Cambodia - Day 9 - Tonle Sap Boat trip & Water VillagesMar 17, 2012
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| First item for the day - it's my Dad's St. Patrick's Birthday, Happy Birthday Dad, we love you! Technically it is only the 16th of March back in Canada but here in Cambodia it is the 17th so we like to celebrate birthdays in both countries, by the time we arrive in Battambang tonight it will be Dad's "official" Canadian B-Day. Tonle Sap - Heartbeat of Cambodia. The largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia, the Tonle Sap is an incredible natural phenomenon that provides fish and irrigation water for half the population of Cambodia. The lake is linked to the Mekong at Phnom Penh by a 100km long channel, the Tonle Sap river. From mid - May to October (the wet season), rains raise the level of the Mekong, backing up the Tonle Sap river and causing it to flow northwestward into the Tonle Sap lake. During this period, the lake swells from 2,500 sq km to 13,000 sq km or more, its maximum depth increasing from about 2.2 meters to more than 10 meters. Around the start of October, as the water level of the Mekong begins to fall, the Tonle Sap river reverses its flow, draining the waters of the lake back into the Mekong. This extraordinary process makes the Tonle Sap one of the world's richest sources of freshwater fish and an ideal habitat for water birds. This unique ecosystem has helped to earn the Tonle Sap protected biosphere status - but this may not be enough to safeguard it from twin threats of upstream dams and siltation caused by rampant deforestation. We were picked up at our hotel around 7am by an old decrepit 12 passenger mini van that already had 14 people seated inside, 11 in back and 3 in front. Once we got in, the count rose to 16 and we had to sit backwards behind the driver (on the hump), cramped in between two other front facing passengers. We stopped along the way to pick-up two more passengers which brought the total up to 18, by this time 4 Europeans seated in the back (two sitting on one another) were getting very angry at the seating arrangements. Hot with no A/C, we hadn't had any breakfast as of yet and I'm sitting backwards in a bumpy, over crowded, all around sweaty situation........can you say, "Motion Sickness!". We did stop one more time to pick-up another passenger, however she refused to get in and decided to take a tuk-tuk instead to the boat dock. We had an older Cambodian local woman sitting between Jason and I who worked for the boat company that picked us up. Not speaking much English she started to wave her hands around and gave everyone orders for their boat tickets. A few of the European passengers were very confused as to what she was asking for but eventually we all understood and handed her our white tickets, she quickly gathered them and in return handed us pink tickets. We stopped off at a "check-point" not even 5 minutes after the entire ticket exchange just took place and we were once again asked to hand over our pink tickets. One of the European girls refused to hand her and her companions tickets over, stating that she had already given her "4 tickets". Finally the older woman just gave up and proceeded to take the rest of our tickets - in return we received yellow ones. (it was like an episode from 'Twilight Zone') Thinking we were close to our arrival at the boat dock we were unpleasantly surprised to find out we had over an hours drive left to go in our current seating conditions. In the end the ride was long, hot and bumpy but we were supplied with wonderful views of the country side and a glimpse into the local farmer's villages. Once we arrived at our final destination we were quickly unloaded out of the van and onto our boat for our journey down the river. We were lucky enough to get front row seats which supplied us with a clear view out the front door of the boat and out the side window. The boat journey normally takes 3 an a half hours but due to the low river level it took us a total of 9hrs. 5 times during our trip we almost got stuck on the rock beds in the river where the water was very shallow but with the efforts from our two boat men we were able to escape. At one point one of the men was cutting strips of cloth to wedge with a meat cleaver into leaking cracks of the side boards of the boat. He was right in front of us, bent down working away when a large fish jumped out of the water, flew through the boat door opening and smacked him on the side of his body. Scared the crap out of him, he yelled, the fish flopped and slide in a cubby hole in the front of the boat down under the floor boards where he couldn't be rescued - to await a certain agonizing fate. Both boat men laughed and were shocked that this happened, obviously they have not had this happen before. What a wonderful journey it was, we saw so many amazing things; water villages, birds, crocodile, fish, corn fields, water buffalo's, oxen and many local village farmers fishing in the river. These water villages are the "real" authentic thing, these Cambodians really live their lives on floating houses and believe us when we tell you EVERYTHING lives on the water. The water villages consist of floating houses, pig and duck farms, schools, churches, police stations, 'convenience stores', fish markets, salons and medical clinics. Men, women and children all work together to bring in, sort and clean the fish from the previous days catch and does it STINK to high heaven, one tries not to wrinkle up their noses as you pass on by. Villagers of all ages were seated in amongst piles of dead fish, be-heading and gutting them and throwing the finished product into large silver pans ready for transport to sell. Huge full grown pigs lay inside 2x2 meter floating wood cages, "basking" in the full days sun. Tons of ducks also shared the same fate as the pigs, we did see some of the cages on the side of the river banks rather than being on floating cages - none the less they still were cramped and very smelly. Many men and younger boys were in the river, ready with their nets to place them strategically running along side the banks to catch their days worth of fish. Most of them wore only their underwear but there were plenty of them fully clothed wadding in the river either placing or pulling in their nets. We saw a lot of the local village women in hand made wooden canoes full of fresh produce paddling their way down the river. A lot of them were very pregnant. Many of the children were along side the banks swimming and playing around in the water, most of them naked, smiling, laughing and waving hi to the white passing tourists in the river boat. Everything goes in the water; garbage, feces (both human and animal).....they wash their dishes and do their laundry - there is no clean, purified water for them to use. Families bathing together in the river and play, oxen eating along the banks, fish jumping out of the water as our boat trudges through. Make-shift houses, some high on stilts awaiting monsoon rains or floods, some with no roofs just a few plastic sheets shielding them from the sun - maybe offering them solace. No beds can be seen inside, hammocks hang among the banisters, swinging back and forth with its current days occupant. Clearly one does not need much to survive here and these villagers do the best with what they have, it appears to be working just fine. With all our 'Western' materialistic ways and greed, I think we really are missing the meaning of life and what it is all about. The beauty of this river and it's people cannot be fully interpreted by us, one must experience it for ones self. It is very dirty, smelly and shocking but in the same sense wonderful. We tried to capture this through our photos and hopefully you get a real sense of what our journey was like. |
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