Today we met Mr Yort at 8am and headed to Chong Khneas which is where the floating village is on the Tonle Sap lake.
This Great Lake is one of the natural wonders of Asia. Uniquely the Tonle Sap river reverses its flow and runs uphill for 6 months of the year. Once the wet season comes the river swells and flows back down stream into the great Tonle Sap lake. The difference is amazing in wet season the lake can be 12 metres deep and in dry season 1.5 metres deep. This is why the floating villages were created with anchors or on stilts.We went down a canal to get to the Great Lake
We hired a boat, it was only us two, 2 people to look after the boat and a guide called David. This guide was awful !! He told us some useful information but kept chatting us up – he was still drunk from the night before and stunk of alcohol.
Mangroves by the side of the canal and a small Vietnamese cemetery which is flooded every rainy season
The floating village was really good except our guide kept trying to get us to buy other boat rides on river taxis and canoes but we were happy just being on the boat.
We headed to a school this one was Vietnamese and had 300 children in it 120 of them were orphans – they were great kids playing and sat in class.
School
Then the guide took us to the floating market where this really fat gentleman who was very rude tried to get us to buy 30kg bag of rice for $30 we said no too much he was not happy, so we bought some water and sweets for the kids.
At this point our guide without warning obviously realised we weren’t going to give him much money and abandoned us with the 2 boat guys – thank goodness he left!!! The boat guys were lovely one was studying to be a teacher.
We took our water and sweets back to the school and left for the main port again.
On the way back we saw more fishermen and these posts that showed how deep the waters went.
