Slow boat to Battambang

As we near the river we notice that the water level is quite low, we are reassured that we’re not the only ones mad enough to be attempting the journey at the sight of a dozen more western tourists clambering onto the boat, seems as though they’ve all been told differing journey times ranging from 5 to ten hours, we settle down for the voyage.

After around an hour we enter the vast lake that is Tonle Sap,

the boat chugs along through a narrow channel which is just deep enough to take us, we skirt the northern shore and enter the Stung Sangker the river that flows down from Battambang, we pass floating villages.

One with a church

And mobile phone shop

We pass loads of small villages

Where boats speed out to greet us and ply their wares

Nearly all the villages have weddings going on

 And strange bamboo fishing contraptions with two “A” frames counterbalanced at one end and a net attached to the other, cheap and ingenious and obviously effective, judging by the numbers of them.

As we journey on the river narrows

and so far we’ve only run aground twice. Nearing Battambang and the heavens open and we’re treated to a Cambodian downpour (all our luggage is on the roof of the boat)

Every house or boat we’ve passed has had at least 3 children waving like crazy at us

by the time we reach our destination 8 hours later we’re not one bit sad to be waving goodbye to our boat

Our hotel had said that we would be met at the dock by transport which again was a tuk tuk and our driver Shadrak agrees to take us to the Vietnamese embassy en route to get our visas sorted, these are done for us as we wait which is great service. We check into our hotel-The Banan hotel, huge great value rooms for 13 US$ and head off into town for a look round. It is chaos as we imagined, the guys in this photo with the ladder are trying to stretch a new power cable across the road between two poles while mopeds and cars hurtle round them.