Unscathed by mass tourism, Cambodia’s northeastern province of Ratanakiri is welcoming trekkers, military historians, gem-merchants, and connoisseurs of ethnic tribes to the country’s final frontier. Jim Algie discovers more

In 1979, a group of Cambodian villagers fled from the invad­ing hordes of Vietnamese sol­diers, taking refuge in the jun­gles of Rattanakiri province in the country’s northeast. There they remained for the next 25 years, fashioning clothes out of leaves and bark, laying traps for wild pigs and civets, and mak­ing weapons from the fallout left by American bombers alongside the Ho Chi Minh Trail. To ignite cooking fires, they rubbed sticks of bamboo together.

Only recently did local authorities discover the four fam­ilies and they finally came out of hiding.

This story, published by President Airlines’ in-flight mag The Cambodian Scene in 2005, is easy to believe when the plane bumps and shudders to a halt on the dirt runway in the tiny, provincial capital of Ban Lung. The arrivals hall is a dust-choked, wooden building with the façade of a Buddhist
temple. Inside, the doors are unhinged and ragged children run amok;
but tourism has made so few inroads here that the kids do not even beg
for money.

What the province may lack in modern amenities, it makes up for in villages belonging to 12 different Khmer Loeu ethnic minorities, a gem-mining shantytown, all sorts of eco-adventures and rivers like the Sre­pok, which was the source of inspiration for the foreboding waterway in Apocalypse Now.

Our first stop on this press junket, organised by Diethelm Travel Asia, is a Kroeung village. Out of the province’s population of 120,000, around 70 percent are composed of native tribes, with the Kroeung being the third largest. This community is a loosely arranged collection of a few dozen wooden houses built up on stilts in order to provide a shady re­treat from the sweltering sun. Hammocks hang beneath the houses. Piglets wander around as chickens peck at the dirt. And a strange si­lence pervades the area – not a TV or radio within earshot – as if the community exists in a state of suspended animation, cut off from the modern world. In fact, there is no electricity in any of these villages and a few of the group bitch about having to drink warm Cokes. Some of the Kroeung, believing in the animistic creed that photographs steal your soul, flee from the camera.

But one beaming old man, living in a thatched hut with a beehive hang­ing from the roof, is perfectly happy to pose for pictures. He even pulls out his bamboo instrument to play us some tunes composed of melodies sounding like bird trills and the sighing of the wind.

The most photogenic, centerpiece of their villages, however, are the “bachelor houses” made out of bamboo. The young man’s dwelling is built up on stilts about four- or five-meters tall, so he can entertain prospective brides in another house built closer to the earth, perhaps signifying the inequality of the sexes within their society, or the Earth Goddess symbolism inherent in animism. Once the couple is married, these temporary shelters are dismantled.

As part of the wedding celebrations, a buffalo is ritually sacrificed, says our guide and translator, Rin Samnith, who goes by the nickname of Nith. “For important festivals, or when people get sick, they sacrifice animals for the spirits,” he explains.

Driving to the next village on the bumpy, unpaved road, full of dips, turns, and gear-grinding hills (the road flanked by thick forest broken up by swathes of forest slashed and still smoking), we see a sight that flips the pages of my memory back to reading National Geographic as a boy: Walking beside the road is a bare-breasted woman carrying a rattan basket full of firewood on her back. Before you get your hopes or anything else up, O lusty gentlemen travelers, it seems that the only half-naked tribal ladies you see up here are middle-aged. One of the few passing vehicles conjures up a phantasmagoria of red, dust devils, and the woman quickly fades from view.

Past a rickety suspension bridge hanging over a tributary of the Se San River, lays the Kreung village of Ta Veng. From here to the border with Laos, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, is only about 10km or so. Through the Terres Rouges Lodge, where Nith works, and where we’re staying, he takes guests for treks along the supply line which the Viet Cong used to bring food and ammo to their troops in South Vietnam. Pol Pot, his wife Khieu Ponnary, and their other comrades-in­arms from the Khmer Rouge also used the trail to meet with their Vietnamese allies when the tyrant had a secret base of operations up in Ratanakiri in the late 60s. Many villagers, if not killed by the illegal, US bombing campaign, were shanghaied into fighting for the Cambodian commu­nists and ended up as cannon fodder. “The Khmer Rouge treated the local people like animals,” says our 25-year-old guide.

Some of the hikes (including sleepovers in tribal villages) can be quite arduous, the lodge’s co­owner, Chenda Clais, tells us later. “The trekkers come back and they walk like old cows,” she says, laughing.

All the men in Ta Veng are either out fishing or hunting, but the women and their children slowly and shyly cluster around us. One of the little boys carries a toy gun made out of the trunk of a banana tree. With Nith as a conversational go-between, we manage to speak with some of the friendly, smiling ladies, who say they don’t mind visitors coming up here. Still, one of the other travel writers expresses that commonplace lament, “It’s like a human zoo.” To which I reply, “Yeah, sure, but to them we’re just a bunch of albino gorillas, and it’s probably the most exciting thing that’s hap­pened in this village for the last few weeks.”

Once again, nobody begs or asks for anything except a po­lite request that we send them prints of the photos we’re taking.

Even with a tightly packed itinerary, there’s still leeway for some unexpected adventures. On our way to explore a field of lava that turns to scarlet at sunset, and is bordered by caves once occupied by tigers, we see a commotion bythe roadside, where a blaze is devouring a shack. Near the road, a large family looks on forlornly. Nith finds out for us that the fire was caused by a cooking accident.

Sitting in front of them are the family’s few worldly pos­sessions: a bundle of clothes, some pots and pans, and not much else.

Nobody complains about the warm Cokes anymore.

Khmer Pastoral

The Terres Rouges Lodge stands out as an opulent, French colonial counterpoint against such a dusty backdrop of deprivation. Once the local governor’s residence, the 14­room lodge has sumptuous wooden rooms (US$30-50 dol­lars) decked out with sandstone sculptures hearkening back to the Angkor Empire, and Thai textiles, while the main restaurant has spears and a chandelier from Bali.

Chenda and her husband, Yves-Pierre, started up the lodge. While doing his military serv­ice as a paratrooper in France, he came to Cambodia as a peacekeeper for the UN-sponsored in 1993. A jack of all travel trades, Pierre has worked as a guidebook writer, and a waterski­ing instructor and the captain of a junk on the Mekong River. As a guide he takes visitors on trips straight into the province’s Heart of Darkness.

On guard duty at the lodge are two playful Doberman pinchers. “Local security guards sleep 24 hours a day,” Chenda explains, “but Cambodian people are very afraid of dogs.” Not so afraid that they won’t allow them on airplanes, however. Since there is no vet in the prov­ince, when the dogs get sick, they put leashes and muzzles on them and bring them along on the plane to Phnom Penh.

On Day Two of our excursion, we head out to visit a Kroeung village where the main, homespun tradition is on public display: women weaving textiles on looms under their houses, or out in the shade, because the sun is sticking to its scorched-earth policy and there’s barely a whisper of wind. None of the weavers has a sales pitch for us; it’s nothing like the crass commercialism and hard-sell tactics that can spoil a visit to many hilltribes in Thailand.

After a while, the villages seem like variations on a minimalist theme, but with different splashes of local color: children smoking tobacco wooden pipes; a well under a jackfruit tree pregnant with fruit the size of cannon­balls; women carrying their babies tied to their backs with swatches of checkered cloth.

And these tumbledown hamlets are peopled with a cast of fascinating and sociable characters like an old man in an army uniform. He’s proud to show off his woven rattan baskets and one of the homemade knives that takes him two full days to pound into shape.

In Cambodia, you’d be hard pressed to find any older person who wasn’t scarred by the country’s decades of civil war, and the widower solemnly speaks of losing his whole through battles and afflictions. It’s a shock to find out he’s only 55, though; I would’ve guessed closer to 70.

Conversing with him, using Nith as the code-breaker, is a lesson in humil­ity: One’s usual gripes about inflation and computer glitches are reduced to trivial conceits.

By the time we get to the town of Bokeo, heading towards the frontier with Vietnam, and the area’s most totemic graveyard, this lesson has seeped in to everyone’s conscience. So what can we do to help? Ideas are tossed around. Everyone chips in some cash. Then we buy a bunch of aspirins and some pens and drawing paper for the kids. Not that I’m acting as Satan’s surrogate or anything, but I pick up a dozen packs of cigarettes because Nith says the local men appreciate them.

Another journeyman writer asks, “What about buying some condoms for
the tribal ladies?”

“You’ve been living in Bangkok for too long,” quips his friend. And every­body cracks up. On these sorts of tours, the other travelers you’re stuck with
are either half the fun or the majority of the misery. In this case we’re fortu­nate enough to have a generous and witty crew along for the ride.

There’s not much to buy in Bokeo’s market: fruit and vegetables, farming tools, cheap clothes and more expensive sarongs. The locals seem more amused by our presence than anything else. One of the young female vendors bursts into giggles when a fellow traveler calls her “beautiful” in Khmer.

She’s wearing a Britney Spears T-shirt; another teenager has his baseball cap
on backwards, but not yet sideways; in the wooden restaurant near Bokeo’s
main road, where we sit knocking back some high-octane, Vietnamese-style
coffee, served in a bowl of water to keep the glass cool, there’s a dog snoozing
on the dirt under our table and a larger-than-life cardboard cutout of Jackie
Chan pimping an energy drink.

These signs of celebrity culture’s encroachment in Ratanakiri steer the con­versation into familiar territory – whether or not mass tourism erodes tra­ditions and unravels the fabric of society – which begs another question
rarely considered by purists. Are all cultural traditions necessarily worth
preserving? Will future historians one day lament the passing away of polka
music, Super-8 film, “pet rocks” and Fear Factor as great bastions of Western
culture?

Let’s hope not.
For the time being these are blurry issues in the province, not likely to come
into sharp focus for a few more years, especially since Nith tells us we’re now
heading for some places few other tourists have ever explored before.

The gems of wrath
Our next stop is a gem-mining shantytown with an aura of foreboding. On
either side of the dirt road leading down through the ad-hoc town are holes
dug out by the miners with buckets and ropes. Pieces of plastic draped over
wooden frames serve as shelters for families while tree branches are used
as clotheslines. Scott Murray, the Bangkok-based writer and editor, says,
“This would make a great setting for a kind of John Steinbeck novel like ‘The
Grapes of Wrath.’”

He’s right. And there are a few glints of wrath in the miners’ eyes as we walk by. But you can’t blame them for being suspicious. Ratanakiri (“Jewel Mountains” in Pali) has a long history of being pillaged for buried treasures, ever since the French came to dig for gold a century ago. In the 90s, it was the Americans. But nowadays a Korean company has a concession for this area, known as the Three Districts.

“We dig for sapphires and rubies,” says one miner, who lightens up the somber mood by playfully throwing a rattan tray full of mud in our direc­tion and laughing.

He’s standing waist-deep in muddy water, sifting the gems from the mud by smashing the rocks with a stick, and then swirling the tray around in the water, grinning and smoking all the while. Once everyone else has moved on I go over and offer him and his friend a couple of smokes in return for answering my questions. Unbelievably, the man with the tray reaches into his plastic water bottle, pulls out two little rubies-in-the-rough and hands them to me. Employing two of my three words of Khmer, I say, “Aw khun. Lee hai – Thank you. Goodbye.”

Both of the miners grin and return the pleasantries.

Totemic River

Along the banks of the Se San River, we board some dugout canoes with mo-tors and rudders, in the form of wooden poles, on the back. The only other vessel is loaded up with a few locals and a man sitting on a motorcycle. They are going to be the last people we see on the river.

Flanking both sides of the waterway are forests, where tree-spotters can have a field day picking out flame and mango trees, gigantic dipterocarps and shoreas. Here and there the jungle is blackened by hack-and-torch farmers, but mostly it’s imbued with the same deep green hue as the water. There’s not much wildlife or waterfowl to be seen, save for a lone kingfisher arcing across the sky, before banking sharply, and diving down in search of a meal.

As Paul Davies, the Regional Head of Communications for Diethelm Travel Asia, muses, “The view along here seems like it hasn’t changed for the last thousand years.”

Infant islands are reborn during the dry season, one of them acting as a floating picnic bench for our lunch break.

Another half hour down the Se San, near the Vietnamese frontier, is the boneyard for the Jarai tribe. In the midst of a bamboo grove craftsmen have carved wooden totems for grave markers. The first one we come across is the final resting place of a helicopter pilot; it’s dressed up with streaks of color and a toy-sized helicopter on top of a pole. Deeper in the jungle, the other totems are more basic: a pregnant woman, a foot soldier with a gun on his shoulder, and another figure with its hands raised to its cheeks like Ed­vard Munch’s, The Scream. To be walking around on such hallowed ground seems like sacrilege, but Nith reassures me that the Jarai don’t mind.

The village of 200 people is a 10-minute hike through the jungle. As the Jarai gather around us, our guide breaks the ice by handing out sweets to the chil­dren. Since none of them can read or write, and the nearest school is back in Bokeo, he decides to save the pens and notepads for another ethnic tribe. Nith also has to explain to one of the teenage boys, who is wearing feathers in his baseball cap, that the aspirins must be used in small doses.

Mas Leu, the nephew of the village chief, lost an eye, several fingers, and part of his arm to a landmine. But he’s still grinning, still laughing, and there’s no bitterness in his voice when he says that the village doesn’t receive any assistance from the government or any NGOs.

Some of his eight children are clinging to his legs, a pig foraging on the ground beside him. When asked how many tourists have visited this village in the last year, he says, “About 40.”

There are not many destinations left in Southeast Asia that have been so un­tainted by mass tourism. In spite of all the hard roads one has to travel in the province (both viscerally and mentally), this is Ratanakiri’s true allure.

Heart of Darkness

A few nights later I’m sitting on the terrace in one of the restaurants near the riverfront in Phnom Penh. A young Cambodian guy sits down at the table across from me with blood pouring down his T-shirt from a head wound. A few other people finally convince him to go to the hospital. As he walks out to the street, I see the back of his T-shirt, which is plugging a local bar called the Heart of Darkness, where statues of Angkor-era kings and idols are bloodied with red light, and where foreign sex pistols gun for local cock-holsters. Once he’s out on the street, the man says somebody drove by him on a motorcycle and smacked him across the back of his head with the lock on a bicycle chain.

By comparison, the tribal villages of Ratanakiri seemed much more peace­ful, and far less primitive, than the country’s capital.

Check out Diethelm’s website at
www.diethelmtravel.com for information about
their Ratanakiri tour on “Tour Ideas”
under “Cambodia”.

The Terres Rouges Lodge has a website in
French at www.ratanakiri-lodge.com.

WINGING IT
President Airlines has three weekly flights (Mon, Wed, Fri) from Phnom Penh to Ratanakiri, departing at 9:35am, or the other way around, leaving at 11:10am. If you book and pay for the flights through their website
– www.presidentairlines.com – the roundtrip fare from Bangkok-Phnom Penh-Ratanakiri is only Bt8,760. It also pays to inquire about their special package deal, which includes accommodation at the Terres Rouges Lodge.