By 4:30am we were up and well ready to go – the 6 hour time difference between New Zealand and Thailand meant that we were wide awake anyway. An hour to get showered dressed and to the airport for our 5:30am check in time was as always too much time, so we were actually wandering round in the departure lounge have completed “check in formalities” at 5:20am waiting for our flight at 7:30am. The flight to Siem Reap was on an ATR, so a nice slow low flight that lets you see the scenery out the window. As we arrived into Siem Reap, the view out the window showed the ground was saturated – surface flooding and all – and this is supposed to be the dry season.
The Airport at Siem Reap is tiny and reminded me more of an Asian hotel, built in the style of a pagoda and a world away from the magnificent sprawling futuristic steel, glass and concrete structure of Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport, which we had just left.
We flew to Siem Reap on Bangkok Airways, which is the Thai regional airline. Its planes are all decked out in bright colours depicting beach scenes. When we got off the plane, everybody stood around on the tarmac taking photos of the plane (see link to photos). Once inside the terminal building, the hotel theme continued, with 12 people lined up in uniform at “reception” to greet us. The uniform was of course military and the greeting very formal. Firstly, there were the 3 people who took passports and the $US20 for your visa. Then there were the 7 men who were given the passports to check whether you were to be granted entrance into the Kingdom of Cambodia. Finally there were the two men whose job is was to return your passports. Anne and I being the last people off the plane, but the first to get tired of looking at it were second in the queue for visa applications. Obviously though, New Zealanders are a bit of a novelty because we took the longest to get our passports back and were passed by the rest of the plane, who we think were Chinese. It was a nice interlude however, as it meant our bags were, for once, waiting for us when we finally got through to collect them.
The hotel shuttle which we had so painstakingly organised didn’t show up, so after a brief wait we were informed by the taxi “organiser” that the hotel must have been busy so we should take a taxi, which we did. Our driver into town has now been our driver for the last three days and has taken us round all the temples, so it’s worked out well for us and been a nice little earner for him. He seemed like a very decent young man and told us up front what a driver and car for the day would cost. $US30 for a driver for a day sounded reasonable to us and he’s taken us all over the place, been very informative, dropped us at good places for lunch, so we’ve been very happy with the service we’ve got.
In the afternoon, we arranged with him to pick us up and take us to the floating village at Kampong Phhluk. Our driver advised us that that was the best thing to do, since we didn’t have a full day to visit the temples. Our guide book also recommended it, so he duly collected us at 1pm, after we’d been to the local market to replace our hats, and took us off to the floating village. On our map it was shown as being about 12kms out of town, so just a short trip. That was how it started anyway, but a few ks down the road we turned off the highway and started heading for the lake. After about a kilometer our speed had slowed and we were weaving all over the road to avoid the potholes. A few Ks of that and with no lake or village in site and he pulls off to the side of the road and says “the road is too bumpy from here, so you will go to the lake on scooters.
It was at about this point that we realized that we both didn’t really know what we had gotten ourselves into and here we were out in the middle of nowhere, with a driver we’d just met and now we were being driven off to some indeterminate location on two small scooters by two other people we didn’t know. Oh well, just go with the flow. “She’ll be right mate”. For some reason, by scooter needed a bag of cement placed in the step through well – I guess it was so that we didn’t do wheelies all the way, as I had a significant weight advantage over my driver. So off we went on our scooters down a sandy rutted track for about three kilometers to where the boats were parked.
Now about this lake. It is called Tonlé Sap and is known as the heart beat of Cambodia. The lake is the largest fresh water lake in South East Asia, but the amazing thing about it is that it’s size varies from about 2,500sq km in the dry season to about 13,000sq km during the wet season. During the wet season the water levels in the Mekong delta get so high that the Tonlé Sap river backs up and expands the size of the lake. During the dry season, the river feeds the Mekong Delta, so it’s size contracts – hence the heartbeat – expansion and contraction. As we are here in the dry season, the lake is contracting and so some houses are already out of the water and Kampong Phhluk the town we are visiting is half in and half out.
The boat ride out to the village took about half an hour through a kind of two way boat lane cut in the mangroves. On the way we saw people fishing (the main income earner for the village), repairing nets and clearing weeds from the mangrove swamps. As we approached the town, stilted houses started appearing above the mangroves. They are built on 6m high poles, with ladders up to them. Like most neighbourhoods, the houses came in varying qualities, with the basic ones having thatched sides and roofs up to the most elaborate being made of corrugated iron sides and roofs.
As the village is partly out of the water, we were dropped off at the part of the village that is completely above water. As luck would have it, we were dropped right outside the local school, where the children were playing in the school yard. No sooner were we off the boat than the sales pitch started. This one was different from others we’d experienced in Asia and wasn’t for books, scarves or cans of coke but to buy packets of exercise books and pencils for the school. For $US5 you got a pack of 20 books and a pile of pencils. How could we possibly say no? So Anne and I bought a packet each. As soon as we did that, all the children were called back into the class and Anne and I had to scramble up the ladders (big steps they were) and deliver the books and pencils to the children. They had a neat trick of having less pencils than exercise books, so they tried to sell us more pencils for $US2, but we weren’t buying that, so we went on a tour of the village where one young boy told us all about how they lived and how the men in the village would move out into the lake as it receded and then move back into their houses when the wet season bought the lake back into the village. He spoke very good English and obviously liked practicing on the tourists. While we were there, they were drying shrimps on big flax nets. The houses were quite open because of the heat, so you could see people cooking, washing, talking on their mobile phones and playing with their children.
After leaving the village, we went further out into the mangrove swamp until we got to the main part of the lake, which is obviously huge and stretches all the way to the horizon and beyond. The return journey was the reverse of the way out, except the sun came out, so we got some great photos of the village in the sun. It was when we were getting back on the scooter that I saw my driver hunting round for his bag of cement and putting it in the step-thru that I realized what it was for. Although it was a sandy track, there was only one section of about 10m that I had to leap off and push him through, so it was pretty good. Anne found the scooter section a real highlight and it was something quite unexpected on a day of many surprises.
On the way back into Siem Reap, we stopped and picked up our driver’s Aunt to take her into Siem Reap and because we were so impressed with the trip that he had organised for us, decided that we would use him for the next three days for our tours round the temples.
We dined in the Hotel Restaurant that night, which had superb food, before retiring early for a decent nights sleep. Day one over and two happy campers.
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