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Published: April 30th 2009
Tonle Sap lake is the biggest fresh water lake in Asia, currently only 1/2 meter deep in some places and 2500sq km long. As the wet season is about 8 days away where the lake will rise to 12 meters deep in some place and 13000sq km or wide.
The floating village of Chong Kneas, is now extremely famous with visitors to see the real Cambodia, this is the experience I was looking for.
We decided to take a moto (tuk tuk) for the day out to the lake quoted in a guide as $15US pp.
We should never complain about a simple pot hole in our roads after you have driven on one in Cambodia....The road to the lake parts of it anyway had rocks the size of soccer ball sticking up out of the road....
So you have this motor bike with a carriage attached to the back of it, only the motor bike has brakes and only the driver has the helmet, with 2 large Aussies in the back sliding all over the road as it had just rained.
We get to the boat dock and it is $20 US which came with an English speaking
tour guide. Ok, I can deal with that.....
We walk down to the dock and have to climbed through a boat and over the motor to get to our boat, which has cane dining chairs for seats about 20 of them. They are not fixed to any thing just sitting in the boat.
The guide tells us a bit of history and mention we would visit a floating supermarket to buy some books and pencils to take to the floating school.... I understood most so I didn't ask how much. We get to the school and find out that 20 writing books is going to cost us $15US and 10 pencils $5US...hmm what could you say, you are buying them to take them to a school for children that have nothing.....
We see a floating pig pen and a floating garden, all houses, if you can call them that are just floating on bamboo or are on stilts. most one room with a hammock for a bed.
We visit the school with a classroom about 6m squared 110 pupils aging from 3 to 10 with one teacher....Male..An a very big ruler....hmmm .....Deja vu
We go inside and
present the teacher with the books, spend a few minutes with the children and we are off again to the fish come crocodile farm which is combined with a bar/ restaurant and gift shop.....
Being our second last day I didn't buy anything as I was shopped out......Yes me....hard to believe...
We are off again next thing we hear a bumped and a little girl jumps on to the boat with a tray of cans of soft drink .. You buy drink sir? $2US. I said only 85c at the shop, brad say's 2 drinks $2. she shakes her head and say $2 one drink....so we feel sorry for her and buy 2 drinks even though we took our own esky with drinks.
We make our way back to the dock about 2 hrs later just as we arrived our guide, about 18.. says now some people pay the driver and the guide a tip, sometimes a good tip is $20US....I don't think so.... Brad rolls a couple of dollar bills up and hands it to him as they don't look until you leave....
I can just hear him..."Cheap Bastard" after we leave.......
We walk up
the ramp to our awaiting Tuk Tuk Driver and a woman comes running out with 2 plates with our photos on..... "you buy from me sir" "Very nice" $10US...meanwhile I am trying to work out when they took the damm photo. Brad say's they took it when we got there. We said no a few times and as usual the price comes down, buy the time we got in to our ride we were down to $5US for both, so we bought them.
Off we go back to our hotel $65US later, so much for the guide book of $15pp....You have to laugh because they are so ingenious, so polite about the way they do things, even if you have been scammed.
Luckily we didn't go on the $70pp trip or we would of been more out of pocket.
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