Top of the boat
Villagers on the bank
Another fishing/house boat
Fishermen at work
Sunset over the Tonle Sap river
Getting dark around 6.30pmtravelpod.com
Everyone is very friendly here, and my new colleagues have invited me on a boatcruise at sunset. It's very common here when friends and family visit (HINT!) to hire a wooden boat and sail up and around the rivers around dusk for two or three hours. Everyone brings their own drinks, a couple of eskies and some snacks, and off they go.
(I say 'rivers' because Phnom Penh is actually situated at the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap river. The Tonle Sap leads up country to the biggest freshwater lake in Asia. Interestingly enough, during the wet season, the river has so much water in it that it all backs up towards the lake, and it starts flowing backwards! It changes direction when the levels drop though.)
The boat itself has a wooden sheltered part, with table down the middle, or you can sit on the roof under an umbrella. So long as the weight is evenly distributed around the edges, it's all quite stable.
The boat is also the owner's home, so while we were sitting around enjoying the mood, the owner's wife was up the front doing the family's washing in a small plastic basin, and the children were playing around in the stern.
We got some interesting views of life on the other side of the river - you can see just how much the river rises during the wet season, and also just how poor the villages on the riverbank are.
Most of the villagers are fishermen, and we often passed a low slung boat with nets aboard and someone stretched out resting on them. At night, the nets are marked in the water with candles floating on little wooden boxes attached to aerosol cans. You'd have to be right on top of them to see them, I suppose, but they seem to work.
Everyone is very friendly here, and my new colleagues have invited me on a boatcruise at sunset. It's very common here when friends and family visit (HINT!) to hire a wooden boat and sail up and around the rivers around dusk for two or three hours. Everyone brings their own drinks, a couple of eskies and some snacks, and off they go.
(I say 'rivers' because Phnom Penh is actually situated at the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap river. The Tonle Sap leads up country to the biggest freshwater lake in Asia. Interestingly enough, during the wet season, the river has so much water in it that it all backs up towards the lake, and it starts flowing backwards! It changes direction when the levels drop though.)
The boat itself has a wooden sheltered part, with table down the middle, or you can sit on the roof under an umbrella. So long as the weight is evenly distributed around the edges, it's all quite stable.
The boat is also the owner's home, so while we were sitting around enjoying the mood, the owner's wife was up the front doing the family's washing in a small plastic basin, and the children were playing around in the stern.
We got some interesting views of life on the other side of the river - you can see just how much the river rises during the wet season, and also just how poor the villages on the riverbank are.
Most of the villagers are fishermen, and we often passed a low slung boat with nets aboard and someone stretched out resting on them. At night, the nets are marked in the water with candles floating on little wooden boxes attached to aerosol cans. You'd have to be right on top of them to see them, I suppose, but they seem to work.
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