Quiet Roads along the Mekong and the Irrawaddy River Dolphins

Quiet Roads along the Mekong and the Irrawaddy River Dolphins

From Phnom Penh, we headed north, back again through Skon, the spider town, and onto Kampong Cham, the country’s third largest city at 45,000. It was in this part of the country that we had our cheapest meals: fried noodles with vegetables for $0.12, sandwiches for $0.25, large pastries topped with shredded coconut for $0.025, vegetable pancakes for $0.05, a plate of fried pork and pickles for $0.12, rice soup for $0.12, and sugar cane juice for $0.12. Our favorite, though, was the fruit shake made with several types of fruit, condensed milk, ice, and sometimes a raw egg.

From Kampong Cham east, we followed the muddy red Mekong for a short while, passing very small and very poor shacks made of palm leaves, some of which looked like they were caving in. They were single-room houses – no windows, no privacy, no doors, even, that closed. People lived on top of each other. We saw miniscule shacks like this in Kampong Cham, falling down and only big enough for a few people to sleep in. There were a lot of floating houses on rafts in the river. Most with incredibly tiny, the house just big enough to allow a few people to lay down inside. Even our tent was bigger than some of them! They don’t have any belongings aside from the clothes on their backs and a pot or two to do the cooking. At the end of the raft was a large fishing net that worked on a pulley system. When the net was pulled up, it was filled with tiny fish, which is the staple of their diet, along with rice.

In all directions, the muddy river overflowed its banks. The entire plain was submerged, aside from the road. Water as far as the eye could see….

And then the road turned away from the river, and the chartreuse rice paddies returned and continued into the horizon. There was just the green of the fields, the blue of the sky, and the white of the big, fluffy clouds. We passed the occasional rubber plantation, remnants from the French colonial era, and then gentle hills, followed closely by steeper ones, came rolling in. The road was incredibly peaceful – we could bike for hours and pass only a few motorcycles and one or two cars. The road took us about 2 mi. from the border with Vietnam. The villages in this area were generally poor – there was no electricity or running water, and the people bathed with either collected rainwater or in the very muddy streams.

We were happy to reach the town of Kratie, because this part of Cambodia is ideal to spot some of the few remaining Irrawaddy dolphins, which now number only 80-100 individuals in the Mekong (the only river in S.E. Asia to have the Irrawaddy). There were thousands of dolphins during the Khmer Rouge years, when most were killed off for sport or oil. Now the animal is endangered, and the two deep water pools near Kratie are the best place to see them. Our morning out on the river was great. A few kilometers from the shore, when we had reached one of the deep-water pools, we tied onto one of many submerged trees and sat with our feet in the current for an hour, watching the dolphins jump all around us. It was a magical experience.