Siem Reap to Battambang on the Tonle Sap

From Siem Reap we took a slow boat across the Tonle Sap lake & rivers through the floating villages on our way to Battambang. Watching river life was amazing and bamboo huts of varying size & purpose appear out of the water and just kind of sit there on the surface. It's ethereal seeing these homes & businesses almost stranded out at sea. It's eerily quiet too without the usual background noise of traffic or the cacophony of yells and people talking. As we chugged past, as slowly as possible through the inhabited villages, people would paddle up on smaller boats to our bigger boat and drop off packages and passengers who wanted to go our way. Yet again the BBC World service had decided to lay on the guilt the previous day by focusing on the river people of Cambodia and their disappearing fish-stocks. It seems the larger fishing fleets are decimating the fish population and that the government is granting more and more of the waters to the bigger companies. The report also mentioned that the largest cause of death amongst children in these villages is drowning, often caused by the swell of the larger, tourist-filled, boats capsizing the smaller. We'd seen this and baulked at the stupidity and injustice of this and yet here we were, doing just that.
In the villages were houses, shops and schools which were buildings and huts that were literally floating on the river. In the wet season the lake tripples in size so a floating home has less of a chance of flooding. A pre-requisite of enrolling in a floating school is that you can swim. Rising out of the lake at scattered intervals are these vast crazy-looking floating fishing devices that look a medieval trebuchet with a massive fishing net attached to it which is lowered into the water via an enormous pully & lever system.



After a fascinating 4 hours, we changed to smaller boat that could make it around the tight turns in the river towards Battembang. Unfortunately all of the people on the big boat were transferred to the smaller boat. There were about 30 of us in a boat the size of a canoe. It was very hot and the drapes around the edges were lowered to keep off the sun. However, Ben and I got in near last which meant we got to sit on a plastic garden chair each instead of the wooden benches down the edges. We couldn't actually move or see anything and when ever the boat went round a very tight bend, which was constantly, Ben's chair legs would buckle and he would fall into the French couple on the right or the Swedish girl on the left. The scenery and river life would have been amazing, but we couldn't see anything from the boat. It was a miserable 4 hours.



Finally we reached Battambang, it was grim so we booked our bus tickets to Phnom Penh for the next morning.