Khmerry Christmas

To date I haven't inflicted this terrible pun on the blip community, so here it is.

I decided to spend Christmas in Battambang as it's a low key place where I could chill out. I chose a countryside bike tour for Christmas Day morning and found a guide called Rich (not his birth Khmer name...) who took me around the paddy fields and villages for a few hours. We visited a fish processing unit (it was putrid), bamboo sticky rice stall (additional photo), banana chip factory and place where rice paper is made for spring rolls. The most memorable part was visiting Wat Samraong Knong a few kilometres outside of Battambang, which has a striking new pagoda but was a detention centre during the Khmer Rouge era, with victims killed in a well and buried in mass graves. The lady making banana chips said she was 48, meaning she'd have been around 5 years old when the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975. People with memories from the late 1970s have experienced such upheaval that it's difficult to imagine, and wondering about how these experiences shaped people was a recurrent theme that visited me when I lived in Cambodia.

Rich himself, like many others, was born in 1983 in a refugee camp along the Thai border and his family only moved back to Battambang in 1992. In April 1975 the city of Battambang had been forcibly emptied by the Khmer Rouge, as was the capital Phnom Penh. From both cities urban Khmer were forced into the countryside to become peasant rice farmers.

The cycle tour wasn't bad value overall and Rich came out with a few snippets but was overall much more interested in reminding me to give him a good TripAdvisor review than charming me to give one of my own volition. I'll do it anyway in a bout of Christmas cheer.

For Christmas Day dinner I shunned tradition and ate some tasty pumpkin and tofu stirfry with spring rolls at a street stall. Then as a nod to my sweet tooth and as I'm not able to pig out on an entire chocolate selection box, I devoured a large chocolate ice cream sundae.

For what is supposed to be the least hot (I hesitate to say coolest) time of year, it's pretty roasting. However that didn't stop me basking by the pool for a few hours in the afternoon. That felt pretty awesome for Christmas Day.

I'm going to have to start berating people who implore me to 'settle down', which has happened twice today when I've been sending Christmas messages. It's incredibly patronising of peoples life's choices. What does it even stand for, except a soundbite that people trot out when they lack the insight to ask anything else?