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Articles Tagged ‘Kampot’

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Island Getaways and Laoward Bound

Friday, January 18th, 2008

I caught a morning bus to Kep and got dropped off at the boat docks for the trip to Koh Tonsay. I found a man selling boat tickets for $15 roundtrip to the island. As this was for the whole boat, I decided to wait around and see if anyone else would show up to go. About 40 minutes later a group of four foreigners showed up. I walked over to them as they were speaking to another man about a boat. He was going to charge everyone five dollars a person for the roundtrip. Despite this being a slightly higher price, I decided to go with them as I was tired of waiting. When I said that I was going to stay overnight, the man tried to charge me $10 saying that it cost more for me to stay overnight. Despite explaining why this made no sense (I was just going to share a boat coming back, I didn’t need a special boat just for me), he wouldn’t take five. In the end I told him that I wasn’t going to spend the night and paid my five dollars. It technically wasn’t a lie because I still had plans to look around the island before ultimately making up my mind about how long I wanted to stay there. The trip out to the island in the wooden skiff took about 25 minutes. [read on]

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Uniquely Cambodian

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

I walked outside at the appointed time to catch my ride to the boat dock for the trip to Battambang. My ride wasn’t quite what I expected as a motorcycle pulling a hay trailer pulled up. I piled into the trailer already holding a hoard of other foreigners. We drove to the boat dock passing through a village of wooden and thatch houses up on stilts. At the boat dock I saw that two boats would be making the trip. As the boats were already full (we were late), I had to get a seat on a hard wooden bench in the back. We set off down a narrow water passage that led us to Tonle Sap which is a big inland lake. We skirted along the edge of the lake and into another small channel. We spent the next seven hours going through small waterways. The trip is normally about four hours, but this late in the dry season, the water level is low. We also had to keep stopping to get the water lilies (also a bane to boaters in Louisiana) out of the propeller. The landscape was flat and dotted with small shrubs and elephant ears, like one would see traveling in coastal Louisiana. We passed through several floating villages. The houses, stores, schools, etc. are all built on rafts and rise and fall with the rain seasons. [read on]

Posted in Cambodia, Travel | 3 Comments »