One Fine Day in Kratie

Since the road to Kratie was upgraded last year, the boat stopped running. Prior to the upgrade most sensible people for the smooth transit up the river instead of the jolted bus ride along the pot holed road past Kampong Cham. But a quicker, smoother and cheaper bus trip has put the boat company out of business and the bus is the only way to travel now.

After many lazy, lingering weekends in Phnom Penh I was feeling restless. Time hangs around your neck like a weight in the city. Whiling it away in bars and cafes is pleasant enough, but do this too much and life becomes bland. But it's not just the weekends. Much of my week can seem like an extension of this leisure time. My 'working' hours would be best described as an orgy of procrastination if there was an activity I was seeking to avoid. But I have arrived at a time of political friction and restructure. We are at a standstill and staff are in a state of constant inactivity. The lunch break has crept up to three hours. Mindful of mental side effects of too much idleness I resolved to escape the city for at least a weekend.

Kratie is a small provincial town on the backroad to Laos. I could be forgiven for thinking otherwise when the swarm of touts converged on us at the bus station. Though the ten foreigners began their search for a hotel together, we were soon wedged apart by a tide of enterprising Khmers. We all ended up at different hotels. Nat and I spent the afternoon relaxing after the long bus journey. We wandered amongst the market stalls, drank coconuts by the river and ate and talked through the early evening with multilingual backpackers.

The next day, after an early breakfast, we set off on motorbikes along the small sealed road up the river. Fifteen kilometres north of Kratie, past small settlements of stilt houses, is the Kampi Pool - a deep water bowl in the wide expanse of the Mekong. With some fellow travellers, we hired a boat skippered by a surly youth soliciting extra funds. As he padelled slowly out into the vastness of the river it started to happen. "Oh" said the people at the front of the boat. "Wow" exclaimed the Mexican on the other side. I could hear the soft sloshing noises break the deep mid-river silence, but despite my bobbing swivling head, I could not yet see the source of my fellow passengers' amazement. But then I did.

A large sleek figure floated serenely through the water surface, arched its back and swooped below again, puncturing the water with a serene splosh. My first freshwater dolphin sighting! Flatnosed, but no less personable than their salt water cousins, the Irrawaddy or Mekong dolphins were once all through South East Asia. Now only a few roam the sparsely populated stretch of the Mekong from northern Cambodia to southern Laos. Very soon they we popping up all around us. At times they seemed to be approaching the boat and we half expected them to rise up right before us. But they would invariably dive deep underneath us and appear a safe distance from us on the other side. Gradually the dolphins appeared less frequently and after a while we stopped seeing them all together. A Dutch woman rebuked our reluctant skipper for letting us drift out of their territory. She pointed to some small islands up in the middle of the river and after much cajouling the boy rowed us out there. But all we found was silence from the river and soft haunting music floating towards us from the forest on the far bank. In their own time the dolphins started appearing to us again. They started jumping out in pairs and squirting water into the air. Everywhere we looked we saw them. For a brief time they conducted a breathtaking display of simultaneous jumping. At one point we saw five jump and roll back together. Then the show died down again and we saw them no more. The boy refused my request to take us to the rapids upstream, but I felt so calm and happy I didn't care.

Back on dry land we took the deteriorating road further north. The villages became more distinct and the fields tidier. We stopped at a small stand overlooking three elongated islands and sipped cane sugar juice. I was hot, dusty and tired and needed the sugar. Just off the road we entered a large Buddhist temple. We squatted on mats with the old caretakers and talked about kangaroo pouches and joeys. One of the men, a true bodhisattva, passed me a cup of holy rose water and i went outside to wash. As i wiped the sweat and dust from my face a small imp of a boy playfully taunted me with furtive hellos and then hid behind the temple colums. After i finished washing i tracked him to the corner of the temple to take my revenge but he had disapeared. We thanked the caretakers, made a donation and left by the back door. As we exited the imp appeared and launched another lateral hello attack. Our guide laughed and told us that the boy looked like a Khmer version of me.

We road back towards Kratie in the midday sun. It was the deep siesta and, save for the occassional stray chicken, traffic was light. We stopped at a small restaurant and ate spicy fish soup and vegetables and then pressed on to our final sight of the day.

To be continued...