Yesterday my alarm rang at 2:45 - wake up call for my day trip to Kirirom, a forest/nature reserve/waterfall in Kampong Speu province. I thought the 3am departure time was worth it to get to spend some non-class time with my students.
They picked me up in one of our two rented ‘lan’s (car/vehicle), which turned out to be one of the 15-passenger vans that are pretty ubiquitous here. I thought I was the last person since I’m past the market and by the time they got to me, there were already 19 people in the car (not unusual for Cambodia). I should know better by now. We made a quick stop near my house for two more passengers who were squeezed onto the front bench with two teachers. Then the last stop. When we pulled up and honked, I counted as two...four...five(!) more groggy-eyed teenagers stumbled out of the house. This required some rearranging but somehow everyone got squished in together. We set off and had just crossed the border into the neighboring province, about 5 km down the road, when someone told the driver to stop. We forgot someone! We turned around and found four cases of bottled water and two more students waiting to be piled in. Finally around 4am we set off for Kirirom, all 28 of us and food for the day for 50 people... I made it about a quarter of the way into our 200km journey before my leg started to go numb, and I think I was in a more comfortable spot than most of the students. Amazingly, I did not hear a single person complain. (Can you imagine American teenagers waking up in the middle of the night and driving 5 hours on bumpy roads sitting packed in like sardines?)
As it happens, Kirirom is actually gorgeous and was a fun hike up a mountain to a waterfall. While I watched in paranoia, 45 students climbed around on the slippery rocks, but nobody got hurt. At any rate, liability is a nonissue. I made buddies with the van driver’s daughter who, after initial apprehension, stuck to me like glue all day, made me teach her how to float on her back, held my hand all the way up the mountain, and took lots and lots of photos on my camera. Most of these were demanded by my students (individual, pair, trio, and group shots of everyone in at least four or five locations) who miraculously stopped being shy for the day and actually talked to me! All in all, it was, somewhat to my surprise, a great success.
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