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February 18, 2007
Tonle Sap (Joe)
Sunday 18 February 2007
This morning we got up at 6.30 and headed down to Tonle Sap lake which is about 15km south of Siem Reap. The tuk-tuk picked us up and we set of to the lake. Rack a Khmer friend came with us as he had never been there. We had to stop at the park office and pay $15 each for the boat trip wich is really expensive for the time on the boat. Once we arived at the boat station Rack did all the translating and we manged to get a boat for just the three of us which was really good.
We started by heading down the Tonle Sap river towards the lake. There were lots of local people fishing with nets on the bank. It looked really amazing. After about 10-15 minutes we arrived at the mouth of the river. It was like the sea. It was so massive you could not see the other side.
The lake has lots of floating villages all over it. When we got closer we saw that some of the houses were made out of boats. They were really interesting. All the houses had threir own canoe tied up outside to get from one house to another.
There was a floating School and a floating church. The whole community was really amazing, that they could survive on house boats. We spent a little time round some of the houses then we stopped at a floating cafe where they had a big enclosure with really big cat fish that you could feed. The one next door had crocodiles in it.
We left the cafe and headed back towords the houses, I asked Rack if I could have a go at paddling one of the local canoes, so we stopped at one of the houses and they loaned me a canoe. It was really stable. The paddle was a bit odd but it was still pretty good.
We headed back up the river to meet the tuk-tuk. We drove for a while then stopped at the base of a temple. We had to get a pass to go in so we just walked round the bottom. There were lots of local houses all around. It was really nice but very hot.
This trip was well worth the6.30 start.
Posted by admins at February 18, 2007 8:30 AM