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Tonle Sap is the highlight of the trip so far. Are there words to describe it? Pictures will present a slightly better brain image but it still won’t be like feeling it and experiencing it and letting it flow through you.
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Maybe part of the reason it was so cool is because we decided on a whim to try and get over to a lake we saw on the map called Tonle Sap.
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We thought it would be fun to just chill out by a lake. But this lake is no ordinary lake. We decided to get a tuk-tuk ride out there and Danica worked on a friendly one who decided he would do it for $6.
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It’s a pretty far ride, maybe about 45 minutes each way, and we soon found that it wasn’t all nice and paved either. In fact, at a certain point we started having flashbacks to the previous night’s bus ride.
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Tonle Sap is the “town” (more of an area) south of Siem Reap and then at the end of the town is Tonle Sap Lake. The drive down that road is stunning in itself.
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It’s not too long until you get out from Siem Reap and into more of the country. Although it’s more the country the road is still lined with houses and shops and stuff.
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Basically, it appears that pretty much every road has houses and shops and stuff along it no matter where you go, but on the back side of those houses are large swampy fields.
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Since it’s all swampy I don’t think they can build too far off the road and that’s why all the places seem to be on the road! Anyway, the houses seem to get more and more shacky/shanty looking the further you go, which to me means cooler and cooler looking.
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You drive down paved road for a while from Siem Reap and then it turns to hard dirt and mud. Eventually you reach this little town, which is not Tonle Sap. You go through that town and then it starts to get unreal.
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The road is lined with ultra-shantys, basically 3 walls, a floor that’s raised up off the ground so that it’s level, and a roof. The dimensions are maybe 10 x 10? The wood looks ancient.
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Little boys are running around naked, men and women are sitting inside eating. The road is horrible bumpy, just as bad or worse than the bus ride. It’s amazing that the tuk-tuk can take it but it does just fine. The driver just has to go slow.
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Hmm, I honestly don’t know how to describe it correctly it’s like you’re watching an IMAX. These people look like they have absolutely nothing but it’s awesome.
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At some point the tuk-tuk driver stopped and we had to buy tickets for a boat ride. We asked if the boat ride is optional because we just kind of wanted to chill by the lake.
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Haha, the driver then pointed to the swampy stuff just off the road and said the lake is like that, you can’t just sit by it. Ohhhhhhh. We didn’t want to just go back so we paid the $10 a piece fee and set off.
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When you pull up to the lake, which later we learned was actually the Mekong River, there are piles of boats lined up on the shore.
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Not boats like we think of in the U.S., these are wooden and colored and old and foreign.
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The boats are packed so tightly they are touching each other. We were directed to a certain one and it had four loose chairs in the middle of it with pink cushions and a roof shelter.
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Sounds touristy when I describe it but when you see the picture you’ll see differently. We were the only ones on the boat besides our two guides, one sat at the back to start the engine and the other started out at the front with a big wooden oar to push us backwards away from the shore.
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Immediately you become dumbfounded because you see that Tonle Sap is a town on water. There are floating houses, stores, churches, and even schools.
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The people live on the water, which right now is brown because the water is high. When it gets down to one or two meters, it’s clear. That information is according to our boat guide.
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A quick diversion, our boat guide, Ban, was really cool. He told us a bunch of stuff about the town and his life.
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You never know if he was scamming us with the story of his life but I don’t think he was. His entire family was killed during the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970’s.
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He’s had several snake bites, one being very poisonous and he almost died but got to a hospital in Phnom Penh and was there for 3 months, in which time he started learning some English.
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Right now he lives on the boat we rode in, which is no more than what I said, the boat, four chairs, and a roof shelter.
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There are no side shelters so he said it’s pretty cold. But he said he’s lucky because his boss lets him stay there for free.
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One of our favorite things were the little kids in these large plastic buckets playing out in the water.
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We saw people bathing themselves by scooping out water from the front porch and pouring it over them.
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What I found incredible though was that these people were NOT pourly dressed.
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In fact, all the women were dressed very respectably with skirts and nice clean shirts and everything. We learned that there are people from different nations there, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Thai, etc.
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You could tell the Vietnamese women because they all wear these sweet pointing hats like you see in pictures.
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Some of the boats were moving stores and they go up and down the river selling goods to the people. Ban said that a lot of trading goes on, which makes sense.
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One funny and odd thing is most of them have TVs. You could see the antennas coming out the roofs. Everything is run off of batteries!
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So there were several floating battery stores along the river as well. There were little kids by themselves crouching on the front of the long wooden boats moving around too.
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After about 20 minutes we reached the lake. The lake is quite large and looks like a giant vat of chocolate milk. No land is in sight except what was behind us.
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Ban said it’s not deep though, maybe 9 meters at this time of year. We turned around and went back down the river but we stopped at this one floating place that I think every boat takes the tourists. Of course there was stuff to buy there but we just got an iced coffee thing, the ones in the little cans.
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The cool part here were the partitioned cages underneath the floor. Four cages had different kinds of fish, catfish, snakefish, and 2 others, one cage had a bunch of crocodiles in it.
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That’s about all the words I have for Tonle Sap right now. The rest of the journey was just a backtrack, but still just as awesome as the arrival.
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We did make a quick stop to check out a temple up on a hill but it wasn’t that impressive and there seemed to be a bunch of monks living up there.
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Danica fit right in since she was wearing short green shorts! Uhhh, she felt bad because she didn’t want to disrespect them but we didn’t know they’d be up there!
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Oh well.
Tonle Sap is very impressive, after seeing the Angkor Wat temples today, we are definitely glad we got to Tonle Sap. In our minds it was way better, even though everyone says Angkor Wat is absolutely superb. I don’t know, there’s something tenfold more intriguing to me in something living, breathing, radiating, and flowing than some ancient temples made to a false god or king or whatever. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the living beauty of Tonle Sap.
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Your computer did some wierd stuff tonight. I did what you told me to but you don’t have your benchmarks in there now??? I looked up Phnom Penh and found some pictures so I could get a little bit of an idea. Am going to look for some of the other towns too. Am really enjoying your adventures…I have an interview at SFCC tomorrow..am getting very nervous…talked to SteveVA and he’s really enjoying following your blogs also & Danica’s. ..Be safe…love you.
Cynde mom | April 9th, 2007 at 3:28 pm |[...] As Mitt Romney unfortunately loses the Republican nomination, I’m posting this little update. Tonight, I finished inserting photos into one of my favorite stops on my Southeast Asia adventure, Tonle Sap in Cambodia. Check it out, it is an amazing place. Click here. [...]
Weithy is Manly » Blog Archive » Tonle Sap Photos | February 6th, 2008 at 12:55 am |