Chasing Amy-Lou

Kampot and Kep and everywhere in between, Cambodia:

They say bad luck comes in threes and that Karma plays a huge part in dishing out good and not so good things. If bad luck does come in threes then today was definitely the end of my losing streak and Karma could suck a fat one. Although, rather than call the obstacles I conquered ‘bad’, I’m gonna call them learning curves: experiences to cherish on my never ending quest to find enlightenment and fulfilment (or something along those lines).

Now, yesterday saw me ‘fall’ off my scooter and bruise my hand. This was learning curve number one. And what did I take away from this? Don’t try to stabilise a scooter on an uneven road, especially on the side of a mountain. Done. Lesson learned.

The next two bouts of bad luck…sorry…the next two learning curves occurred today and we’ll get to them in due course.

Today was a good day. No, scrap that, today was a great day. I woke early to the golden rays of sunshine spilling through my hostel dorm window and decided I was going to seize all the positive vibes and fill the day with experiences to cherish.

Deciding to sack the hostel breakfast off (it wasn’t free anyway unlike hostels in Vietnam and Laos; a lot of places in Cambodia didn’t offer free breakfast, something that annoyed me slightly, considering it was pretty pricey to begin with), I walked the short distance to a place called KAMA Cafe and had a bite to eat there instead. KAMA Cafe is a great little arts space right near the White Pigeon Monument and just round the corner from where I was staying at Pepe and The Viking. It’s run by an English speaking Cambodian lady whose ethos consists of only good things. KAMA stands for Kampot Arts and Music Association and as well as helping Cambodian women to become more independent and to improve their English skills by providing them with jobs in the kitchen and front of house, it runs projects and puts on exhibitions to promote art and musical talents from across the city. The main focus of KAMA’s project at the moment is to help a female Cambodian artist learn to play rock and roll. Something I thought was absolutely brilliant.

Kampot is a bustling little place – relaxed and quirky, full of surprises and full of interesting characters. And I realised this morning that I liked it immensely. The abundance of coffee shops, quaint cafes and vintage clothes shops reminded me a little of the laneways of Melbourne, but less polished. And the choice of food is incredible. But what really struck me was the way every establishment tried to push education and ambition onto the Cambodian people. A lot of the restaurants and cafes in Kampot are ex-pat run, and the ex-pats employ Cambodian staff to take care of the majority of duties from serving guests to cooking, from cleaning to front of house management. And I thought it wonderful; for a country still in recovery from the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot regimes, it was refreshing to see so much progression and independence. And so much desire to learn too.

After breakfast I took a walk to the Revolution and Workers Monuments and then passed by the Lotus Lake on my way back into town. The sun was still shining and I felt alive, so I hired another scooter and headed out towards Kep, via the [not so] Secret Lake.

The Secret Lake is a lake set back around 2km from National Road 33 and can only be accessed via dirt tracks that during wet season can prove to be a little hazardous. As I soon found out. Taking the exit towards the lake, I encountered probably the worst pot-hole riddled road I’d ever come across in my entire life. Worse even than the roads in Glasgow, and that’s saying something! Huge puddles, rocks, fresh mud, and countless cows that insisted on walking out into the middle of the track whenever they felt the urge to try and cheat death, littered my scoot up to the lake, making the drive arduous, a little nerve-wracking and pretty hairy. At one point I almost lost a flip-flop to the depths of the squelching mud as I tried in desperation to steady my scooter as it skidded through the puddles. At least the sun was still shining though, that was the main thing.

When I finally reached the lake, the Krypton Factor style drive seemed hardly worth a second thought for the view was pretty spectacular. During high season I could imagine it being crowded with tuk-tuk drivers and avid tourists, but today, it was silent. It was peaceful, serene, and utterly beautiful. And it was all mine. I spent a while scootering round the vast space of water, basking in the gorgeousness of the midday sun and soaking up the scenery. This is what I’d come travelling for – moments entirely like this!

Once I felt satisfied that I’d gotten enough from my lake experience as I could, I made the gruelling scooter ride back to the main road. And this is where learning curve number two makes an appearance. Seeing as the weather had been a bi-polar cluster fuck over the last few days, and seeing as I’d almost forgotten what sunshine looked and felt like, I’d not given any thought to wearing sunscreen. No thought at all. Big mistake. Biiiiig mistake.

Underestimating the strength of the sun, I’d left Kampot at 10:30am with only a t-shirt and shorts to protect my pasty white body from the killer UV rays. And it was while on the road towards Kep that I noticed something was amiss. The creases in my elbows were stinging somewhat, and my face felt a little flushed. And when I hitched my shorts up a little higher over my thighs to inspect the damage, well, that’s when my worst fear was confirmed. I was bright red. And not just a glowing kind of red, I mean, tomato red. I had a t-shirt/mini-short suntan, and a bright red honker to rival that of Sir Alex Ferguson’s. I had just become my own pet-hate – I’d become a typical British tourist!

Vowing never to leave the house without sunscreen on again (lesson number two well and truly learned), I thanked Karma for her persistence, prayed that my final bout of bad luck wouldn’t be too painful, and soldiered on.

I reached Kep in one hot and flustered piece and went to sit by the beach to eat my packed lunch. However, the weather had turned pretty shit, the beach wasn’t worth sitting on, and the wind had picked up. So I sat on a bench instead and ordered a beer to drown my sunburnt sorrows. It was at this point that a friendly Dutch guy came to sit by me (we’ll call him Amsterdam), and we ended up chatting for a good while, discussing photography and travel, entrepreneurship and hotels. And whether this was Karma’s way of easing me into my last bout of bad luck (sorry, my final learning curve), I’ll never know, but I’m pretty sure that Amsterdam came into my life that afternoon for a reason, and looking back, I’m bloody glad that he did.

Deciding to go visit the Butterfly Farm together (I’d never been to nor once had the urge to visit a butterfly farm in my life before but thought it would be fun to try something new), Amsterdam and I scootered our way through Kep and paid the $1 entrance fee and took a look around. Now, I’m not being ungrateful or cynical here, but I knew there was a legit reason I’d never visited a butterfly farm before. It’s because a butterfly farm is literally a piece of land with a few enclosures that house lots of butterflies. And that’s it. Don’t get me wrong, butterflies are beautiful; they’re delicate and peaceful and graceful to watch…if you’re into that kind of thing. I just kinda wasn’t. But Amsterdam had fun, and that was alright by me.

Taking a whistle-stop monument-seeing ride back through the town, stopping at the beach and the White Lady Statue along the way, Amsterdam and I decided to head back to Kampot for a couple of happy hour mojitos and to educate ourselves in Cambodian history by going to watch a film at the Ecran Cinema called The Killing Fields; a British made movie about the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. But before we could reach our final destination, learning curve number three (and surely to God, my last bout of bad luck) occurred.

I’d rode the scooter over some pretty shitty terrains that day, and was surprised that it hadn’t completely collapsed on me. But as we made our way back onto the National Road I detected some sort of noise coming from the back of the bike. Asking Amsterdam if he could see anything wrong, he scootered alongside me and gave me a resolute ‘no’. Ploughing on ahead we reached a speed of around 80km/hr and were well on our way to making it back to Kampot before 5:30. That was until Amsterdam overtook me, slowed down until he was level with me and told me to pull over at once. “Oh God”, I thought, “What’s happened?”

Turns out I had a flat tyre. Bloody typical. At first I panicked, thinking of all the possible things that could go wrong – I didn’t have the name or number of the place I’d hired the scooter from; they had my passport as insurance; I could end up stuck in Kep with no way of getting back; the rental place could fine me a hefty amount of dollar; and I could begin hyperventilating at any moment. Giving myself an almighty slap, and thinking practically about the situation, I pulled myself together and asked Amsterdam to rescue me.

Luckily for me, Amsterdam turned out to be pretty resourceful and pretty calm in the face of catastrophe – he found a garage at the side of the road and within half an hour my bike had a new tyre, I’d only had to part with $6, and we were on our way again.

Thinking logically about the situation, I reckon I panicked for no good reason. Amsterdam was a great help and I probably would’ve broken down in tears had he not been there, but after reassessing the event, I really needn’t have worried. South East Asia is tailor-made for an avid scooterer. And luckily, wherever you may be in this part of the world, you’re never too far from a man that can. And that man just so happened to whip my back wheel off and have me back on the road in no time at all. Lesson number three: well and truly taken on-board.

After a couple of wind-down cocktails we finally made it to the cinema for the airing of The Killing Fields; a film that put everything that had happened that day into perspective. My bad luck was not bad luck. My bad luck was probably not even Karma’s way of telling me to be more cautious. My bad luck was just a fact of life – a few insignificant events that happen to many people, all over the world, every single day. What happened in The Killing Fields was not bad luck. That was sheer brutality at its ultimate worst. And if it took a few unfortunate events while travelling across a beautiful country to make me appreciate my life and freedom so much more, to make me appreciate just how lucky I really was in comparison to others, then my ‘bad luck streak’ had been worth every second.