La France à vélo!

So much happened on my first day it’s hard to know what to leave out! First, I took the overnight ferry from Portsmouth to St Malo. The ferry was French. I could tell immediately, and not just because all the staff were speaking it. I have to apologise to my dear, patient husband and to all you lovely Anglo-Saxon men out there who might read this, but there is something about French men in the service industry that makes me go weak at the knees. First, they look you right in the eye, then they smile, widely, and then they help, in fact, go out of their way to help as much as it is possible to do. Well, not all of them, but quite a lot. And there I am, won over again by a race that so many love to hate. (PS The women on the boat were all charming and beautiful too!)

Arrival in St Malo. Where was the sun of my imagination of this moment? Instead, steady English drizzle and the grey, grey cloud that northern Europe does so well. St Malo is a lovely old town that was almost completely destroyed in WWII and was rebuilt in the18^th century. It juts out into the sea and buildings peep above the original ancient ramparts that almost completely surround the town.

But I wasn’t lingering to sightsee. Once docked and through customs, first I had to unfold my bike in the rain. Even though this takes about 15 seconds when you can remember how to do it, when you can’t, it pays to have written down a summary, which I had and tried to look at without anyone seeing that I was. That was easy because everyone else was taking taxis or driving off in their nice dry cars or campervans.

It didn’t take much more than that though to have it all ready to go with bags on. Now I had to ride it. I had had one practice in Dulwich Park just around the corner from Jonathan’s house. It wasn’t enough. I had put the back bag on to try, but it’s the front bag that is so disconcerting. It attaches to the stem, not the handlebars, so when you move the handlebars, it doesn’t follow but keeps going in the direction of the main frame. It’s as if it has a mind of its own. I was waiting all day for someone to tell me my bag was in the process of detaching itself.

So off I went with my swinging bag, in the rain, on the wrong side of the road, navigating roundabouts as well as other, vaguer intersections where everyone else seems to know whose right of way it is but it’s a mystery to me, trying to remember the instructions I’d read in a guidebook (and photographed, now there’s efficiency) to find the shuttle ferry to Dinard which is where the bike route starts from. This involved negotiating rail tracks in the wet (never easy on a bike) and waiting in the rain for a split bridge to be put back down before I could pass across.

The shuttle terminal was scenic and the shuttle ferry men wouldn’t let me anywhere near my bike which was nice because it’s quite a heavy beast fully loaded and the gang-plank was narrow. They swept it off me, wheeled it up the ramp and propped it in place with a ‘Voilà, Madame’, ‘Ça va, Madame?’ And all I had to do was say ‘Merci’. Step one achieved.

Step Two was a bit trickier. How to find the start of the bike route? Dinard, across the water from St Malo, is a pretty town nicely positioned with harbour on one side and lovely sandy beaches on the other. Gracious, several-storey houses line the promenades where people were trying to walk their dogs but the waves were pounding up and over the walkways (Is that why I didn’t sleep a wink on the ferry last night? In between coughing fits in my tiny windowless cabin, I couldn’t help thinking all night about the Titanic, as well as the Life of Pi which I had seen on the plane on the way over, as the ship lurched, juddered and rolled its way across the English Channel).

Dinard is a better start to the route south than St Malo as a ‘voie verte’ begins there and runs for 20 kms allowing an easy ride out of quite a busy area. The trouble is, no one seems to be quite sure where it begins and it’s notoriously badly signed.

Again following photographed (!) instructions from a guidebook, I navigated my way up some fairly steep and rough cobbled streets. I hadn’t eaten breakfast on the boat, and was hoping for a café/crêperie or something to be open to give me some energy for the day but there was nothing. After all, it was only 9 am. So on I went. Finally, I managed to find the exact spot where the voie verte was supposed to start and it was taken up by a giant construction site. Not a sign anywhere. Hardly anyone anywhere. I asked one Madame, and then another, but no, neither was from Dinard and they certainly didn’t know anything about a bike route.

But there was a corner boulangerie that was, yes, ouverte! Overjoyed, I got to breathe in deeply the nothing-like-it-in-the-world delicious smell of a French baker’s shop. Crisp baguettes, flaky croissants, little strawberry custard tarts, meringues, macaroons, where to start? I chose a huge pain aux raisins, sticky with syrup, bursting with fruit and hot out of the oven. Madame was friendly and helpful even though she had probably been asked the same question by dozens of other lost cyclists, and off I set along the Voie Verte hoping to find somewhere nice to stop and eat it. Which never really happened. What few seats there were were sopping wet and I kept trying to beat the weather.

However, that was the least of my problems. Here was a beautiful purpose-built cycle/walkway through forests and the backs of village, with a surface that in summer wouldn’t be a problem but which after the daily rain they’ve been having here, had turned glutinous, sticky, sinky and especially so for a bike with small wheels and lots of weight (me!). I churned into it and struggled to get up to 8kmh. It was going to be a long day!

And so it proved. Even once the voie verte finished, a short stint on quiet, paved (yay!) back roads led to the river and canal towpath (chemin de halage) that I followed for most of the rest of the day but which had exactly the same problem.

On top of that, I sort of like people, some of them, and company is nice when you’re on holiday. I was missing my long-term cycling buddy. We’ve almost grown up together, done so much together and always gone on holiday together. We first ventured together with bikes to France 1982, and here I am doing it again 30 years later, when really it should be both of us. There is a part of me missing which I haven’t felt for the past four weeks while I’ve been doing stuff he wouldn’t have been so keen on or will do later during our shared trip. But this is special, it’s a kind of reunion, and we should be doing it together.

I never thought I’d say it but canal paths can be quite boring after a while; nothing much changes for quite some time. The shutters on the lock-keeper’s house might be painted a different colour and some of them have pretty gardens but the path is straight (ish), trees overhang it, a few buttercups and cow parsley line the water which is dark and calm, and so it goes on km after km (there’s a story there which I’ll tell tomorrow). Also, it’s lonely; there is simply no one around. Enjoy a tranquil experience, say the brochures. Hmm a bit too tranquil for me! No one to talk to while I shelter (which happens often) from the thunder, lightning, hail and rain (yes, I know you’ve got snow in NZ but it’s supposed to be nearly summer here).

Finally, I gave up and took to the road. What a relief, the bike ran smoothly for the first time. Neither is traffic a problem here as the drivers are super-courteous to cyclists. I was quickly reminded, however, that roads are not canals and actually undulate, even in flattish Brittany. Two kilometres from my bed and breakfast, I completely ran out of steam. Oh the shame of pushing up a hill, and not even a hill by NZ standards. But on no sleep, four days of flu, little to eat, no fitness (sorry Barb, lost it all in the first 4 weeks!), bad weather, and mud, maybe just getting there was something to be celebrated!

London (first visit)

My cute nephew and his even cuter dad, my little bro.

Lovely to stay with my brother, Jonathan (Jon to everyone else, always Jonathan to me), and his family. The kids now five and twelve are growing up fast. How quickly they do that when you don’t see them very often.

Highlights: spending time with the family, and picking up my new Brompton!

Lowlights: another dose of sickness, this time a nasty flu which laid me very low for three days. And now the sore throat and a cough still linger.

Highlights: the fantastic ‘nursing’ care, and kind help and support in general, and just being able to hang out and do not very much.

Lowlights: some very cold weather which may have contributed to my sickness.

Highlights: three lovely sunny days where the kids played in the garden and I even got too hot lying on the sun-lounger on the back patio, while the clack of a cricket ball and the occasional cheer from the park over the back fence reminded me I was in England!

On the edge of the Cotswolds

It was lovely to catch up with rellies not hugged for a long time and, of course, my cousin, Ali, who somehow always manages to look younger each time I see her. I stayed with Ali and her lovely Ray, and Daisy too, along with the three doggies, so walks in the English countryside were a given.

Not much has changed – those huge skies are still there that my grandfather used to paint, those wide views over gently rolling fields, some still brown, others green and some, sadly, bright yellow with rapeseed, a blight on the usual pastel shades. Copses of woods bright with bird song, green spring leaves on every tree and carpets of bluebells under. Public bridle paths everywhere and not a barbed-wire fence in sight.

We visited my mum’s sister, my Auntie Nan, in her pretty stone cottage and garden surrounded, I’m sure, by all the same kinds of things my mum would have had in her home had she lived, as she should have, to a sensible old age.

My brother, Jonathan, drove up from London (and took me back there afterwards) to do a ‘nostalgia’ tour of parts of our past. We shared some old stories and some new. My maternal grandparents were both doctors and delivered me at their home, a house called Nicholas Corner in the ochre-coloured Cotswold stone village of Burdrop. My grandfather ran his practice in the surgery next door. Although I have had the house pointed out to me several times in the past, I had never before been inside, so I plucked up the courage to knock on the door and introduce myself. The connections having been made, not only were we invited in, but got a tour of the house and a chance to stand in the actual bedroom I was born in.

Jonathan and I reflected on why these kinds of connections are so important to us: 
 
 

perhaps not only because we lost our mother, and in fact both our parents, so young, but also because we grew up half way around the world from our birthplace. I am, vehemently, and always will be, a Kiwi, but part of my heart also will always be amongst those little villages of Oxfordshire.

Cambridge

You couldn't get much more of a contrast with Siem Reap and I did a lot of oohing and aahing for the few days I was there. I had forgotten just how pretty the town is. So green, old pubs on the river, wide meadows yellow with buttercups, purple lilac and irises everywhere, even bluebells still lingering, ancient second-hand bookshops crammed to the ceiling, as well as the grandeur of the magnificent college buildings, many of which are 800 years old.

So lovely to see Hannah, to know that she’s OK and on track for upcoming exams. She’s doing just what she’s always done and what seems to have worked so far. Amazing that some of her fellow students are saying to her, so how do you revise for exams? So lovely to meet her house mates who have given her so much support over her year here, which hasn’t always been plain sailing.

How lucky she is with her place of residence which she chose having no idea what to expect. A modern building, it has had its glitches, especially, in true British style, with the plumbing, but it is right on the edge of town and her room looks out onto playing fields while the rooftop ‘patio’ has expansive views over beautiful gardens and the surrounding countryside.

Her bike is great and I took it all over (when I wasn’t in bed with my first lot of flu bug). It’s wonderful: cars are pretty much kept out of the centre of town and bikes are in. They are everywhere and everyone rides them, not just the ubiquitous students. With bike lanes and purpose-built paths, bike parks at the supermarket and all over, and impossible parking for cars, why would you do anything else?

It was particularly lucky that I was there when Hannah found out she had got the job as a judge’s assistant at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It had been a gruelling interview and she was convinced there was no hope but obviously they thought otherwise. Maybe it was because she told them she might be rubbish at international criminal law but she can make good cupcakes! It’s kind of been her dream ever since taking the Model UN student delegations there in her early twenties and visiting the Court. I felt proud and privileged to be able to join in the celebrations in person with her and her housemates in their kitchen.

Koh Ker and Srayang

The definite highlight of my Cambodian experience was a day trip we did to Koh Ker 125 kms north-east of Siem Reap. This is the ‘real’ Cambodia that most tourists don’t see. Sparsely populated, much of the region is covered in jungle. It was once the capital of the Khmer empire and is a developing tourist attraction with many ancient temples, although not yet fully de-mined.

However, seeing temples wasn’t our goal for the day. Feeding some of the local children was. The average monthly income for Cambodian rural families is $2. Twice a month, two PLF vans loaded high with lunch supplies and equipment (paid for with donations), leave Siem Reap at six in the morning for a three hour journey on half-formed roads and narrow dirt tracks through villages impassable in the wet season with little traffic other than bikes and scooters, for the primary school at Koh Ker.

This is another of the Foundation’s ‘adopted’ schools.  When they first got involved, teachers were sick with disease and the kids were starving to death. First, health care was set up and now the focus is on feeding and educating. At present donations allow lunch to be provided twice a month, usually noodles, vegetables and chicken. Everyone joins in on the preparations – school children, local women, Ponheary’s sister and the van drivers.

Once cooked, we filled plastic buckets with the steaming noodles, took them around the classrooms  and ladled them into the kids’ bowls which they keep under their desk. The kids are tiny, thin and serious, intent on their food and shovelling as much in as they can. Some of them have brought a baby brother or sister along. Time after time they raise their hand for more. There is complete silence. They look at me with their huge brown eyes, but there is little response or connection. Food is the priority.

After lunch our next stop was Srayang about ten kilometres away where there is a high school and where next door, the PLF has built a communal living complex to provide accommodation for teenagers from the village who were living in unsafe situations at home and who did not have the means to get to high school. Thirty-two boys and girls live in dormitories, cook, shop, clean, keep house and grow vegetables together, and attend the high school just down the road.

A ‘house mother’ lives on site along with Canadian volunteer, Torsten Tabel, who takes English lessons and mentors the kids. You have to go there to appreciate his generosity of spirit. He is living in basic conditions, in extreme heat and in the middle of absolutely nowhere. He has a bicycle, infrequent visitors and no hope of any friends or social life.

But, the kids are thriving. In the safety of this sanctuary, they are free to learn and to dream of where they might go from here. The girls proudly show me around their spartan living quarters, eight to a room, nothing in it but the bunks they sleep on. Many engage me in conversation in their rapidly improving English. Something about them touches my heart. They have been through so much and have so little yet a remarkable strength still burns within them.

A quote from Torsten’s blog says it all:

I’ve learned a great amount from these 32 students about what it’s like to come from a place where there was very little future beyond their immediate surroundings. Now they are looking at the world in a different light because the light within them is shining through. They are changing their world in a way I find hard to put words to.

It is the most powerful experience to witness and be a part of. Their radiance and confidence to face this new world is evident each time a visitor shows up. Providing a setting like the PLF Canada dorm for these students to have the freedom to grow into themselves is paramount in breaking the cycles many of them  were born into. When you give someone space free of worry about shelter and food, you open the door to the horizon. These students here in Srayang are proof of what happens when people are given access to those opportunities.

My trip to Koh Ker and Srayang with the PLF the day before I left the country really summed up for me my whole experience there: crazy, hot, uncomfortable, mind-blowing, frustrating, totally humbling and so emotional. It didn’t take long for Cambodia and its people to find their way into my heart and I’m not sure they’ll be letting go any time soon.

 

Temples galore!

I clambered around ten temples in the two weeks I was in Cambodia. All different, all impressive for different reasons, all decaying to varying degrees although quite remarkable in how well they have withstood the elements for so long.  Some stood out for their intricate decorations, the pink or orange hue of their stone, the symmetry of their towers; others for the tranquillity of their moats, their mysterious carved faces or their immense size.

Angkor Wat, for example, is enormous. It is, in fact, the world's largest religious monument. In the 12^th century, the city of Angkor was the capital of the Khmer Empire and is known to have been the largest pre-industrial city in the world with a population of around one million, at a time when London’s inhabitants numbered a mere 50,000.

Yet, there was something very poignant about all the temples. They represent such grandeur, such immense power, all the wealth of times gone by, but are now just decaying relics of the former glory that was once the Empire of the Khmer people. Cambodia is now one of the world’s poorest countries with about one-third of its people living on less than one dollar a day.

 
 












Most of the workforce are
employed in subsistence farming. The Mekong River provides fertile fields for rice production but the government is also one of the most corrupt in the world and many thousands of people have been evicted from their villages as the government has received bribes for granting land to foreign companies keen to exploit resources. It is little wonder that parents prefer to send their children to sell postcards at the temples rather than to school.

So, where Kings once sat fanned by dozens of servants and watched ornately decorated elephants parade past, now tree roots twist and strangle beautifully carved doorways, rubble lies in piles where it has fallen, weeds creep over stone walls and beggars live amongst the ruins hoping to cadge a few cents from tourists most of whom know and care nothing of where they are except to get their photo taken in front of a tree they have seen in the movies. At sunset up the hill they totter in their silver dresses and high heels, cameras dangling, to get a photo not of the temple at the top but of themselves. ‘Me, somewhere in Cambodia’ the captions, if any, will read.

Luckily for me Jane Dinnison, the Fundraising Coordinator for Australia for the PLF (Ponheary Ly Foundation: http://theplf.org/wp/), was in Siem Reap at the same time as me teaching English at Khnar School for one of the local teachers who had recently had a baby. Jane has been involved with the Foundation’s work for several years and was a wealth of knowledge and wisdom, as well as being great company during our journey to and from school, and over many delicious Cambodian dinners.

 The daily two hour tuktuk ride was at times uncomfortable (depending on the number of potholes our driver managed to avoid) and always hot and dusty. But the journey was also fascinating and lovely as the road wends its way across rice paddies, through forests, past pink decaying temples or alongside villages of thatched ‘houses’ on stilts, morning shafts of sunlight hazy in the smoke from the cooking fires.

A favourite stop on the way home is a noodle shop in the village of Pradak to sample Num Banh Chok – a delicious rice noodle soup served with peanut sauce and various pickles, and topped off with a selection (your choice) of leaves and water lily stalks freshly picked from the forest that morning. Supremely tasty cuisine for less than $1 a bowl!

Access to clean water in the villages is limited, so at Khnar School Australian donors have provided a washing station. Water is pumped up from the ground and bowls, soap and scrubbing brushes are provided. The children love the opportunity to clean themselves, and in the few months that it’s been in place, the deep, infected sores on their arms and legs have almost completely disappeared.

Medical care for rural Cambodians is at best unreliable and inaccessible, at worst non-existent, and there is almost no understanding of how modern medicines work. So the PLF provides daily nursing care at the school and the children are learning to present their ‘wounds’ for treatment on a daily basis. They show so much innocent trust and are so stoic when faced with pain. How much easier it must be to learn, knowing that such things are taken care of.

I taught English classes for two weeks at Khnar School as part of the Ponheary Ly Foundation’s volunteer programme. This is a rural school about an hour by tuktuk from Siem Reap. The children in the area are poor and their families uneducated. The goal of the Foundation is to provide educational opportunities to such children to avoid the common alternative of their being sent to work at nearby temples selling postcards and so on to tourists, thereby condemning them to a lifetime of poverty. The Foundation’s belief is that education will provide them with some choices that they will otherwise lack.  

So, donations to the Foundation provide school uniforms, school bags, books and resources, breakfasts, teachers’ salaries, English lessons, health care, bicycles for them to get to school and much more. The government spends 53 cents per child per year on education in Cambodia. Schools that aren’t lucky enough to be ‘adopted’ by an NGO or similar, clearly cannot get by.

The kids are delightful. Keen to learn, their enthusiasm is infectious. Homework excites them; they choose to come to school for English classes even when the rest of the school is closed for a statutory holiday! The classrooms are hot and basic with no resources and no electricity. But the kids are sponges, intent on getting as much as they possibly can out of each lesson, and they learn incredibly fast.

My lack of Khmer and their lack of English matters little as they master the complexities of telling the time in English. Luckily, we have a whiteboard because I teach them a few learning games and their favourite, just as with my New Zealand students, turns out to be the board game!

The first morning in a strange place, even with inadequate sleep, always seems brighter and easier than the night before. And so it did.

Breakfast in the ‘garden’ at the Seven Candles Guesthouse was always a pleasure even though my often protesting stomach sometimes didn’t allow me to take full advantage of it. Muesli with fresh tropical fruit and yogurt; baguette, croissant and homemade mango jam; French toast with maple syrup; freshly squeezed orange juice; French crepes with bananas or the more local style Cambodian crepes; all were delicious and cheap.

                                                                  The Guesthouse is the home of the Ly family and has been for many years. Four generations of the family live and work here. Despite being forced out of their home and city during the regime of the Khmer Rouge, Ponheary Ly and her remaining family members managed to return during the Vietnamese occupation. In order to be able to provide for their families, some of the family members subsequently learnt several languages and qualified as tour guides once Cambodia opened up again to Westerners in 1998.

In more recent years they converted their home into a guesthouse and, judging by the posts on Trip Advisor, very popular it is. Most people comment on the friendly, family atmosphere where your tuktuk driver, the receptionist, the breakfast waitress, the Rooftop Lounge café cook, a Field Officer who works in the office and the six children who run around the place from time to time are all related.

Two weeks overdue but better late than never, at last my blog begins. In any case, hindsight is quite a useful thing to have when writing this part, since my Cambodian experience grew on me over my two weeks there, so that in the end it was difficult to leave.

I think it's always hard to jump directly into a culture so different from one's own, rather than making one's way gradually via other less challenging countries such as Thailand or Vietnam. The heat, the traffic, the shouting geckos, the unfamiliar toilet arrangements, the dusty shop fronts, broken footpaths, the ubiquitous rubbish, the difficulties of crossing the road - all of these you no longer notice by the end of a week (with the exception, perhaps, of the heat), but all are strange and new for the first while.

On top of that I had the passing of my dear friend and colleague, Emma, who died a few hours after I left Nelson. Emma, whose work as a language teacher was her passion, gave too much and realised too late that life is short and we have to seize the day. Emma inspired this trip; she thought it was such a great idea. She had something similar planned for herself for next year but sadly that was not to be. Emma, your warmth, compassion and support will be with me throughout my adventures.