Day 79: Kratie

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Kratie was basically just a stopover between Siem Reap and Ban Lung, but we made the most of it. Kratie is right on the Mekong, and it is famous (at least among backpackers) for it's nearby pod of fresh water dolphins. We decided to take the bus from siem reap to kratie (8 hours or so), see the dolphins the next morning, and then catch another bus to Ban Lung (6 hours).

Our bus left siem reap at 8 am, and we didn't make it to kratie until after dark. It shouldn't have taken that long except we made a few stops along the way, one of them for over an hour when we changed buses. Our bus let us off in the middle of nowhere and told us to wait for another bus that would take us to ban lung. I was kind of glad that we were changing buses because the A/C broke on our bus partway through the trip, and they had to open all the windows to keep us cool. But after about 10 minutes of waiting in the heat, I wished I was back in some kind of shade again. Where we stopped did not look like much of a bus stop. There were some local food stands nearby, one of them was selling cooked snakes. Steph and I ended up sitting on our bags in a small patch of shade to get out of the sun. Finally a bus came that was heading to ban lung, and thankfully the A/C worked on that one.

We crashed in a decent guest house called You-Hong II (You-Hong I was full) which was able to schedule a trip for us to see the dolphins the next morning. We rode a tuk-tuk 15 km from our guest house to the spot on the mekong that is home to the dolphins. Apparently there are only 18 of them left in the pod. But when we got to the edge of the river we could see several of them all over. For $7 each (lonely planet said $2... grrrrr) we got on a boat to get closer to the dolpins.

The got as close as 30 ft or so, but never stayed up long enough for a decent photo op. I did get a couple pictures worth saving, but mostly we just watched and tried to burn them into memory. They are the same greyish color that I'm used to with the saltwater dolphins in san diego, but they have round noses, not bottle noses. Also their dorsal fins are not very prominent. My favorite part was when they would go after fish - you'd see a fish jumping out of the water, almost hopping, but it almost always got eaten.

Our boat driver used an oar most of the time, until we had drifted too far downriver, and then he would motor us back up. We got stuck for 10 minutes or so while he tried to fix the engine. It looked like he tried about every trick in his book before he got it started again.

Our mechanical troubles didn't stop there though. On the way back to the guest house, our tuk-tuk got a flat tire. He rode slowly back the way we'd come, to a "mechanic" that was basically just a shack along the road with an air compressor. It took them a while to fix the tire but we still had enough time to eat before we got our bus to ban lung.

I would have included the few dolphin pictures we did get with this blog, but I managed to accidentally delete all 5 pictures (computer shut off in the middle of copying them over...) They weren't all that great anyway. I'll try not to make the same mistake on the next blog. Thats all for now

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Comments

[Matt Potterton]

What!
Pictures or it didn't happen.