Meeting Mondulkiri's Mountains

* This meeting happened way back in February. Proper documentation takes time!

At the beginning of the two-day trek I was sure I had a fractured toe. By the end of the first day I was sure I didn’t. But that’s still the excuse I gave for leaving a day early. 

The real reasons? I was exhausted from hiking all day in flip flops, and I knew there wouldn’t be enough food. The second day began with a baguette and coffee. Lunch was going to be a cup of noodles. That was supposed to last seven hours of hiking up and down mountains.

I took the first ride out of there. It took an hour or two to make it out of the hills and back to the guesthouse, but the reprieve from walking was worth it.

 

Not that the walking didn’t start out fun. My fellow Peace Corps Volunteers and I ogled over lots of wildlife while hiking up and down the hills of Mondulkiri ­— the province Lonely Planet calls the “Original Wild East of Cambodia.”

The beloved travel guide calls Cambodia’s second most northeastern province a lot of other things, too, like the “Switzerland of Cambodia.” Oops, that’s just Sen Monorom, the provincial capital, which supposedly earned that name for its two lakes. But the whole province garners plenty of other geographical comparisons from the traveler’s tome. Africa, Tasmania and Wales: LP claims Mondulkiri’s got pieces of all these locales plus more. 

I haven’t been to Tasmania or Africa, so I can’t comment on those likenings, but I have been to Switzerland and Wales. Sen Monorom didn’t remind me of the European country high in the alps, but I didn’t bother to check out the two lakes in the Cambodian town.

I also didn’t pick up on the Wales comparison, but I’ve only been to one tiny town in the tiny British country. Still, in my memory, Wales was more green and less brown than Mondulkiri. If anything, Mondulkiri is a bit like Eastern Washington, with its scrubby ground and dry hills.

Hills are something Mondulkiri has a lot of. Mondulkiri literally means “Meeting of the Hills.” Lots of hills and not a lot of people. With only two people per square kilometer, Mondulkiri is Cambodia’s least populated province. (Again, according to Lonely Planet, 2008.) Most people who live in the province are not Khmer. About half are Pnong and the other half other minorities.

So, back to our hike. We arrived in Sen Monorom (after a nine-hour bus ride) without plans. But it didn’t take long for a travel guide to sell us his two-day trek through the jungle, interrupted by an overnight stay in a Pnong village. We’d see waterfalls, animals and have plenty of food.

The guide spoke stellar English, told killer turtle sex jokes and had a jaunty revolutionary look to him (beret, silky ponytail, combat clothes). How could we say no?

Well, it turned out the long-haired guide wasn’t really the guide. He was just the moneymaker. Our real guide was a quiet Pnong man named Om who spoke Khmer but no English and made a meager $10 a day. (The hike cost $20 apiece.)

Om led us up and down mountains, across shallow rivers and through slashed and burned fields waiting to become farms. 

The 20k hike was supposed to take five hours. It took 10. We stopped for a lunch of pork and rice and swam in a chilly waterfall, but much of the delay was likely my doing. I was constantly catching up to the group, because somewhere along my life’s course, I’ve become really slow. Geriatrically slow.

I had to use two bamboo poles to pull myself up and down the hills and the guide’s hand to make it across a log spanning a river. 

Part of the reason I went home a day early was to spare the group another day of waiting for me. 

We left that first morning at 8:30 and landed at the Pnong village high in the hills just before dark, just after 6 in the evening.

We arrived at the four-hut, 20-person village in confusion. The guesthouse we were promised, with hammocks and bamboo beds and mosquito nets for sleeping, was taken by two French girls who arrived on elephants.

With no other choice, we displaced a 12-member family and stayed in their hut, what one of my fellow trekkers called a step up from a cave. 

A thatched wooden house lined by a platform for eating and sleeping on two of the walls and by a shelf for cooking supplies on the third. A fire pit on the dirt floor below the shelf.

Dinner, cooked in the fire pit, was a couple stirfry pork and vegetable dishes.

The family living in the hut numbered nine children, plus a dad, a pregnant mom and an ancient, bony man who hocked loogies all night.

The loogie-hocking made sleep difficult. So did the snoring. Not to mention the cold, the hard wood planks for a bed and the laughing and shouting of the men singing and playing a flute while drinking rice wine outside the hut.

But the morning (and my ride back) eventually came.

As often happens in Cambodia, the ride back was lost in translation. I figured this out when we drove a ways and then stopped, to wait for the others, the driver said. Once the others arrived I found out the plan was to walk one hour to a waterfall and then walk about four more hours to get out of the hills.

 

Um, no. I was done with walking. I simply wanted to be done with the hike and go back to the guesthouse. After some back and forth about missing the main road already, I finally got back to town. Being lazy has never felt so good.