river dolphins at Kratie

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The buses from Siem Reap to Kratie all go in the morning. At the Mingalar Inn where I was staying they had a bus schedule. Two left at 7am and cost US$22 and $18, one left at 7.30am and cost $13, and the last left at 8.15am and also cost $13. They all would take seven hours. I chose the 8.15 one because that would give me time to have breakfast without rushing. I wouldn't be doing anything that afternoon upon arrival in Kratie, so it didn't really matter if I got there at 2.30 or 3.30. Kratie, incidentally, is pronounced krah-chay. That's not important, I just thought I'd mention it because it isn't the way it's spelled.

In the morning I was sitting out front at 6.45, waiting for my breakfast to be ready, and a guy turns up in a tuktuk to pick me up for the bus. There was some discussion during which I pointed out that my bus was at 8.15 and he pointed out that no the bus leaves at 7.30, and I pointed out both the schedule on the wall and my actual ticket which said 8.15am. My assumption was that he was actually there to pick up someone else for the earlier bus. But it turned out that in fact all the buses leave at 7am, no matter what the time on your ticket or the schedule says (or, indeed, even when he himself said 7.30!).

The bus ride was the longest "seven hour" bus ride ever. I didn't get to Kratie until 7pm - twelve hours later! Still, it was more comfortable than the shared-taxi I took to Siem Reap the other day, where there were four people in the front (i.e. two in the passenger seat and two in the driver's seat) and seven in the back seat including myself. And I got through five movies plus a whole lot of Cambodian karaoke videos on the tv at the front of the bus. First was a Jet Li movie from the nineties, then a Sammo Hung movie of the same era - both were in Chinese and I was too far back to read the subtitles - then a Donnie Yen movie (they obviously love their Chinese martial arts movies in Cambodia), then Schwarzenegger's The Last Stand, and finally the reprehensibly-bad G. I. Joe: the rise of Cobra which I have now seen at least twice (the first time was in Borneo).

When I visited Vietnam in 2015 I commented on how there are no birds in the countryside. When you take a bus in Thailand you see birds everywhere, but in Vietnam there is nothing, no drongos or mynahs or even sparrows. Even the paddy fields are lacking egrets. There is nothing left alive outside of the national parks. Cambodia isn't quite that bad, but it is almost-so; a handful of birds every couple of hours rather than only one or two birds. I do wonder how the environment copes, even if it is farmland.

Kratie is a tiny town, so arriving after dark is no problem. The bus stopped by the riverside where all the cheap hotels are and I got a room for US$5 at the Mohra Outdom Hotel. The owner asked if I was American, and when I said I was from New Zealand he said "then why do you have an American accent?". I did not have an answer to that question.

My reason for coming to Kratie was because 15 or 20km up the Mekong River is an even tinier town named Kampi which is famous for Irrawaddy dolphins. At the same spot can be found the Mekong wagtail, which looks like a large version of the white wagtail. It is easy to get to - from Kratie you can take a tuktuk for US$10 return, a motorbike for US$7 return, or a bicycle for US$5. I was going to hire a bicycle but I was told the road was dirt (everything here is brick-red from the dust, and I didn't fancy being the same), and it would take about 1.5 hours as opposed to the tuktuk's half-hour. It was a better decision to take a tuktuk I think, because the entire road (which was paved and not dirt, but just really bumpy) was lined with village so I wouldn't have been stopping for birds along the way anyway. If this was my first time in Asia then a bike-ride along that road would have been really interesting, seeing how they were all living, but I've seen southeast Asian villages hundreds of times so instead of interested I would have just been dusty and tired.

I was a little apprehensive about how much a dolphin boat was going to cost, seeing I was alone, but it was only US$9 per person for one or two people (a bit cheaper for more people), and that gave you an hour on the river. However to go to see the Mekong wagtail would cost an extra US$15 (so US$24 total) because it was found slightly further upriver amongst the sand islands - and by "slightly" I mean it looked like it would have been another five minutes travel in the boat. But that was what it would cost, and I didn't want to pay that much for one bird which looked like another bird. I would walk 15km for it but not pay $15 for it. I'm not sure if that is stingy or sensible. Also I'm planning on going to Yok Don in Vietnam, and there are supposed to be Mekong wagtails there as well.

The dolphins were easy to see. In fact I could have seen them from the boat dock without any trouble. I had heard some stories about the dolphins being chased and harrassed by the boats, but when I was there (at 8.30am) it was all well-controlled. There were only four boats, including mine, and they only used their engines to move up or down the river. When they were anywhere near the dolphins they either used the oar or simply floated. It may be a different story in the afternoon, of course, when there would probably be more boats. The boat ride was for an hour, basically going in big circles within probably less than a hundred metres of the dock, and it felt like only fifteen minutes had passed when the time came to return.

I have seen Irrawaddy dolphins before, on the Irrawaddy River itself in Burma, and they were just as difficult to photograph here as they were there. They don't jump like marine dolphins, they just sort of slide up through the surface, breathe, and dip back under, all in a few seconds. There's no way to tell where they will come up, but because they are in groups often another will surface straight after one has gone down. I didn't get any worthwhile photos though. In terms of viewing, it took me a long time to find the ones on the Irrawaddy but the viewing was much better (on that specific occasion). So I'd say that the best place to see them is on the Irrawaddy River, but the easiest place to see them must be here on the Mekong River.

Once back on shore I got the tuktuk driver to take me further up the road to where I could have a look at the sand islands from shore. I was hoping I might still see a wagtail that way. But it was not to be. There were a lot of blue-tailed bee-eaters and a pied kingfisher and a few other common birds, but no wagtails.

Tomorrow morning I would be off again, with a mini-van to Phnom Penh at 6.15am followed by another mini-van to Sihanoukville. This town is the best place to get a Vietnamese visa, and I don't have any real wish to spend time in Phnom Penh. Supposedly I would get to Sihanoukville about 6pm which probably means midnight, but at least the mini-vans have much less leg-room than the buses so I'd be doubly uncomfortable. Yay.

Unexpectedly, my 6.15am bus to Phnom Penh arrived on time, and it was a mini-bus rather than a mini-van so not as cramped as I had been thinking. I'm really treating Cambodia as more of a transit-country for Vietnam than a proper-visit country. I rushed through the west, mostly because all the reserves were too expensive to visit; detoured up to Kratie to see the Irrawaddy dolphins (I think the main reason most backpackers go to Kratie is because they are on their way to Laos); and now down to Sihanoukville via Phnom Penh to get my three-month Vietnamese visa.

Kirirom National Park is half way between Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville. On my original plan I was going to stop off on the way but I thought it might be a bad cash-vs-results decision to go there so I changed my mind. Kirirom is a forested mountain with a plateau on top which the Cambodian government sold to the Chinese for development. The forest on the plateau was razed and a resort built in its place. Down the bottom of the mountain is a tourist complex with cheap homestays but which is more-or-less a front for poachers. There's very little useful information online about how to look for wildlife in the park (as in where or if there are trails, where the forest is in relation to the tourist complex, etc). Birders don't go to Kirirom so I thought it would be interesting from that perspective, to see what nobody else does, but I'm afraid there might be little left to see.

Just outside Sihanoukville is a mangrove reserve called Ream National Park, which I was undecided about visiting. The Cambodian government has subleased it to a Chinese company and they have been busy clearing the mangroves to turn it into a resort. It would cost me about US$15 to get there and back from town, plus the additonal entry and guide fees, so I gave it a miss. I didn't want to pay that to see the ruined remnants of a forest.

East of Sihanoukville is another place called Bokor National Park. Like Kirirom it is a forested mountain with a plateau on top which the Cambodian government has sold off to the Chinese and they have destroyed all the forest on the plateau to build a resort. I'm sensing some kind of pattern here. I know there is still bird-populated forest on the slopes of Bokor because bird-tours still go there, and it is also home to pileated gibbons which I would like to see. I found a survey of Cambodia's pileated gibbons online, and Kirirom was a stronghold - which was why I had it down as a destination - but I think Bokor might be a better choice. However there is only one road and I'm not sure how easy or difficult it is going to be to access without transport. I'll find out soon enough.

The mini-bus from Kratie to Phnom Penh took four hours. I had been told that the 11.30am bus to Sihanoukville was full, so I had been booked onto the 2.30pm one. But when I arrived at Phnom Penh they gave me a ticket for a 12.00 bus, and even better it was an actual big coach and not a mini-bus. I haven't seen any "local buses" in Cambodia, by which I mean the old rattle-buckets you get everywhere else in Asia. All the buses are A/C coaches and mini-vans. Even at the bus stations there has been no sign of old buses. Maybe Cambodia is where all the other countries got their buses from when Cambodia upgraded. The driver said it would take five hours to reach Sihanoukville - and it did! There was however an additional half-hour upon arrival where we were crawling through the traffic, the city being quite a bit bigger and busier than I had been expecting.

I had pre-booked a place the night before because I had thought I'd probably be arriving in the middle of the night, and also according to the internet the local transport in town is controlled by a "tuktuk mafia" who have fixed prices at unreasonable levels, so I wanted a set place I could be taken to. I had chosen Guesthouse 66 because it was quite cheap (US$8) and literally across the road from the Vietnamese Embassy where I needed to go for my visa. There was the usual crowd of tuktuk and motorbike drivers at the bus stop when the bus pulled in, but it certainly wasn't what the internet claimed it to be like. I told a motorbike driver where I wanted to go, he said $5, I said no and turned my back on him to wait for my bag to be pulled out from the bus' luggage-hold. Motorbike-taxis are pretty much restricted to picking up lone travellers but most backpackers are in groups or two of more and thus get a tuktuk, and so the motorbike drivers are easier to bargain with because they need the fare more. As soon as you give a flat no, they ask how much you'll pay (that way they can get an idea if you actually know the real price or not). I said I'd pay $2, making a guess based on knowing roughly where I was in relation to the guesthouse. He said $3, I said I was only paying $2, and he agreed. Later at the guesthouse I asked the owner how much the real price would have been and he said $1 so I was close enough. I think the internet's "tuktuk mafia" is a load of rubbish and I imagine it was originally started by the king of unreliability, Lonely Planet.

I also found out, once at the guesthouse, that an attempt had been made to go through my bag while it was in the luggage compartment of the bus. This is a common trick on the tourist buses in Thailand - someone hides out in the hold and while the bus is on the road the person goes through all the bags and takes anything of value. Nobody finds out until they are at their next hotel and have no proof (or clue) that it happened on the bus ride. I always have my bags padlocked, except the front pocket which just has empty plastic bags in it. I knew the pocket had been gone through, firstly because one of the plastic bags had been caught in the zip, and secondly because the paper bags from Ladakh which were at the bottom were now at the top, where someone had pulled them all out and then pushed them back in again. Most backpackers don't lock their bags, so I expect at least a few of them have since found out they are missing valuables.

The next morning I crossed the road to the Vietnamese Embassy. The form I had to fill out was a lot simpler than I had been led to believe (internet again). Supposedly you needed to include not only the normal details like passport info, your home address, etc, but also full names and addresses of parents and spouses, religion, address of employer, and other such irrelevant things. Instead it was just the basic details. As with Cambodia I used a passport photo from 2015 (actually from the ones I got taken when I was going to Vietnam that year) and there was no issue. They don't even look at the photo, they just staple it to the form you filled out. I thought maybe you could use anybody's photo so long as they weren't of a different colour or sex, but when I got my passport back the photo was laminated into the visa which was stapled inside the front of the passport. I'm assuming that when I get to the border they will put in a proper stuck-on-the-page-visa. A three-month visa cost me US$55 and because I had gone in early (just after 8am when they opened) it was ready later the same day at 4.30pm.

With that done, and no reason for me to stay in Sihanoukville, I continued on the next morning to Kampot, which is the closest town to the entrance road for Bokor National Park. There's another smaller park a bit further on called the Kep National Park but I don't think there are gibbons there. I may visit it anyway (for birds), but otherwise after hopefully spending a few days visiting Bokor I'll be heading into Vietnam.

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Photos

Irrawaddy Dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris)
literally the best photo I managed to get of the dolphins!