Day two in Cambodia

 Day Two – Around Siem Reap, Cambodia

The Rest of the Tour

The next day Art took us to a floating village. Now our tour said two days at the ruins, and there were more ruins to see, but at this point it was just Erin and us and we all went along with what Art thought we should do. We saw more of Cambodia and one day of ruins felt like enough. Cambodia has the biggest fresh water lake in South East Asia. It is the home for many people and livelihood for even more. Fish from this lake is the country's number one source of protein. Depending on the time of year the lake depth fluctuates from 2 to 22 meters deep or so and the size shrinks and expands accordingly . I have never seen anything like the floating village. There are houses, stores, schools, health centers, restaurants, all on floating rafts. They all move when the area becomes too shallow to another deeper part of the lake. The trees are under water at this time of the year and we could only see the top branches sticking up like bushes. This is not a village on stilts as we saw in other places, all these structures are floating and movable. The people are mostly fishermen. There is quite a bit of tourism too. This is a very different way of life.

A floating store.

One way kids get around on the lake.

We next went to an art insititute where they are trying to preserve the ancient, traditional, art techniques of Cambodia. Students are picked from allover the country to come here and study a partiular art form and go back to their village to set up shop, or continue ti wir in Siem Reap at the institute. The arts included where lacure painting, wood and stone sculpture, metal work. The quality was beautiful and I really wish we had bought something. But we are always worrying about carrying more so we just looked.

The day ended at the National Museum a big brandnew building. By the time we were done in there we were ancient historied out. The day was very eye opening as we drove aorund and stopped at these and other places (like a lotus farm). We saw how people were living, the effects of recent flooding (its the rainy season) and snippets of day today life. I really liked Cambodia, as Dave said “Cambodia, the best thing about Thailand!)

Back to Thailand and then on to Bali in the next blog.