Day on the boat

Today I travelled by boat from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh on the Tonle Sap lake and river. I was supposed to be on that boat together with 15 other people (a tour group from France), but in the end - yet again - I was all alone on that yacht type boat with 2 crew members and a guide... The group had to cancel in the last moment as one of them had some serious illness and they all flew back to France..

When we left the harbour, people were staring at me as they probably believed that I hired this boat all for myself.. Next to us was the fast boat, which does the same trip but without stopping along the way, which was completely overcrowded, and all my tourist colleagues looked at me. I felt a bit strange. The guide is a BELGIAN living here in Cambodia since 1992, when he started working here for a World Bank project in order to restore the electricity network in Cambodia. He finally got married there and stayed. He was nice but extremely talkative, whereas I would have preferred sometimes to just sit there and watch the riverside passing by.

We visited a floating village on the Tonle Sap lake. The lake changes water levels between 1 meter at the end of the dry season and 9 meters at the end of the rainy season. Right now we had about 4 meters left. It was therefore not always easy to navigate. The 180 km river which connects the lake withe the Mekong changes directions twice a year. When the snow is melting in the Himalaya and all the water comes down the Mekong, some of it is pushed upwards and makes the lake grow. In the dry season, when the Mekong has a low level, the water goes back from the lake into the river. This means that the floating villages are constantly moving location.

There is everything in these village: shops, churches (yes, 80 percent of the population of the village are catholic vietnamese...!!), a filling station, a floating school on two levels with a football field on top (with nets all arounds so that the ball does not get wet..), lots of TV / satellite antennas. Electricity is mainly provided through car batteries, some have however solar panels.

On the way we visited 3 other villages: one where we saw the production of local pottery and palm wine / palm sugar (this was actually very interesting.. and the fresh palm sugar tastes great, like a caramel...). In another village we saw silver / cupper smithing. It is mainly young girls were working on the decoration with a little hammer with an incredible precision. They put the whole temoples of Angkor Wat on it without any image as a model. In another village, I rode on the back of a farmer's wife's carriage pulled by two oxes... quite fun actually. pictures of all this to follow... sorry, but still have not yet worked it out...

In the late afternoon I arrived in Phnom Penh, where I will just stay for 2 nights as it seams that there is not much to see.

UPDATE:

When adding the pictures, I actually realised that I forgot to mention 2 other important events of that day. The carriage ride was to a beautiful pagoda with very nice frescoes from 1852 (something really rare around here because of the humidity). The details and the colours were just amazing (see the picture of a king riding on an elephant... he seems however a bit more comfortable up there than me when I did this elephant ride...)

We also visited a local school, with 6 classrooms and just 2 teachers. All the classrooms were packed with pupils of different age and this was only half since there are two shifts given the limited space available, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We went into one of the classrooms where there was no teacher and did a little bit of maths with them.. it was a laugh for them and for us !! they all shout out loud the figures written on the blackboard and then the result. I couldn't judge whtther what they said was rifhgt, but Sandy (the Belgian guide) said that everything was correct. ;-) They all wanted to be on the picture and even wanted to have a portrait just of themselves... We left however in order not to disturb class too much... ;-)