Kratie, Kampong Cham and back to Phnom Penh

Asia » Cambodia » South » Sihanoukville
May 21st 2014

Published: September 30th 2014

Hi again, it's been just over another week and we've visited three more places (well two new places) as we continue our time here in Cambodia; Kratie and Kampong Cham as well as revisiting Phnom Penh, as we journey down to the coast for our last week. After an extremely long and hot bus journey to the small riverside town of Kratie, we arrived early evening to the Silver Dolphin guest house, right on the riverside run by a very friendly family and their very cute bubbly 1 year old boy 😊) unfortunately they had no AC so we had to settle for one standing fan, it sounds like a trivial thing but the weather here is now extremely hot and stuffy and we're only choosing to book rooms which have AC as it can get unbearable... So although it wasn't our most comfortable stay, we enjoyed playing with their little boy and they more than made up for it by being so friendly 😊 we stayed in Kratie for 3 days and enjoyed being so close beside the Mekong river, watching the sunset over it with a nice cold drink on the rooftop of the guest house on a couple of evenings. On Wednesday we went out of town and visited Wat Sorsor Muoy Roi, otherwise known as The 100 Pillar Wat, a large Buddhist temple with gold pagodas standing tall beside it and brightly coloured images of the Buddha and his life painted on the walls and ceilings inside - it reminded me a lot of stained glass windows in churches. Lots of people of all ages were coming and going praying and getting blessed by temple elders, as well as what looked like fortune reading for a modest fee...! We then went onto Kampi where the Irrawaddy river dolphins are best seen. Although beautiful and interesting animals, unfortunately the Mekong river has only a very small amount of these dolphins left. Local people take visitors to see them and the money they sell from tickets goes towards the conservation of this endangered species and to the educate the people who live along the river to protect them so that numbers don't dwindle further. We got a little wooden boat out and it was lovely seeing them coming up every so often - although they were so elusive that we only got 2 good photos in a whole hour!!! After that we watched our tuk tuk driver playing some bowls with other men who either worked as boatmen or other tuk tuk drivers which was fun, before he took us to Phnom Sombok, a meditation retreat and temple on three levels with three flights of stairs. Although it wasn't as colourful as the 100 Pillar Wat, it was still impressive, with statues of monks lining the flights of stairs and plenty of pagodas and smaller temples with statues of the Buddha at the back for people to come and pray to/worship with offerings of incense sticks and money. On Thursday evening we decided to go over and stay on the small island of Koh Trong in the middle of the Mekong river, as there were a couple of families who had opened their houses up to guests to stay. We took a little wooden boat across early evening and were greeted not only by our host family, but also a group of six French runners who had come over to time how long it would take them to run 10kl around the island! So we all stayed in the open plan room of a traditional large wooden house on stilts, like the ones I've already described seeing all over Cambodia. There was a living space underneath but without walls, whereas the upstairs had walls and other rooms at the end which the family used. They cooked us traditional Cambodian food consisting of rice, and different types of vegetables in soy sauce. For breakfast we had a now Cambodian staple of baguettes with egg - they use baguettes a lot more than any other type of bread, introduced by the French colonialists in the 19th century. After breakfast when the runners were off competing around the island, I rented a very basic bike from the family and rode around the island, and enjoyed seeing how the people lived, there were plenty of chickens, roosters and hens clucking around as well as people working on canoes, and making things from wood, others swinging in hammocks and school children on their own bikes. The track was quite bumpy but it was fun seeing all the island life. We left Koh Trong on Friday morning and made our way back across the river in time for our bus to Kampong Cham, the third largest city in Cambodia. Although it is big, it doesn't seem to be, as like Kratie it is located along the river, so it feels quite relaxed and not as busy and built up as other big cities here. We only spent two days here, but found a very handy internet cafe which we used to update our resumes and applied to a few agencies in south Korea - for potential teaching work over there after Christmas. A quiet but practical couple of days! On Sunday we decided to travel back down to Phnom Penh, as we wanted to head to the south west coast before our time in Cambodia is up! Unfortunately we couldn't stay at the place we had done before whilst here as it was fully booked, however we stayed in a lovely large room with AC and a fridge! (We get very excited about anything under 20° now..!) This time round we visited a run down Olympic athletic stadium built in the 60's for an Asian games that never went ahead. Around late afternoon each day the whole complex turns into a busy frenzy of exercise, with athletic and football clubs training, as well as the general public coming to jog and run around the track, as well as take part in dance classes around the top of the stands, all very entertaining to watch! It reminded me a lot of Saffron Lane, an athletics complex in Leicester which I did some running at when I was younger - the size and layout was pretty much the same!! This morning, we visited the royal palace which still houses the Cambodian royal family (be it in closed off areas), which although was magnificent with many golden temples and pagodas in lovely gardens filled with flowers and trees, was slightly less interesting than I thought it might be due to the lack of information provided and amount of out of bounds areas there were within the visitor's section of the palace gardens... however as we visited very early in the morning the weather was amazing and not too hot, so I managed to take some brilliant photos of the palace grounds and temples within it. So...fast forward to now it's Wednesday evening and I'm now currently sat in a hotel room in Sihanoukville, after a lovely FULLY air conditioned bus ride south west beside some stunning lakes and mountains!! (up to now the scenery on our long bus journeys seems to have been made up entirely of rice fields, small towns and more rice fields)!!! Sihanoukville is a large port town on the south west coast known for its white sandy beaches and the Ream national park a short distance away.... we now have a week before we'll need to leave Cambodia, so I think we'll use this town as our base to explore this part of the country... I'll get back to you next week about how we found it... bye for now!!!

Kratie, Kampong Cham and back to Phnom Penh

Copyright Notice: All Rights Reserved