Come look! The barangs (foreigners) are coming!

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My first full day in Cambodia yesterday ...and the only thing wrong with the day was that I'm worried the rest of my trip won't live up to it ...it was so, so good! Fabulous in fact!

I'd booked a day tour via the internet before I arrived (through Villa Siem Reap) to the Kompong Phluuk floating village - we ended up going to another village Kompong Kleang further away, and the tour was brilliant. Just three of us (myself and an English couple), plus guide and driver. Tourism is apparently about 30% down here in Cambodia at the moment ... I gather last year these tours were almost always fully booked.

Some fantastic photo opportunities as we stopped along the side of the road at roadside stalls, plus visited a family who makes incense sticks and later the guide showed us round a local market. The whole day, we were the only tourists in sight.

Which is the reason for the title of this blog... after driving 40km+ and over an hour on a boat cruising up a lake tributary past a huge floating village (all houses on stilts), we stopped off in the village for lunch. While the tour goes 3 times a week, we were enough of a novelty that children came out of their houses to stare and giggle ...and a few knew enough English to say ''hello''. We even got one "I love you"! We also kept hearing them say 'barang', 'barang'' which is their word for foreigner as we wandered through the village. They were gawking at us, just as much as we were staring at them!

We saw the villagers smoking fish, drying snails/shellfish in the sun, waterproofing a boat and generally observed village life. We caused a bit of a stir when we wandered past classrooms of the local school - looking in the windows. One classroom didn't have a teacher and the kids all rushed back to their chairs to sit looking wellbehaved as soon as they saw us. We walked past the next window and a little girl of about 8 looked up and gasped in shock when she saw me. And then giggled shyly.

All in all, the day couldn't have been a better one....such a great insight into the non-tourist side of Cambodian life. I topped the day off by making my first visit to the Angkor temples when I got back to Siem Reap - joining the hundreds (thousands?) of tourists who go up a small hill temple at Phnom Bakheng to watch the sunset. I knew in advance that it would be super-crowded. In fact, I went to see the crowds almost as much as I did to see the view of Angkor Wat and the sunset ... just so I could contrast it with my plans to visit the less crowded temples the following day.

that's it for this first blog ... I hope to write more later tonight. After I've had a sleep, that is, as I was up before 4am this morning (more about that next entry....)

P.S - I'll try to figure out how to load pictures in my next blog ...one technology step at a time!?

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Photos

Time to get on the boat!
Our boat was like the blue one on the right

Floating village
In the wet season, the lake rises more than 3 metres.

Comments

[Joanne Stuhmcke]

Sok Sabay from the Stuhmckes
Thanks for the blog Alison - it was excellent. Greg and I are keen to see the photo's and hear all about your travels. We both will be following your blog with avid interest!!