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| Model community ... the welcoming host of a home-stay at Chambok. Photo: John Borthwick |
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| Children perform a traditional Khmer dance. Photo: John Borthwick |
The Sydney Morning Herald
Home-stays are helping to get a village back on its feet, writes John Borthwick.
Hauled by a two-cow-power vintage vehicle, we're making unsteady progress along a Cambodian jungle track. Cathedral walls of wild bamboo arch above us as a pair of oxen pull our farm cart up a rise. The boy at the reins grunts them to a halt and gestures that from here on our way through Kirirom National Park is a walking trail only.
With my Khmer guide Thy (pronounced "Tee"), I hike the last kilometre. We scramble up a rocky watercourse until the rainforest opens out to reveal an amphitheatre of giant boulders tumbled at the base of a 30-metre cliff. A gossamer cascade spills over the crag. "This is Chambok Waterfall No.1 - sorry, not a very exciting name," Thy says.
I slip into the 20-metre-wide pool at the foot of the falls. In rainy season this would be a maelstrom, with monsoon torrents crashing down from above, but we are still in the dry season and the pool is swimmable, which is a cool relief from the jungle humidity.
Forest cicadas are roaring like a rock band at level 11 as we begin our trek back to the Chambok Community Ecotourism Centre that adjoins the national park. As we amble down the trail, Thy points out medicinal plants, oddities such as the convoluted "monkey step" vine and small spirit house altars. A sign in English on one shrine reminds visitors of the enduring animist beliefs of Khmer people, saying: "Our forest is alive with plants, animals and forest spirits."
The Kirirom plateau in Kampong Speu province sits about 100 kilometres south-west of Phnom Penh. Its name, meaning "Mountain of Joy", was suggested by a monk decades ago when the 32,000-hectare reserve was a favourite retreat for Phnom Penh's elite, including King Sihanouk. Then came the heinous Pol Pot regime (1975-79) and in its aftermath Chambok's villagers were relocated when their area was infested with remnants of the Khmer Rouge. On their safe return in 1998, the villagers initially reverted to survival agriculture - slash-and-burn farming, cutting forest timber for charcoal production, and hunting.
A non-government environmental organisation that Thy calls Green Shadow of the Forest initiated the Kirirom-Chambok ecotourism project with the aim of halting deforestation and providing new livelihoods for the villagers. So successful was the scheme that it has now expanded to include a home-stay program, English-speaking trail guides, handicraft production and community education.
Arriving back at the centre's cluster of mural-decorated buildings, I see a class of local teenagers learning the principles of conservation. Neatly dressed and driving their family motorbikes, they look like typical Cambodian teens. Sadly, most of them are near illiterate. As Thy explains, many farm children receive only two or three years of basic schooling before they are needed to resume work on their family fields.
As dusk falls a minibus of backpackers from the Chambok home-stay program arrives. We tuck in to a hearty dinner of greens, rice, pork, soup and bananas, all prepared in the centre's Women's Kitchen that, partly funded by Australia's AusAID program, provides culinary training and rotational employment for 337 village women.
Dinner over, we gather before a stage for the day's finale, traditional Khmer dances performed by local children. They turn and weave gracefully, with delicate hand movements and songs telling their national folk tales and myths. This is the positive image of Cambodia that I have come to see, not Phnom Penh's pair of ghoulish meccas, the Khmer Rouge "killing fields" and S-21 torture museum.
Later we head back to Chambok village. The family lots typically consist of timber stilt houses, many of which now sport a neat "Homestay" sign on the front gate. We pull into the one we've booked in advance and meet our host, a petite, beaming woman called Koo, and her family. Her two-room guesthouse is newly painted in blue and even has solar-powered lighting. She shows us upstairs to two immaculately clean rooms with a mattress, bedding and mosquito nets. There's a traditional thunderbox washroom in the yard.
From just two original home-stays, Chambok now has 37 families who take in tourists on a rotating basis. The cumulative income is significant for the village, with profits shared among participating households, the poor and ill, and forest conservation works. Chambok now serves as a best-practice model for community ecotourism across Cambodia. I am serenaded to sleep by a symphony of crickets trilling and cicadas droning. The only sound competing is a sweet-toothed Khmer mouse trying to unzip my pack, desperate for the chocolate bar within.
Sihanoukville
"Open your heart, open your wallet!" the beach vendors joke at Sihanoukville. A home-stay at Chambok is the perfect way to break the road journey from Phnom Penh to the beach resort of Sihanoukville. Sunny, snoozy "Snookyville", 190 kilometres south-west of the capital on the Gulf of Thailand, offers a combination of white-sand beaches, "bucket" bars for backpackers, casinos for the bored, new resorts for the ever-anticipated "Russians are coming" invasion and time-warp prices for food and drink. There's music, dance, island trips and scuba-diving, or just doing nothing, with good accommodation costing from $25 a night. The dramatic new Australian movie Wish You Were Here, starring Joel Edgerton, is set partly in Sihanoukville, but your stay will surely be much lighter fun. footstepsinasia.com.
Trip notes
Getting there
There are no direct flights from Sydney to Phnom Penh; one-stop options are via Singapore, Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh City. Chambok is about 100 kilometres south-west of Phnom Penh on National Road 4.
Getting around
Cambodia specialist Footsteps in Asia arranges individual or group Chambok home-stay packages and Sihanoukville excursions. Its 10-day Cambodia Experience program includes both destinations, plus Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, and costs $US630 ($605). footstepsinasia.com.
Cambodia's de facto currency is the US dollar, with Cambodian riels used for small change. Credit cards are accepted and ATMs dispense US dollars.
Before arrival, obtain a Cambodian electronic visa, which is far easier than the "visa on arrival" procedure. www.mfaic.gov.kh/evisa.
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