Field Trip

Another public holiday befell my busy work life in Phnom Srok last week. I had planned to work it as a normal day but over a few cans with Mr Sophan we decided that it would be a perfect day to visit the rice fields with a picnic. How exciting! I was so looking forward to see the field I helped sow a few months back and thought it would be the perfect opportunity to invite some of my VSO team mates to join me and enjoy a day out in the rice fields.

So, Elise and Pam arrived Tuesday evening and we shared a lovely dinner with Mr Sophan and his wife who told us exactly what he thought of our Khmer-speaking abilities, much to our embarrassment! Well, at least he’s honest! And poor Pam was forced into a promise of speaking Khmer all day at the fields. We joined Daney and Srei Saart at the market the next day to help to buy all the food we needed and then sat relaxing at their house, helped to prepare some food and waited for Soroth to arrive. After roasting peanuts for the sauce for a while, amusing ourselves with the various animals in the vicinity (mainly pigs) and watching fishing rods being fashioned from bamboo we finally took off for the fields on motos with the picnic in tow and it took about an hour to get us and the food and drink to a dry spot near Mr Sophan’s fields.

It was such a beautiful day, sunny but a bit cooler than usual. Our trip took us down a dirt road, a lot of which had been washed away or flooded by the rains which made the journey a lot more interesting and led us to predict which types of worm we might get as a result of wading through the water. We weren’t the only people out that day either, as we passed and chatted to other farmers tending their fields, children swimming and men and women fishing and walking cattle out to the fields. What a busy place.

Our picnic reminded me so much of camping. We had a small gas stove and cooked beef in loads of butter, piled high with veg and then eaten with a deliciously spicy sauce. We attempted fishing with the rods without much luck and watched the locals throwing their huge nets into the water. It was a holiday for us but for many it was life and what ever they caught would be their dinner that day.

The fields were really wonderful: such an absolutely luscious bright green colour and it was so hard to imagine that the same place had looked so dry and barren a few months before. I remembered motoring over the hard, dry soil which was not an easy thing to do nor very comfortable. This time we had to get to the fields by boat because the fields were under water and high with rice. With a few beers inside us our boat rocked along and with so many barangs in the boat we were quite close to the level of the water. It was such a beautiful ride and when everyone stopped talking all you could hear was the very gentle swishing noise of the boat against the rice plants – it was really beautiful. We bailed out water as fast as it entered the boat but eventually the inevitable happened and the boat filled quicker than we could bail. It was very funny and we all managed to step outside the boat before it reached the bottom except for Pam who remained standing! What’s that phrase about never leaving a sinking ship? While we all laughed and guffawed, the professionals amongst us got the boat back to the surface by pushing it backwards and forwards to each other in the water and then rocking it side to side until it was on the surface again. Then with a little more bailing we were all back in! The water was only about knee deep so Elise and I enjoyed walking alongside the boat and even swimming behind it. Imagine that – swimming in a rice field! It was amazing!

We reached the field that I had helped sow a few months back and admired how tall the rice had grown. “Kupoh dauch Anna” (tall, like Anna!) was on everyone’s lips and I started to wonder whether I’d missed my calling in life. I made Mr Sophan promise that I could help harvest the rice, which starts next month and we pushed the boat onwards, back to the picnic site. The funniest thing on the way back was the discovery of fishing nets which had been strung up around a field. My fellow boaters nabbed all the fish on the way past which was highly amusing but somewhat unfair on the people who had gone to the trouble to put the nets out in the first place, I thought! Apparently it’s first come first served!