My week in mondulkiri!
on Meg's Cambodian Adventures (Cambodia), 14/Oct/2008 05:48, 34 days ago
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Last week I went to Mondulkiri for a week visit, this is the province I will live in for the next year. We went up on Sunday, the only way there during the wet season is by pick up truck, luckily we got seats in a the cab and so we didn’t have to hang off the back for 8 hours, but they do cram people in, Keith, Jan and I had to squish into a seat made for two… we would have had to share it with another person but we just paid for the extra seat! The roads to Mondulkiri are non existent in some places so we properly sinking inmud for part of the journey! Once we got there I totally fell in love with Sen monorom, the only town in the province and my new home for the year, its very high in the mountains and is surrounded by lots of rolling green mountains, lakes, waterfalls and jungle. it’s a lot cooler that the rest ofCambodia too and so we were a lot more comfortable. There is no electricity in the province at all and there hasn’t been any for the last 4 months, but apparently it will come this week…. Heres hoping! During the week we went and visited a few of the schools I will be working in and met the teachers and the children who are all very sweet and well behaved but face big challenges since often teachers don’t come to school. The classes each have about 60 students and some of the teachers have to teach two grades in one classrooms. Most of the schools are under sourced and don’t even havetoilets… its going to be challenging work!On Thursday we went elephant trekking! It was amazing although the elephant that Sandra and I were on was a greedy pig and kept going off the course and knocking our heads on branches, it was pretty scary and we thought we might fall off a few times! But it was beautiful in the jungle with big rivers and massive butterflies flying around us. That night we went to a barbeque restaurant which was a very pretty little candlelit hut with a bbq in the middle, very very pretty and nice. On Friday I found my house that I will live in for the next year, and it is a very cute 2 bedroom wooden house on a lake, I think it might be the best house in the world! House hunting is very strange in Cambodia since you drive around and when you see a house you like you stop and knock on the door and ask if you can live there… cant imagine what the reaction would be if you did that in England! When he agreed he asked me if I would like to keep all the photos of his family on the walls….. Ummm not so much! But yes I think I will love it a lot in Sen monorom!