bright moments though: a few kg’s of snails. (Here my customers divide sharply: those who do eat them and those who do not). Some shrimp from Nah Trang or even some tropical sole on a very lucky day.

Well, the sun has come out for now, off  into the garden, the avocados, the ramboutans and the passion fruit are ripe… and of course there are always bananas… The stalks are very high, some more than 4 meters. So if we want bananas, we have to hack the stalks over. The other day I was confronted by one of those formidably outsized pieces of weed. So I away I hacked with my machete, but must have calculated something wrong, the bloody thing fell the wrong way: timber! I just managed to save my life, not so that of the fence of the vegetable garden nor that of the leeks. Which got flatted well. (The bananas survived the crash somehow and were pretty good ).

Ps. did you notice that central computers have no real sense of humor???

Take ad sense: I bitch about the French rubber barons out in bousra, and what are the ads? Everything and anything to do with rubber and, sure enough plantations. Then I make fun of missionaries, and what do I get: an ad for some nasty cultish club, man, I happen to find that offensive...As the rainy season drags on and on, roads get muddier, bridges give the ghost and we hope for the odd sunny day to do some basic drying out.

 

Little Iddy, the Sharpei puppy  is not so little anymore, she is almost 4 and a half month old now.

She is soft and sweet and well adjusted, housebroken and still compulsively collecting ‘treasures’ behind the jackfruit tree and she guards her blanket, (woe betide the one who touches it, human or beast...). She sits and gives paws, comes- almost always when called and is a holy horror to all the neighborhood mutts…

They flee in terror when she approaches, no matter how big they are.

 Elvis and DT, the bulldogs decided to love her, and they get along, well, most of the time.

 Not so Iddy and the geese, which were rather mean to her at the best of times… Whenever Iddy decided to take a kip in the rather spare moment of sunshine in this rainy season, the geese would approach and bite her tail, and Iddy would be frantic, angry and... scared. Until yesterday: I was upstairs on my sleeping loft, when I heard a racket so hard you would not believe it, when I finally made it down the rather steep wooden ladder, a sight to behold greeted me: somehow the geese had decided that the rains were too much even for them: so they  walked straight into the restaurant, just to encounter the dogs, who would have none of  that :Elvis, Dt, and  Iddy (who got quite into the spirit of things), were chasing the geese around and around rather big main table., the geese too stupid to figure out how to flee running  around and around and so they went, the geese crapping all over the floor and the dogs having the time of their lives. Feathers flying every which way… Finally I managed to stop the merry go round by catching the geese by their throats- and getting quite scratched up in the process- and so I threw the geese out into the garden, the dogs looked at me like,  hey, whatdya do that for, it was so much fun’!’, (killjoys those humans!!!)

Soo, today, the geese had quite recovered from the shock and there was: Iddy snoozing away in the weak cloudy sun, and three guests- rather mean spirited, humorless  missionaries approaching down the garden path, the geese, in a bind: who to bite first? Iddy or the missionaries?? They decided on Iddy, meanwhile, the missionaries approaching stealthily. Iddy went: aww. You’re just geese!! And she went for them, geese all over the place, geese- followed by Iddy- and, as the garden path is slippery- some slip sliding missionaries somewhere in between– flying every which way, all over the place. Quite a mess. The missionaries did not have a sense of humor,   so they kinda muttered some and slipped away- in a squelchy huff-(not that I mind at all) followed by the geese, followed by Iddy, and the rest of the dogs in hot pursuit….

Ooh man that was fun, and there will yet be another nasty piece about me and my dogs -and my customers on some religious website…, as the place was packed with  local expats  who were having their week end brunch- all in stitches and the some…

on chasing the Reverend

Aww times are hard, wet and boring – most of the time. The restaurant is too slow to be any fun, money is low and tourists, well after a good two weeks, now there are only ncv’s around ( no commercial value (s)- in expat speak).

But there is a big reservation in the near future, Duck as a main dish, we decide. See, the Reverend and Tammy Sue, my big black duck couple had a falling out. -That was after she managed to miscarry 20 (!) eggs and would have no more of him….

 First she moved to the neighbors, then she vanished (probably eaten by abovementioned neighbors), the reverend, moved to some other neighbors, after being bored and lonely, I guess. There he started a gay relationship with their mallard, but the neighbors there decided ‘no good would come of this’ (they are Christians converted recently by the rather rabid missionaries,) so they ate their mallard and mine was lonesome again. So I took him back – and that is when the Reverend lost the plot: het started biting everyone and was as mean as a duck can be.  The Reverend is one of those big ugly black walking ducks. They hiss and are big and waddle right onto their target or that failing they lay in wait and then bite…

 So, the Reverend had to go- the meat will need quite a while to get tender and then some and then I will need a recipe for wild duck if I do not want my customers to bite out their teeth….

 Now, one can say a lot of bad things about the Reverend – and Tammy Sue sure would agree and then add some too, but, stupid he ain’’t.

So when Bongserrei, my assistant came and we went for him, he kinda got the point and hid under the house. We yelled, jumped on the wooden floor, yelled some more, to no avail. Crawled under the house- and I swear I heard the little monster laugh at us! Then we decided to use the fishing rods to chase him out. Bongserrei took her short one and I found a very long hard tipped deep sea rod that I bought on sale in pp a while ago, (why I did so then, I do not know). And it worked: slowly the Reverend was forced to emerge.

Aww! this is fun the bulldogs said and as soon as the beast emerged, the bullies chased him back, and on and on it went.

..And for once it is a hot day hereabouts: we sweat, are muddy- and not happy at all, actually we are angry. After about two hours of this, somehow the bullies and we converge and the Reverend finally comes out from under the house. - And vanishes again under the house. By now the bullies have gotten the point and chase him out! Bongserrei is about as angry as I have ever seen her While I was stuck- or better said the fishing rod was stuck under the house at the front and at the back in the banana plants…she has changed weapons...

 When I finally  wise up enough to just drop the  rod, I find that Bongserrei is  braining the beast with a very big pierce of bamboo, and so, the Reverend keels over….dead out cold. Choi! She says: he deserved that… The bullies and the little sharpey are grinning, as in: we helped, right? how much do we get??? And me, aw well I am  just feeling me age…

 When we clean the beast, I am stunned; the Reverend qualifies as a small turkey….

May all the saints of the culinary arts of all cultures be with us cooking that one...