Blogs from Kratié, East, Cambodia, Asia - page 3

When planning your trip you always want to unearth places others haven’t been yet, or are at least less frequented en masse by tourists. So when we discovered Kratie (pronounced kra-chey) in the North East of Cambodia, we thought this is definitely the type of place we want to explore. With it being on the way to the Elephant Valley Project (http://www.elephantvalleyproject.org), which we are visiting after our trip to Kratie, everything slotted into place nicely. Although its only a small town, its most redeeming feature is the french colonial promenade that overlooks the island of Koh Trong, and has a look and feel about it that would sit well in most sea fronted european cities. Nevertheless its still run down like most Cambodian cities and is most noticeable with the amount of litter that is ... read more

After 5 fabulous days in Siem Reap it was time to move on. We were headed towards Laos border but we really wanted to avoid going back to Phnom Penh. In this case we decided on taking a rather long journey (more than 10h and a change of buses) to Kratiein the north-east of Cambodia. So far we have been really enjoying this country a lot (with an exception of few minor incidents with Tuk-Tuk drivers) and judging by what we had read about Kratie, we were more than confident that our next destination would be equally good or even better. We arrived in town just in time for a beautiful sunset over Mekong. Kratie is a very small town so our walk from a bus stop to a hotel took us maybe 2 min. We ... read more

The bus ride up to Kratie is apparently meant to take around 6 hours, ours took 7.5 hours unfortunately due to an elderly woman throwing up (at least I hope that's what it was) in the isle of the bus as the bus pulled out of the Phnom Penh bus station. May I just say it was one of the most putrid smells I've ever been around and unfortunately hung around for the 45 minutes til we made it to a depot thing towards the outskirts of Phnom Penh where they washed out the isle. I pity the poor guy who had to clean up the mess. The good news about the bus ride to Kratie was that the 'smooth as silk' road that Lonely Planet talked about was still mostly in tact. The route did ... read more

Fresh water dolphins are possibly the biggest attraction in Kratie, and I was determined to see them. Ideally alone, but then when is life ever ideal? My moto driver arrived a little late and driving a tuk tuk with 2 people already seated in the back. "You travel with 2 other tourist" he beamed "cheaper for you" (lol, more money for him more like, but who am I to begrudge that), as I reluctantly nodded my assent he thrust $2 back at me and off we went. My two companions were very nice, proper backpackers who'd met that day on the bus and were already sharing a room (I'll never understand this need the average backpacker has to save a dollar and share a room with a complete stranger - do they not crave some time ... read more

Now that we are back in Cambodia, memories are reactivated of our last visit to that country, which was just over 2 years ago. That was in my pre-blogging days. So here is one, as the TV chefs say, that I prepared earlier.... We were on our way from Kratie to Sen Monorom. The first part of this journey was no problem, just a regular bus journey to the little town of Snuol, from where, we had been told, we could easily catch a minibus to Sen Monorom. But it was in Snuol that things started to go slightly pear-shaped. Snuol. The very name of the place should have told us something. Instant mental associations are invoked with words like snide, snigger, sneaky, and snot. And indeed it turned out to be a bit of a ... read more