Day 5: The Cambodian Countryside

Siem Reap - Sunday 19/12

Today was a special day for the girls as this day is not included in the "normal" Julie tour of Cambodia. It was a chance to get out into the country side and experience a piece of what life is like everyday for Cambodians.

Well off the beaten track, we bounced down a narrow road into a village of about 180 families who are subsistence farmers growing mainly rice. Our guide had organised a ride for us on traditional water buffalo wagons with large wooden wheels and definitely no suspension. Water buffalo are the "workhorse" of Cambodia and they are used to pull wagons and do the ploughing in the rice fields.

The girls took turns driving (with various degrees of success !) and we trundled around the narrow roads and then through the rice paddies where the locals were harvesting some of the crop. We met the local chief of the village who had been kind enough to invite us into the community for a visit.

We jumped back in our van and drove 20 minutes or so to the start of a water canal that appeared just to start in the middle of nowhere. In the dry season this canal is a road, but in the wet season (which we are just at the end of now) the water rises and the road becomes a shallow canal.

We boarded a long boat and journeyed down the canal for some distance before it slowly widened out and we entered a river. Scattered along the river are floating villages, where people have built their houses on floating platforms of reeds. These families move up and down the river during the year and fish the river for their food. It was quite funny to see a platform with a house and then a secondary platform next to the house might have a chicken pen or even a small vegetable garden planted on it. Aid organisations have even built floating schools that are a part of these communities to give the children a basic education.

After passing through a number of villages, the river opened up into an enourmous lake that is Cambodia's largest fresh water lake, Tonle Sap Lake. We cruised into the main lake briefly, then returned to the river mouth for a final surprise.

Nestled on the edge of the river were four small canoes ready to take us into the river edges between the trees and experience the quiet of the shady swamps away from the main river (yes parents, it was all safe - you can see from the photos we all wore life jackets !). We saw a number of small red squirrels and scamper through the tree tops and some black monkeys in the distance that made themselves scarch very quickly. After a very tranquil paddle around the river swamps, we returned to the long boat for the journey back up the river to our starting point.

Our final visit on the way home was to the Siem Reap silk farm - this is genuine end to end production of Cambodian silk. We enjoyed a garden tour to see the mulberry trees specially grown for the silk worms, through the worm hatchery to see the silk worms being grown and spinning their silk cocoons, then through the production stages of harvesting and spinning the silk to make clothes and other items. The entire end to end process happens on the one site and in a few local villages around the farm where the spinners work.

After a quick refreshment stop at the ice cream cafe in the silk farm, we returned to the hotel to freshen up - on the way there was a quick stop at the huge reservoir that supplies water to Sien Reap. Our guide said this was a good place for the girls to buy bracelets from the kids at the small market at the reservoir - once one person bought something, you will see in the photos that the girls were surrounded by kids wanting to sell their bracelets !!

Tonight was our night for a special dinner dance put on at the hotel where we enjoyed dinner and some traditional Khmer dancing ... Ed: perhaps a little additional cultural appreciation required by the girls ... ???

So tomorrow is another day - we head to the Land Mine museum to learn something of the tragic past of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime.

p.s. If it is not clear - you can view a small selection of photos from each day by clicking on one of the pictures on the left - this will launch you into a slide show of that days pics .. as you would expect, there are hundreds each day to choose from, so this is just a quick selection for the blog ...