Enlightened Sculpture In Post-Apocalyptic Ratanakiri

At last a bright and sunnier day fell on our day instead of the endless rains. We had decided to take the advice of the Green Carrot restaurant owner, to employ the services of a guide, which turned out to be the optimum way of discovering many interesting activities in a single day. I’m not usually one for guides but this was definitely worth while since Sokal was from the ethnic minority of the Kreung. He explained there were 7 minorities in the district. I wondered which of these, if not all, had fought against all the governments of Cambodia, and if they had managed to hold their ground with the Khmer Rouge.

Sokal first took us to the local mining pits, where prospectors worked in pairs in a tight community renting a plot in a rubber tree plantation. Apparently, they return to the same sites year after year, digging and filling holes in the same spots, by hand, as far as 12m deep.

One of the group had been lucky enough to find $5k worth that week, but these lean digging machines didn’t look like they ate a lot, though several wore expensive looking ornately fashioned gold tube bead necklaces.

We next visited a village where the people did not believe in gods, but were still worshipping spirits. We took a look at their place of washing, where the cleaning of clothes, utensils and the human body all took place under the same constant flow of water gushing lazily from an array of plastic tubes that channelled water from the nearby river.

Traditionally the water would have been conveyed by bamboo pipes, but like so much these days, everything has been replaced with an ugly plastic alternative. Whilst the tribe to longer wore traditional clothing daily, they would still do so for special occasions, and they continued to fashion and use their sturdy rattan basket backpacks.

Next we visited a village where weavers made traditional clothes

and even had some beautiful carved crossbows on display.

Finally, we wade our way down a long dirt road to Katieng Waterfall where plaques advertising restaurants and other activities still hung nailed to trees that once hoped to catch the attention of passing barang. There was something quite post-apocalyptic about witnessing these signs, as if I were a survivor of a catastrophe long since past. Of course, the pandemic which has crossed the globe is still running its course of destruction, but it all feels so final, especially where tourism is concerned. It's difficult to imagine how tourism will ever return to the comparative mania that it once was. Cambodia now feels much like a sleepy uneventful collection of dusty towns held together by an equally dusty network of feeble roads as I had experienced in Africa. There are no tourists here except the few who preferred to stay than return in a blizzard of panic.

“Quick, you must return home for fear of Covid-19”

the governments, friends and relatives would cry,

“come home to Europe where you will be safer”,

NOT.

So, whilst the age of mass transit travel is dead, the dawn of travel for travellers is in a renaissance. I'm sorry for the downtown in business as people struggle for their livelihoods, but I'm seeing far more benefits in planetary health outweighing the incessant need for greed. I'm revelling in travel as it once was, where people are pleased to meet a stranger instead of despising yet another foreigner.

Our final stop for the day was to meet Mr. Pich, a sculptor of some renown who had come out here to create a home and retreat from the madness of Phnom Penh. He created a complete traditional styled village on his Phun Lok Fa Pich Community grounds.

In-between these structures are strewn many of his sculptures in various states of undress, but may one day meet their completion.

But for a man like Pich, it was evident he has many distractions. We met him in one of his fields where he was planting and stopped his work to take us to a nearby plot where a store statue of Buddha with overarching naga dragon serpent stood.

He explained that he had commissioned stone to be brought from the same source that built Angkor Wat, and that a sculptor came to carve it on its current plot. The statue with some gold leaf applied was there to symbolise an aspiration of safety in the union between two religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, just as it had come to pass in ancient Angkorian times. I had become aware of this during my investigation of Bon Om touk, but Mr Pich was the first Cambodian I’d met who felt such things were important to honour.

His daughter, 8, who had been skirting quietly around the edges of the adults’ conversation was suddenly plucked from obscurity. Pich explained that all his children were studying the arts, some were at art school or film school and that here his youngest was learning the art of the traditional Khmer ballet Apsara dances. She then performed a minute-long sequence for our entertainment.

Pich learnt that I had studied sculpture, but even though he warmed to me even offering

“We are of the same heart",

and also inviting me to visit and live with him to sculpt for as long as I like, I felt this was a part of my life I might never reunite with again.

There was an air of melancholy in my manner and I dwelt upon Pich for much of the following week. I was filled with his enthusiasm for life, his courage and conviction to show art as being all, a truly impressive diamond in the rough, a rare find indeed.