..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.
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