Mekong Diaries: Day 60

Day 60

Today we caught a bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, where we arranged for the next stage of our journey downstream to Viet Nam by boat. A ferry service runs twice each way every day, carrying tourists through a stretch of river with an amazing history. Cambodia’s rulers moved its capital from Angkorian Siem Reap to the junction of the Tonle Sap and the Mekong when trade began to replace agriculture as the engine of national wealth and influence. Since then boats have been making there way upstream through the mouths of the Mekong Delta to the lands of the Khmer and beyond.

In an aside, check out this site, about an Asia Society exhibition called ‘Arts of Ancient Viet Nam: From River Plain to Open Sea’. The website alone is beautiful and tells a story few are aware of, namey the long cultural history of Viet Nam: http://sites.asiasociety.org/vietnam/?p=17

We have been forced to be very diligent in planning our Vietnam leg, not that we normally lack diligence, because Viet Nam is not an open book where outsiders can critique in the margins. That being said it is not China, and we were able to arrange a promising schedule of of locations and interviews, all sanctioned by our government guide.

We set up our camera on a tripod in the back of the ferry as it pulled out of the port in Phnom Penh, and for the next 5 hours the camera snapped off a frame every second: timelapsing all the way to Cau Doc. Our journey stops not at the floating restaurant we the ferry docks. Instead we heft a bag onto every appendage and toss our considerable bulks onto the back seats of a flock of tiny motorbikes that take off through the busy streets of Cau Doc. Our riders seem possessed with a desire to terrify the large tourists foolish enough to have flagged them down. We adjust our knees and shoulders to avoid high-speed shavings by trucks and on coming cars. 10 incandescent minuets later we pull into a bus stop and after buying a ticket on a mini-bus to Can Tho have quick bowl of truly weird noodles. Then we board the mini-bus which, soon after leaving, pulls into a small shop whereupon the ‘conductor’ proceeds to load an incredible amount of cigarettes into the bus, into pulling back the panels and the ceiling to stuff more cartons on, and finally donning a special set of pants and a jumper in which dozens of cigarette packets are stored. Once our mini-bus has been transformed into a motorised nicotine delivery system we are off and arrive several hours later in Can Tho, in time for dinner and then to bed.

Mekong Diaries: Day 59

Day 59

As if we must punish ourselves for having too much fun in a previous incarnation, we book in for a 4am rise and visit a pre-dawn fish market on the shores of the Great Lake. It is surprisingly cold in the blank darkness as we park on the side of a long man made spit leading into the water. A flurry of trucks and motorbikes is already coursing up and down the thin lane, loaded with coolers overflowing with ice and fish. Down the end of the road on a steep beach dozens of fishing boats are crowded bow first onto the shore. On board the crews are shoveling tons of fish out of their ship’s hold into baskets and bags for transportation. Small single person long tail boats jockey for space next to larger industrial scale trawlers, and behind the mêlée on shore, villagers in smaller wooden skiffs pole through the darkness, small silent shadows against the lightening sky.

We speak with several people, market sellers and fishermen to find out the details of this market life. They tell us that the fish of the Lake attract buyers from all over. The houses and buildings here are all wooden and as the sun rises over to the west over the water we start to pick out the details of life. Some of the huts here are no bigger than a large box. Constructed of sticks and patched with rice bags, one hut is home to a woman and her 2 young children. She smiles at us, perched in the door way suspended on thin wooden legs above the water. Her poverty is such that she cannot even set her foundations on 2 meters of dry land. Rather she will shift her home with the rising and falling of the Lake, retreating before the wet season floods, but always placing her feet in the shallows, in no man’s land.

We spend hours filming an interviewing, taking in the scenes of fish wealth that have played a central role in Cambodian history since the rise of the Angkorian empire on the shores of this Great Lake. Then we drive back towards Siem Reap, stopping to film a large group of men excitedly casting their nets in what otherwise appears to be a rice paddy. This mixing of land and water, an amphibian world, is magical in our eyes. It is a wide ditch running to the horizon and linked to many others that 20 or more men are netting catching catfish, silvery fingerlings and pretty little spiny green-scaled fish. At one point one of the men in a public parody of his lack of fishing success and need for some kind of meal attempts to hunt one of the white cranes that are standing on the back of a buffalo grazing in the field. One tiny boy fishes by himself, casting his small net awkwardly and then watching the older men to try and copy their technique. His efforts are both adorable and alarming, as the energy he uses needs to be matched by the fish he catches. For all the exuberance, there is no pretending to hunt in the efforts of the poor people netting in this ditch.

Mekong Diaries: Day 58

Day 58

When we arrive Siem Reap is hot, even in the early morning. After checking into our hotel we dive straight into a very tight schedule.

We catch a taxi to the edge of the Tonle Sap, the largest lake in South East Asia, and meet the King of the Great Lake at a port called Chong Kneas.

A young man with a lot of responsibility, the King is actually the government officer in charge of enforcing fishing laws and zones on the Great Lake. He is a much more straightforward person than we expect when meeting powerful government officials in Cambodia.

Mekong Diaries: Day 57

Day 57

We spring out of the very comfortable folds of our beds at 4 am and polish our sleepy faces in readiness for Gordon and Verne. They are already waiting outside with a couple of Camrys, the national conveyor in Cambodia, (did you know that a Camry could drive up the side of a rain-soaked mountain, or ford a flooded stream? They can, it’s terrifying!).

We leave for the Kampi dolphin pools and are on the water well before the sunrise. It is chilly and in the darkness the water starts to glow with that deep indigo which signals the coming of the light, and in its beautiful surface we begin to make out the shapes of rising dolphins.