Woman who scaled Cambodia’s three highest peaks eyes Everest

21 Mar 2019 2145 | Cambodia Travel News

One of the very few Cambodian women to have successfully reached the Kingdom’s three highest peaks is now eyeing Malaysia’s tallest mountain, Mount Kinabalu, and potentially even the world’s tallest straddling Nepal and China, Mount Everest.

While in many Western countries it is not uncommon for women to engage in extreme sports like skydiving, bungee jumping and mountaineering, in Cambodia, a country that remains relatively traditional and rigid in its gender roles, it remains an unusual sight.

But civil servant Chum Pesey is doing her best to change that.

As a child, Pesey spent her holidays in her father’s hometown of Kampong Cham, where she found herself enjoying adventurous outdoor pursuits.

But as is the case with many Cambodian women, these types of active hobbies stopped when she reached puberty.

This changed when she went to study English at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand in 2015.

“My friends, all foreigners, would invite me to take walks in the hills to see beautiful views of mountain ranges in New Zealand,” says Pesey.

Her first trek was a 4km hike with friends, a long distance for her maiden voyage.

“I was similar to many other Cambodian women, in that I was afraid of my skin going darker while outdoors, but my friends insisted. I agreed to walk with them on a not so difficult mountain to trek. It looks like the mountains in Kep province, but it required four hours trekking. It was my first time that I had walked for four hours under daylight between 10am and 2pm,” says Pesey.

“Was I happy that first time? Not at all. My first experience was not exciting and I was angry that they took me. I hated everything about it,” Pesey says laughing.

But after struggling with the stresses of living alone in a foreign country, she met with a student counsellor who recommended that she once again go into nature and hike in the hills behind her university.

This time, for whatever reason, the pleasures of the great outdoors seemed to click.