Mekong Towns to the Big City

     The day after our trek we had to wake up at six for an eight o'clock bus to Stung Treng.  It was another mini van bus so there were four of us crammed in.  Music was blasted out of a speaker right above my ear but luckily the three-hour time estimation included all the stops we had to make.
     The bus dropped us outside a hotel where were able to use a phone to call the place where we were staying (a wifi-less ecolodge four kilometers or so out of town).  A tuk-tuk came to pick us up and it was a bumpy but not unpleasant to the collection of cabins on the river.  Nobody at the lodge spoke any English and somehow they brought us three dishes of everything we ordered plus something we didn't order, but we conveyed 'save it for later' and polished everything off at dinner.
      Until six we were powerless but my parents went on a boat trip onto the Mekong while I caught up on some much-needed sleep.  It was still sweltering when they got back and we sat on the porch reading and swatting mosquitoes.  Malaria is so uncommon here that we've opted out of pills but apply bug spray religiously.
     The food had turned soggy by the time we ate but the setting was pleasant and it was cooling off enough to be comfortable.
     Maybe because of the large gaps in the floor, walls and roof and maybe because they don't really clean the cabins there were three spiders that we found in the room.  They went from big, bigger, to biggest but since I have no photographic proof I doubt anybody will believe me when I swear that the last, legs included, was the size of my dad's hand.  The large holes in the mosquito net were not reassuring.
      Apart from a frog in the toilet that my dad caught in a metal bowl and evicted after much clatter and clashing and some giant geckos fighting on the walls we were able to get safely under our placebo nets fairly quickly.
      The next morning we woke up at five thirty to pack up and go on boat trip.  Supposed to last until eleven it was almost nine before the tuk-tuk even brought us to the place to launch the boat.  We stopped for breakfast--spreadable cheese and pineapple marmalade that tasted of the fluoride you get at the dentist, but in a good way.
     I don't know what to call the boat.  It was the basic shape of a canoe but larger, and wider and flatter in the center.  There were no seats so instead we sat on a mat on the floor while the boat driver sat at one end and the two people from the hotel who accompanied us sat at the other.  A canopy covered three-quarters of the area.

     It took about an hour to reach our first stop.  It was a place where the river widened and a sand dune led up to a rocky plateau dropping off at off points to have waterfalls.   To get to a place where we had a view of a bunch of falls was a short walk and, including all the detours we had to make and jagged rocks we had to avoid, we were up there about forty minutes.  When we again came to the river we swam for a little while and then cut up and ate a couple of mangos.
                                     Since it's the dry season now a lot of what is normally submersed isn't, including the trees lining the banks.  Many of them with driftwood embedded in their branches, they are all bent over in a way some trees on the Oregon coast are from the wind.  Only here it's from the current.
     After backtracking to a few buildings with a line of flags in front of them, above where the river has eroded, the boat is stopped and our companions leave for a few minutes.  I'm not sure, but possibly it was the Laotian border crossing or at least a check-in about how close we would be to the border.
      There was a very small area not far from these buildings where the Mekong dolphins swim.  We stayed there for about forty five minutes and during that time a fleet of kayaks came and went.  The dolphins swam back and forth across it several times, because of the shape of their heads looking a lot like small Beluga whales.  They seemed to swim in pairs, though once when a pair came up to breathe they were circled by a third dolphin swimming on its side.
     When the motor was turned back on it took less than fifteen minutes to get back to where we left from.  I can officially now sleep through anything, after sleeping through an hour and a half on a tuk-tuk on dirt roads and waking up with a bruise on my temple where I rested my head.
     After a quick stop at the Bird Lodge to grab our bags the tuk-tuk took us to a hotel in town, attractive for its closeness to other restaurants and lack of giant spiders.  The air con was nice, too.
     Only a little over a block away from our hotel was a restaurant called Ponika's Place where we ate dinner.  They served both Cambodian and Western foods, and while my parents enjoyed veggie amoks I gloried in a pepper pasta.  Being back in a place with wifi I started working on my last blog but was burnt out before it was finished.  Kung Fu Panda was on (in English) and we caught the end before retiring.
     The bus (assume it's a mini van unless otherwise named) came at eleven and we had a leisurely morning, going pack to Ponika's Place for breakfast.  For whatever reason nobody else sat in our row and it was only three ours to Kratie.  Kratie is another nice Mekong-front town and we had a late lunch at the Balcony Hotel.  Everything on the menu looked good but I figure that I should eat veggie burgers when they are on offer.  It was inedible, but the restaurant overlooked the river.
     That night we went out searching for ice cream but all the restaurants either were closed or didn't serve it. Disappointed, we instead ate fruit we found in the market.   The boardwalk was emptying out and there was a perfect orange crescent moon above the river.  
 
      The bus to Kompung Cham was a tourist bus!  That means rows of four big, obviously divided airplane-esque seats divided by an aisle.  For that trip it also meant 'almost empty'.  Some passengers were picked up on the way, but even at its fullest each passenger could have had their own pair of seats.
     About twenty kilometers away from Kompung Cham the bus overheated and we pulled over to let it cool down.  Since in the heat that could easily have taken until well after sundown we nabbed a passing van with room for three more.  Unsurprisingly we were smooshed in but after a false scare where we unloaded our luggage and everything we arrived nead the town's center.  Immediately we were swarmed by motorbike drivers but then one of them went and found a tuk-tuk for us.  Both the hotels in town were on the river and during our time there that was the street we stayed on.  Next door to our hotel was the Smile Restaurant, a non-profit organization with mediocre food.  
    Through our hotel we organized  a tuk-tuk to take us to the nearby weaving village.  There we made stops at a few houses, the first wear a woman wove the traditional red-and-white checked scarves on a large wooden loom, the second at the house where the threads were dyed using plant dyes and then wound into huge spools, and the third at a silk-weaver's house.  The house we made our second stop at dates from before the Khmer Rouge, and is a really nice house with bamboo floors.  To look at their cloths we were invited in and sat on the floor of the main room.  
 
                               
  
    
  At the third house the silk was beautiful but felt almost like a cheat, since the pattern was pre-dyed onto the thread and the weaver had nothing to do with it.  There was some banter about ages while we were there and at one point the weaver asked my mother to guess hers.  People age so differently here and she looked about seventy, but my mom was sweet and guessed 'thirty eight'.  She felt really bad when the woman was thirty two, but she didn't take offense.
     Our last stop in the village was for sugar cane juice.
     From there we were taken to Wat Nokor, a modern Buddhist pagoda squeezed into the walls of an eleventh-century sandstone temple.  The roofs looked almost like they were held up with a keystone but weren't, and we walked under them very quickly.  Cats lounged on the floor of the temple and bats on the ceiling.
                                 The tuk-tuk left us at the bridge to an island.  For years the bamboo bridge has been rebuilt at the start of the dry season but they are building a permanent one this year.  Motorcycles and bikes whizzed back and forth and the mats rattles noisily.  The bamboo sank, a bit like a trampoline but without so much spring, beneath them and when it was dark the make-shift powerline turned lamps on.   
                              
     It's confusing converting into and out of the metric system.  When we walked back to our hotel from there we thought that eight hundred meters was nothing but though it isn't far it's almost a kilometer.  My parents went out to dinner without me while I blogged and, finally, got a post done and, in case you were wondering, I was able to persuade them about the ice cream.
      The next morning we took a taxi at ten thirty to Phnom Penh.  At the suggestion of the hotel we bought the entire back seat of the Toyota Corolla and were so glad we did because it turns out they normally cram nine people into those things.  As it was two women shared the passenger's seat, a man sat in the driver's seat, and the driver sat half on the driver's seat and half off, braking and accelerating with his left food.  They talked constantly, often speaking over eachother and always at the top of their lungs all three hours to the city.
     It turned out we were able to charge the keyboard so I'm back out of the land of unwanted autocorrect.  Sorry if some of those sentences last time made less sense than usual.