Advertisement
Published: March 31st 2009
Edit Blog Post
Oh my, what a day….Just hum the Gilligan's Island theme song while you read.
We spent eight hours on a boat between Siem Reap and Battambang. Eight hot, overcrowded hours with the most fascinating scenery along the Tonle Sap River. Small boats of all kinds - fishing boats, boats delivering goods and people, and even delivering motorcycles from one side of the river to the other in the absence of a bridge. Tiny fishing boats, no bigger than a small canoe; tiny children alone on long narrow boats; boats full of produce, or monks, or fishing nets.
Our boat ticket was a printed piece of paper with a photograph of a sleek, high capacity cruising boat. This ticket was exchanged for a multicolored ticket with an even sexier-looking boat. This was exchanged for a ride on a ramshackle wooden boat with two benches and a stack of plastic lawn chairs under a metal roof. Someone had fun with clip art when they made those tickets! Yes, it has a picture of “a" boat but it certainly isn’t “the" boat.
We started our journey with nine Westerners and one Cambodian woman on board. At several points along the way,
someone on shore or on a small boat would wave down the captain and we would stop to pick up more passengers - all Cambodian, and generally transporting several bags or boxes which went up on the roof. Eventually, there were about 30 passengers, and any more would have made it distinctly more uncomfortable.
The views along the river were endlessly fascinating: floating houses and businesses, stilted houses higher up the riverbank, palm trees, vegetable gardens, big white cows, and little brown heads bobbing in the water as children played naked in the river.
It was hot - 100 degrees in the shade - and my brain went into that same travel fog that happens on long-distance flights. My eyelids felt unbearably heavy, and as soon as I closed my eyes, I was instantly in a different level of consciousness, not quite asleep, but certainly not awake either. When I wasn’t busy taking hundreds of photographs or fighting with my own eyelids, I was occupied with fretting about Jaz, who I was sure was spending too much time out in the sun on the back of the boat and not drinking enough water. It turned out that she
did not get sunburn or dehydrated, though she was looking pretty exhausted. 5:30 am wake-up calls do not agree with her.
We arrived at Battambang at three o’clock and were met by a small army of tuktuk drivers waving hotel brochures in our faces. Lori had arranged for a specific tuktuk driver, Mr Kim, to meet us, and he suggested a lovely brand new hotel for us, aircon and cable TV for $12/night. (Alas, no wifi…but they did have two slow internet computers available for our use.)
After dropping off our things, we headed off to ride the bamboo train as the sky grew ominously more grey. The bamboo trains are a fabulous innovation: Cambodia once had a railroad , but it was destroyed by the war. Tracks remained, but no trains. Local people figured out how to use parts of other vehicles to create barbell-shaped wheel contraptions, upon with they set a flat bamboo platform. Originally, these vehicles were pushed along by hand to move goods and people from one village to another along the tracks, and then they figured out how to attach small engines. Because there is only one track, and many bamboo trains, they
often meet going in opposite directions, and a very clear protocol has developed for this situation: Whichever train has the fewest people on it dismantles their train and takes it off the tracks to let the other train pass, then reassembles their train and resumes the journey. This happened to us at least seven or eight times while we were riding. It took our crew about one minute to disassemble the train, and about a minute and a half to reassemble. In between all these stops, we careened along at a pretty good speed, smacking hard over every seam in the iron tracks (ibuprofen was later required), passing rice fields and the occasional cow, and after a few minutes, being pelted with raindrops. Thunder boomed in the distance and the rain began - and combined with the speed of our open-air train, it felt more like hail than raindrops! Within minutes we were completely soaked and actually felt chilly - something I could have never imagined an hour or two earlier when I was enjoying the sauna-like experience of the boat. But the rain stopped after ten minutes or so, and we were relatively dry in no time.
Mr
Kim took us on a brief tour of Battambang, which is the second-largest city in Cambodia. (I may have said somewhere earlier in this blog that I thought Siem Reap was the second largest; I stand corrected.) It has some old French colonial archictecture, a lot of NGOs, some very nice parks and green space, and few tourists. In fact, we seemed to be such a novelty that we began feeling like celebrities. Cambodian culture apparently allows for unabashed staring at people - or maybe I just had some spinach in my teeth.
While visiting a
wat where a group of teenage girls were taking their photos with some monks, suddenly we became the subject of their photographic interest. They wanted Jaz and me to pose in photo after photo with them, and then some of the monks wanted the same. So we posed with them - thankfully, they were much more interested in Jaz than me so I ducked away quickly. (You all know how much I don’t love having my photo taken, and next to all these tiny Asian people I am particularly ….well,
large.)
From there, we were off for dinner. Mr Kim took us
a local place - no English on the menu or anywhere else. We had fried frog with curry, barbecued frog, fried rice, and a soup that came with its own table-top burner and all the ingredients to be assembled at the table. Thanks to Mr. Kim, we could order and ask questions, and he knew how to make the soup as well. We washed it all down with two pitchers of beer, and ended up with a bill for $12.
Mr Kim also provided interesting conversation - he was interested in understanding more about the bad economy in America, thoughtfully enquiring about whether we had lost our jobs. He also had some questions about “big storms” that he had heard about, which we determined to be possibly global warming. He had his own tales to tell about his life and his family. He has two brothers in high school (age 18 and 20), a sister of 22 who has never been to school and a brother in his early twenties who also has not had any formal education. They all live with and support their parents. Mr Kim and his parents spent time in a Thai refugee camp in
the years after the Pol Pot regime, coming back to Cambodia as many others did in the early 90’s. He is now 30 years old, and drives a moto and tuktuk for a living. He thinks that supporting his parents is a very fair system because they took care of him when he was young, including working very hard to make sure he had enough to eat and to keep the rain off his head, and now it’s only right for him to do the same for them. Such a different culture… (Are you listening, kids?)
Having ridden the train and eaten our frogs, the Battambang mission had been accomplished. Having had our photo taken with monks and teenage girls, we had had an unexpected surprise. And anything we do tomorrow will just be icing on the cake!
For the rest of the photos, click
here
Advertisement
Tot: 0.352s; Tpl: 0.018s; cc: 6; qc: 51; dbt: 0.1654s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Miriam
non-member comment
Bus vs. Boat
I complained bitterly about taking the bus to work this morning, where we had to stop so the driver could throw off a guy drinking alcohol from an open bottle. Then, I read your piece. Suddenly, I felt that riding two to a seat was a luxury.