Blogs from Kratié, East, Cambodia, Asia - page 2

On the road again ! Direction Kratié une ville bien plus connus du grand public mais très sympas la route qui nous y mènent est de 45 kilomètres on choisit donc de faire une petite halte sur une îles qui n'est pas de tout repos après la rencontre d'un groupe de Cambodgien qui joue au foot, le match Barang vs Cambodgi et vite lancé très physique avec pas mal d'obstacle sur le terrain, des arbres, des poteaux ... Finie par un match nul nous partons côte ouest, pour rejoindre de nouveaux la côte est et la ville de Kratie trouvant une guest house sur river side à 7 dolls pour 4 plus que raisonnable, dans cette ville un peu touriste un petit dinner occidental feras le plus grand bien à tout un chacun! Pour finir à ... read more

Having allowed ourselves a bit of a lay in we headed out for some breakfast at 11.00. Kratie ( pronounced Krachie) is a pretty small town sitting on the side of the Mekong river, in itself not too much to offer apart from in the surrounding areas where theres enough stuff to make it worth a visit for a day or two. Back at the only Cambodian/western restaurant in town Kate and I decided to hire pushbikes for the afternoon. Sitting in the Mekong adjacent to Kratie is a small island called Koh Trong and according to my book is definitely worth an explore on a bike for an afternoon - so perfect. Off we headed down a flight of steps to the boat and got on a waiting taxi boat, which only leaves when its ... read more

Mui ne was cool. It's a beach resort, and I was sort of hoping it would be a quieter nha trang. Turns out you can't really access the beach; it's more of a fishing hub than a sand-and-parasols kind of place. In any event, the backpacker hotels had swimming pools and the weather was sunny and very hot. I bumped into the guys again in mui ne. We and others from the main backpacker hotel flocked en masse to dragon beach bar in the evenings and danced and got drunk. A guy I got to know got punched in the face by a moto taxi driver. I had an interesting second evening. On my last full day I visited nearby sand dunes, which were quite impressive, albeit manifestly exploited. From mui ne I made my way ... read more

If there was one place during our entire Asian trip that I probably would have been content not visiting, it would be Kratie. Not that the town is terrible in any way: it was colonially quaint and along the Mekong River, with an undeveloped, pretty countryside not far away. It simply comes down to boredom: there wasn’t that much to see. Thus, our visit was more about breaking up our route to Laos. The one noteworthy visit to make, and undoubtedly the town’s main attraction, is to hire a longtail boat to take you along the Mekong River to view the Irrawaddy dolphins. Although these creatures were reminiscent of the pink dolphins in the Amazon River we’d seen while in Brazil, they are not actually freshwater, river dolphins as I’d initially thought: they’re oceanic dolphins that ... read more

Unlike Lance Armstrong, the only thing we had running through our veins when heading out on our bikes yesterday was excitement about seeing the freshwater Irrawaddy dolphins. We found the bike route through the Mekong Discovery Trail, which is basically just a series of maps outlining different routes that you can bike around the Kratie/Stung Treng area, promoting local tourism. There are two places where you can easily see dolphins around this area - Kampi Rapids, 15km out of town, and the island of Koh Phdao, 35km away. We thought that Koh Phdao would be less busy with tourists than Kampi, and both wanted the chance to get a bit further out into the countryside, so Koh Phdao it was. I was a bit nervous about the bike ride up there, seeing as I tend to ... read more