Blogs from Tonlé Sap, North, Cambodia, Asia - page 3

I was up at 5:00 AM for a 5:45 pick up by the Sam Veasna Center. It was me, the guide, a Khmer guide, two Canadians, a Portuguese, and a Rastamerican. We drove out to a river in a van, then boarded a standard tourist boat. We took this boat past floating villages, up to a more major floating village to present ourselves for permission, then across Tonle Sap Lake and through a private fishing lot to a river on the other side. There we progressed for about an hour and transferred to three shallow-draft wooden boats, each poled by a guide, roped together and propelled at times by little outboard motors on the first two boats. These motors were quickly fouled by water hyacinth stems and needed to bee cleared, and the water hyacinths and ... read more

We left the option open to wake up early today and head out to the temples before the crowds, but none of us bothered to get up early enough. Dylan was fighting a bit of a sore throat and cold, Jaz had made it clear that she wasn’t going out on any 6:00 am temple trips, and Steve and I just plain let ourselves sleep in. The weather was no different than every other day here this time of year - sunny and hot, just as we’ve become used to. Our only definite plan for the day was a half-day tour to the Tonle Sap Lake outside of Siem Reap to see the floating villages and scenery along the way. The Tonle Sap is the largest freshwater lake in southeast Asia, and is pretty fascinating in ... read more

Hi All First of all, many thanks for the birthday sms’ wishes. Loved it. (uploaded some pics as well this time) It was a kind of earlier start this morning (again), we left our ‘Lazy fish’ river guest house around 05u45 heading for a ‘fast speedboat’ who would bring us to Siem Reap, entry city to visit the famous Angkor temples. As always we boarded the ‘ship’ as the first ones and immediately reserved ourselves the best spot on the upper deck level, although in Cambodia this term reference to the ‘roof’, nevertheless very adventurous and very pleasant. We traveled the Tonle Sap River and lake for about 6 hours and had spectacular views of the surroundings and the Cambodian life in/next to/on top of the water edges. We’ve been told visiting the Angkor Temples can’t ... read more

On the second day of our trek, we woke up at sunrise. Wit and Bee made us eggs and toast. Then we hiked for about 3hours to another village. We rested for a bit and had lunch. Afterwards, they made a bamboo raft for us to sail down the river to an elephant camp. The raft was about 10 feet long with a post for us to hang all of our belongings so that they wouldn't get wet. We sailed down the river for about an hour or so, and docked at the elephant camp. The elephants were to take us to the next village where we would spend the night. They walked through the river for most of the journey, then up the mountain to drop us off. When we arrived at the next village, ... read more

Tuesday 27 November 2007 Having toured the temples of Angkor, it was time to head back to Phnom Penh before continuing on to Sihanoukville. An early morning start saw us picked up by minibus from our hotel at approximately 6:30am to be taken to the ferry terminal - after half an hour of driving around the city picking up other travellers we realised this was once again an exercise of ‘how many people can you fit in a minibus?’ Fortunately it was tourists, so there was one seat per person, except for the last two who got on. Unfortunately for them, they were over 6 foot tall and the bus ceiling was 5 foot 6 inches. At around 7am we arrived at the ferry terminal, just in time for the scheduled departure. Boarding the boat was ... read more