Sundays.: A piece from my journal; my visit to Hariharalaya

Last week there came a day where I stood still and realized all of my travels where about to change. Like I was standing on one side of an invisible line in front of me and was about to step over it. Over that line everything would be very different.

Every time I pack up my bag the unknown is both haunting and exciting, but this time it wasn’t so much the unknown as the knowing. For one the time had finally come to say goodbye to my English comrade’s and solider on alone again. Secondly I was heading out into the country side to a yoga retreat with morals of permaculture and veganism. This was going to be a different kind of lifestyle to the one I had been living of late. A few tears began to well up in my eyes as I turned my back and left my new friends behind. I waved down a motor-hop and awkwardly explained my destination, bartered over a price and was off….

As I rode through the streets with my belongings on my back out into the country side I begun to feel at peace. The further away we travelled from the city of Siem Reap the more my heart and lungs opened up to the wide open spaces and poverty around me began to intensify. My smile grew larger and larger the closer I got to my new home with the realization that this is exactly the kind of experience I have been looking for. Local Khmer people. Local kids that smile instead of abuse like the street kids in the city, bright orange dirt roads, crummy little schools. Goodbye tourist exhaustion. Goodbye civilization.

Once arriving I had to laugh a little and wonder how long I would last. The word retreat and everything I thought it had meant quickly disintegrated as I found my lush bedroom was in fact a shared shed with spiders bigger then my hand, rats roaming freely and a constant choir of mosquito’s singing in my ears. Although there was a compost toilet outside my room the western toilet or even a long drop was across the otherside of the camp. The showers were cold water and outside. Food was prepared and eaten whist sitting on the floor, of course along with the 7.30am yoga sessions and nightly meditation groups. There was a constant layer of dust that found every spot of skin and the detox of vegan Khmer food was no joke. Of course the lack of meat and animal products was no strange feat, but not been able to indulge in the slightest form of western food when needed was something new.

I immediately began to feel this distant gap between what felt like my old life, even if it was a matter of hours ago, and this new one. Like these people, their morals, priorities and aspirations were so totally different to the materialistic outside world. At first I felt like I was in limbo, not fitting in there nor back where I would be going next. I decided a walk to inspect the village was in order.

Here I was greeted with wide smiles and an excited and proud hello by EVERY passing person. My feet got dusty from the orange dirt, my camera; almost out of battery. I found a school to teach at where the conversation went like this;

“Hi, how are you today”

“Good, how can we help you”

“My name is Monique, I am staying down the road at the yoga retreat, I was interested in your school, can I take some pictures?”

“Yes, let me show you around, I am the general manager here”.

He took me to the classrooms, computer room and library and told me about their school although due to his poor English I struggled to catch a lot of it.

“Is there anything I can do to help out here?”

"Yes you can teach a class, there is more classes between 4-7pm”

“Ohhhh um ok, I can come back, maybe I can just sit in and watch a class first?”

“Yes you come back and you teach a class, see you later”

Our neighbors; these two were the smiliest little monsters, they would run out and greet you with big smiles and waves anytime you went by but as soon as you took a picture they would pose like this, then giggle at their photo.

Savong School

Cute little man hanging in the school yard

Our beautiful road

After my walk I went to my room to prepare for mediation later in the evening. I turned on my vipassana discourses from my ipod and tried to remember how to focus, instead I fell asleep, much like camp after all. I woke up covered in sweat feeling like I needed to vomit but struggling to see due to my blinding headache. Naturally fear kicked in given my complete solitude in the middle of know where. Feeling not unwelcomed but not welcomed either by the surrounding people. I dizzily walked to the main bathroom and splashed my face with water and then found a spot outside to sit and breath through it. I thought of leaving the next day, too afraid to be so alone here, "I'm in the middle of freaking Cambodia in the middle of the bloody countryside with a bunch of far off hippy healers!' This was an all new feeling of alone.

Before I new it someone was floating past me ringing a gong marking the beginning of group meditation. “Ok”, I thought, I'll give it a whirl and see how I feel. But this wasn’t like vipassana. This wasn’t solitary meditation. We sat in an intimate circle and held hands and meditated into one another with love. Then we lay in our circle our heads at the centre and the leader talked us through a full body meditation and blow me down, I was on a cloud- literally, well not literally. But she talked us through a cloud slowly creeping up and embracing our body and I felt it 100%. I felt it calm my sore and aching heels, I felt it release the tension of my headache and massage my skull. I felt its weight hang over my body letting me know I wasn’t alone at all. And after we were let up I was the last one lying there in my own little trance.

After we went in for a group dinner and had a lovely open group chat around the table. Legs crossed on the floor side by side and I believed the cloud. I wasn’t alone at all.

From here things started to feel more and more like home. A fellow guest and I took the bikes the second day and rode for an hour (in the middle of the day/heat of the day, might I add) to the floating village. Since it wasn’t the wet season just yet it was more like a village on stilts, but all the same it was a very interesting, if not gruelling, outing. Back we went, another hour, desperate to make back in time for lunch, our butts sore and bones rattled from the amazingly bumpy roads.

Ducks crossing! There were hundreds of ducks here that would just walk back and forth across the road again and again.

Nap-time

Before I knew it I had befriended a couple of the staff, Danielle the Hariharalaya healer and Maggie one of the yoga teachers, both American travellers. The rest of my time here was spent with these two. Maggie and I getting up to mischief in one way or another intent on entertaining ourselves. And soon enough it was time to leave again. But not before a mouth watering romantic Arabic dinner and drinks together in the city to reverse all signs of detox.

All in all, even if the retreat was…well not much of a retreat I am so thankful that I decided to stay in Cambodia a little longer and venture off the beaten track. I feel now, leaving tonight for Thailand, that I have truly experienced the real Cambodia. Its orange roads and beautiful people. Plus the choir of mosquito’s were eventually joined with a chorus of crickets, lizards, wind in the trees, falling coconuts, chanting, rain falling, the tick of some ones watch from far off, the scurry of one of the dogs feet, the turn of a page in a book, a whisper from the healing tent, a rattle of a bike passing down the road, the click of a bugs wings. Suddenly, I found, I was awake to everything...