CD1 - Boat Ride

Directly after being picked up at the airport and having lunch we headed out to Tonle Sap Lake. We left the main part of town and drove through many poor areas. We passed homes that were made of straw, some that didn't even have four complete walls. It made me very sad to see these areas and I wished that there was something that I could do to help them.

We got out of the van and walked out to see all of these boats floating in the river. I'm not the biggest fan of riding on boats because I always feel like we are going to tip over with just a slight movement, so I was a little nervous when I discovered that we would be riding on one of them.

Our tickets to make it official that we were going on the boat.

The ramp going down to the boats was really steep, we walked very slowly one foot barely moving at a time and holding onto the railing the whole way.

All of us on the boat, thankfully our group leader had no problem moving around on the boat.

More boats sitting and waiting until they were needed.

Another view of a house, many people would just sit there waiting for tourists to pass to try and sell them something.

A boat-store, two of the girls were so excited when they saw these---"Shopping!"

A beautiful view of the clouds and greenery.

A school that we passed.

Homes, part of the lake village.

Another school that we passed, they were just getting out. For "buses" they had a boat that would boat them to their home boats. Because the water was so shallow and some of the kids lived close enough I guess some would actually just swim home.

We stopped at this store, outside the boat they had a section where they were raising crocodiles...I wasn't so excited about seeing them there.

I don't know if you can really see but that little girl has a huge snake wrapped around her neck, we saw several like this. Trying to get people to take pictures and then give her money for taking the picture.

Some of the things to purchase in the store.

If you can't tell that is part of a snake in the bottle.

Scorpians!

Riding back in style...a couple of times kids would try to come up in their boats and beg for money, when they would do that one of the drivers would run up to them and have something to hit them with if they tried to talk to us---kind of a waking up experience for my first time being in Cambodia.

Because it was summer it was their drought season, the water was really shallow, maybe 2 or 3 feet deep. At some places where it was especially shallow our driver would turn the engine off completely and just let us flow. This boat had gotten really stuck and there was several other boats coming from both directions trying to get by.

Trying to get by the boat that was stuck and help them a little without getting us stuck ourselves.

It was interesting, at the beginning when we were going down the ramp someone had taken our picture, I hadn't really thought much about it until when we were getting off the boat and these two girls walked up to us with plates that had Andrea's picture and mine on them. We were really confused but we quickly realized that it's all about making money and that it would be something that we should be prepared to encounter many times before we headed home.