thousands of birds at Prek Toal...

This morning the restaurant at my guesthouse was playing "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" on dvd, which I took as a good omen.

South of Siem Reap is a body of water called Tonle Sap, the largest lake in south-east Asia. And at the top of the lake is the Prek Toal waterbird sanctuary, home to tens of thousands of rare birds. My two reasons for coming to Cambodia (apart for the visa run of course) were to see Angkor and to go to Prek Toal. I hadn't been able to find much about it before I left (mainly because Cambodia was sort of a last-minute addition to my trip), but the information I had was that you take a taxi from Siem Reap to the floating village of Chong Kneas, catch a boat from there to the environment office at Prek Toal (US $35 return) and a boat from there into the sanctuary itself (US $20). Because birding is best morning and afternoon, it was recommended staying overnight at the office for US$7. So I set off on my merry way.

The tuktuk driver said yes he did know the floating village, that would be $2. Then he took me to the Cambodian Cultural Village. "No no, the floating village, on the lake," I say. "Ah, yes sir," he says, realising the misunderstanding, and takes me to the road leading to the airport. "Here sir?". We made it to the boat docks eventually, where I discovered that my price information was wildly incorrect. It was $80 return to the office ($60 if I came back the same day, but I was adamant I was staying overnight because of all the great birds I'd be seeing) and then the boat from the office to the sanctuary was $40. Remember these are American dollars. The only correct price I had was the $7 for a dorm bed. But...what I hadn't realised, and what the things I'd been reading hadn't made clear, was that the birds are only there for a few months during the breeding season. I had been under the impression they were resident populations, but no. For most of the year the lake was as devoid of birds as the rest of the places in Cambodia that I'd seen. The man in the office had a double-sided poster of the birds of Prek Toal. "None of these birds here now. Not for two months," he says, pointing out all the species I was there to see. No painted or milky storks, no greater or lesser adjutants, no black-headed ibis, no spot-billed pelicans. "You can see one species. The oriental darter." (His English wasn't really this good, I'm enhancing it for the purposes of this blog). "I saw this one on the way here," I said, pointing to the Chinese pond heron, "and this one" to the whiskered tern. "Are some, but in two months many thousands. Now you see just one species." I turned over the poster to the passerines and other non-waterbirds. "What about these ones?" "No, not now. In two months." What I was getting was that by 'no birds' he meant 'they are there, but not in their thousands', and I was hardly going to turn around and go back without at least trying, so I got the first boat to wait for me there (having decided it wasn't worth staying the night there now; I got my extra $20 back again) and we headed off in a speedboat. Along the way I saw a 'not for two months' grey heron and several pond herons and darters. We stopped at the nesting trees of the darters. A darter looks like a cormorant but bigger and with a big long spear-bill instead of a long hooked one. They were one of the species I'd really wanted to see while over in Asia. Here there were at least a thousand of them (the boatman repeatedly told me 20,000 in total, but when at Khao Nor Chuchi several weeks later I was reading 'Oriental Bird Club' magazines and found out that in 2003 there were about 1000 darters total on the lake, so I'll put the 20,000 down to a misunderstanding. Months later when back at home, I discovered that there are probably only about 4000 darters in all of south and southeast Asia). There was a single Indian cormorant there as well. A weeny little water snake came by. And that was all. I watched the darters for about twenty minutes, but there's only so long you can watch, so we headed back again. The driver's English was enough for simple general conversation but I couldn't get him to understand that I wasn't just interested in masses of colonially-nesting birds but also in small insignificant ones too. I would have liked to have just cruised around for a while spotting passerines in the trees but the driver just kept saying "no birds here. Two months". So that was it. On the trip back to Chong Kneas I saw a few more birds, but for all that outlay I got minimal returns. Just six new birds. I guess it just means I'll have to go back to Cambodia another year.

The lake was pretty awesome though, and I'm glad I went, despite what it cost me. Its only a metre deep and there's rafts of water hyacinths and reeds, and trees scattered everywhere, growing straight out of the water. It looks like a forest has been suddenly inundated but that's how it always is. Then you come out of the treed parts and the deeper part of the lake is stretching all the way off to the horizon. You know its a lake, but it looks like the ocean. It all looks the same in the vegetated parts and how people navigate it I don't know. My boat drivers looked lost several times on the way there. On the way back they were definitely lost because they were both standing on the front scanning the horizon looking extremely bewildered. Good to see I'm not the only one that happens to. The guy that drove me on his motorbike back to Siem Reap from the boat docks got lost too.

[I'm just adding this bit in in December, after reading a very good book called "Vietnam: a natural history". The boat people told me that Tonle Sap is always the way I saw it, with trees sticking up out of the water, never changing, but in fact every rainy season the mighty Mekong River swells to such an extent that the rivers coming out of Tonle Sap are actually forced into reverse with the amount of water rushing into them. The lake expands from 2700 km square to about 10,360 km square, and the depth increases from 1-3 metres to 9-14 metres. And that of course is when all the fish are replenished and the birds have lots to eat, etc etc etc. You might have thought that by this point in my trip I would have learned not to believe anything anyone in Asia told me, but these were the people who live on the lake and make their living from the lake! Unbelievable.]

I went back to Miss Oud Dom guesthouse and they moved me to a double room for the same price as the single. They keep giving me free food as well. I love that place. I may not have much luck when actually travelling to places, but I do well at the places I do find. That's the Miss Oud Dom Guesthouse, number 017 on Sivatha Street. It has the Scary Israel seal of approval. (The sign out front says Miss Oud Dom but the business card says Miss Outdom and the signs for rules on the walls inside say Miss Out Dorm. So long as you find it, the spelling doesn't matter). I watched the new Superman movie on the TV in my room. How come he can see through walls but he needs to lower his glasses to do it? And what's the deal with him not needing to breathe in space? He obviously has lungs because he has super breath. It just isn't believable dammit!

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