Floating Market! What Floating Market?

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My final day in Siem Riep and the tuktuk driver persaudes me to do the Floating Market trip despite my misgivings about the $30 fee for the boat - I did say to him I wanted to ride in it not buy the bloody thing! He assures me the price is only $30 because there is only 1 person and I get the boat to myself.
So off we set and on the way pass some amazing rice fields - once the rice plants are established the whole field is a luminous light green - if bourganvillias had green flowers it would be this colour. There's no breeze today but I reckon if there was thie whole field would be shimmering too - awesome! This as it turns out was the highlight of the day.
After 30 minutes we arrive at a large purpose built visitors reception and jetty. There are hundreds of tourists here and small boats coming and going all the time dropping off and picking up. I pay my $30 and am sheperded down the jetty to a boat. In we get and off we go passed sandbanks that are exposed as it's the dry season and then some interesting looking trees that are growing partly submerged in 2 feet of water.
Further on we see the first floating houses, a floating Catholic church and a floating school. Some very small children are paddling around in large round aluminium bowls - the kind you see at the markets with live fish in. Overall the floating houses are shabby and makeshift but the people look well dressed with mobile phones and satelite TV - this is Cambodia and Vietnam all over - a bit of an enigma at first as far as quality of life is concerned - some aspects are very modern while other aspects have remained unchanged for centuries. They are countries experiencing rapid uneven change and modernisation so perhaps it's not so surprising at all.
We get to the Tonle Sap proper and just as I think we are going to head right out into the great lake we turn around and pull up at a huge floating restaurant that boats an 'exhibition' too. I get off and the exhibition is some fish in small fish tranks and 15 sorry looking crocodiles in a pen underneath the floor. There is a restaurant with overpriced western food and several souvenir shops with the usual T-shirts, jewellery, wooden animals etc and that's it! I ask the tuktuk driver when we are going to the floating market - he looks at me a little sheepishly and says this is it. Lonley Planet got it right explaining that many floating markets in Thailand had morphed into tourist traps over the last 20 years with the real produce markets moving ashore as the country modernized - well it's happened here in Cambodia and in Vietnam too! I ask to go back much to the tuktuk drivers dismay that I didn't want to eat at his mates restaurant or by btat from his other mates shop - nuts to that I've already been badly ripped off today and I've had enough of 'helping' the Cambodian people to 'help' themselves cart blanche to my money!
I'm glad to be moving on to another country in a few days.

The next day I return to Dave and Stephanies in Phnom Penh for the night before saying goodbye and flying off to Thailand the next day. Dave has copied his entire music collection (150GB) onto a portable hard drive for me and donated a spare ipod as mine got nicked - ;ooking forward to listening to this lot as Dave has really good tastes in pop and rock music. The first thing I listened to was a phenominal album 'Our Love to Admire' by a band called Interpol - how I haven't come across this before now I don't know. My trip has suddenly had a bit of a lift.

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