Monday was a travelling day. I‘d been in Siam Reap for ten days and knew I had a busy work week coming up. If didn’t make a move that would have meant my stay there would be more than two weeks. And though I had a good hotel (with a pool) for $25, and there were more day trips to do in the area I thought I should make the effort to see other places in Cambodia. Because of the Angkor temples Siam Reap has the highest concentration of tourists to locals in any place n Cambodia: and while that means more home comforts it almost means it’s somewhat of a showbox.
Generally I am travelling slowly but that would have been dragging my feet. In nine weeks in SE Asia I have been to just six towns/cities. I do four or five days work, four or five days sightseeing and a day’s travelling on. It’s a good pace for me. It gives me time to suss out the better bars and restaurants, get to know a few locals (even if only ex pat bar owners) and have conversations that go beyond ‘where you from, where you been, where you go’? And one still sees something new every day. Even if only by being in the same place at a different time than the day before.
So I took the boat from Siam Reap to Phnom Phen. I kind of wanted to skip Phnom Penh altogether (I don’t like these mega Asian cities much) and hoped to go down to the south coast. But I had some business to do there and the trip frazzled me so much that I didn’t have the energy to locate the taxi terminal and do another 3 hour or so ride. It turned out to be a good call.
The boat journey (and, moreover, getting to the harbour was exhausting). Not worth going into details. But it did take us across one of the miracles of the natural world: Tonlé Sap Lake and River. The river normally flows into the Mekong – except during the rainy season - when the Mekong cannot drain fast enough and the direction of the current of the river changes. This increases the size of the lake more than five fold (from 2,500 km2 to more than 16,000 km2) and raises water levels in the permanent lake by up to 10m. Most residents on the year-round lake live on floating homes, or have houses perched on very high stilts.
The flooding irrigates almost 14km2 of land, deposits upstream silt that fertilizes the land and acts as a spawning ground for fish that migrate upstream through to Thailand, Laos, Burma and China. It’s both the fish basket of Cambodia and acts as a reservoir and a pump that regulates an ecosystem that stretches from Tibet to Vietnam. It is also a wetland site of extremely high ecological value, designated as a UNESCO biosphere reserve, it is home to lots of bird species, only one of two places in the world where the sarus crane survives and harbours both sweet and salt water crocodiles.
The boat went so fast and there was so little in the way of protective railings on the outer walkways so my photos nearly all came out blurred or out of focus! But it was a trip to remember (also for the discomfort factor). Half way through the six hour so or trip I decided to stay in Phnom Phen. I was feeling frazzled. It was good decision – also a challenging one: I normally book a hotel before arrival in a new city: it saves on the stress factor and making ‘where shall I stay’ decisions when tired. This time I just decided to rely on a tuc-tuc driver. It took three hotel visits to find one that met my criteria. But we agreed a mutually acceptable fee and I am sure he went into collect an ‘introduction fee’ after I had booked in.
When I got to my hotel room and unpacked I realised that my glasses were missing. I had changed seats on the boat about four times ( between spells on the outer deck) in search of leg room / getting out of the sun etc. and remembered not picking up my glasses after finding a place to spread out a bit. ‘Oh shit’ I thought ‘that’s another thing to do here’. The next day I got my hotel to call the boat company and a few hours later (to my great surprise) found out that my glasses had been found, handed in, and could be collected tomorrow. If I had travelled straight onto Kampot as planned that would have been so much harder to arrange!
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