Tonight I’m in Kratie (pronounced kra-cheh), a small town about 8 hours northeast of Phnom Penh. The first thing I did on arriving here (after washing off a day’s worth of bus-stink) was hire a motorbike and head out into the countryside. The Cambodian countryside is STUNNING; miles and miles of lush green forest, scattered with wooden stilt houses, skinny dogs and barefoot children playing in the dirt out the front, and maybe some women with stands selling rainbow-coloured fruit or old glass Pepsi bottles full of petrol. Even more beautiful than the Vietnamese countryside, albeit because the country’s poorer and so there’s less development.
We drove for about half an hour, to an area of the Mekong river where you can spot rare Irawaddy freshwater dolphins. There are only about 250 of these dolphins left in the world, all in this stretch of the Mekong, and about 100 in Cambodia. I think that on this boat trip, I saw all 100, several times. I was either lucky or just chose a better place, because other people I’ve spoken to tried to see these dolphins, but either saw none or just the odd fin. Our boat was surrounded by dolphins for a whole hour; they were more just coming up for air rather than flipping around doing tricks, but that was so beautiful to watch, and sometimes we were treated to a flat-nosed face coming up to say hello, or some roly-polys on the surface. I felt so chilled out sitting on the boat as the sun went down, the smooth surface of the water broken only by dolphins, jumping fish, and our boat driver’s spit. This was definitely the best thing I’ve done so far on this trip.
view from the boat; I didn’t try to take any photos of the dolphins because I’d rather sit and watch them. and actually you know what dolphins look like anyway
this monk was talking on the phone when I took this
I might stop writing words on this blog, and you can just guess where I am based on what beer I’m drinking
