Home Sweet Home

Through the magic of Google Earth -- one of the coolest things ever -- I can show you where I live. This is Phnom Penh.


The turquoise circle in the bottom left is where I live now. The circle in the far opposite corner is where my first apartment was. The big box beneath it is the Royal Palace. I could see it from my kitchen window. The circle in the center is where I work. It's easy to see my commute. I drive parallel to the bottom of the picture on Mao Tse Toung Blvd, make a left onto Monivong Blvd, make a right onto Street 214 and I'm there. It usually takes about 10 minutes.

The smaller box on the right of the image is the Koh Pich footbridge. This is where the stampede happened during the Water Festival, during which nearly 400 people lost their lives. I started a post about that, but every time I try to go back to it I quickly lose interest. It's just not a fun thing to write about.

The yellow circle at the top is where I hope to move next month.

The river closest to the Royal Palace is the Tonle Sap River, which I've written about before because it's the only river in the world that changes direction. You can see the tip of a peninsula in the top right corner. The river on the other side is the Upper Mekong, which joins the Tonle Sap River and the Bassac River, which curls under the bottom of the photo. The Lower Mekong splits off around the tip of the peninsula.

Tonle Sap

After spending one day at Angkor I took a boat from Siem Reap to the town of Battambang. To get there you cross the biggest lake in Cambodia, called Tonle Sap, then spend several hours traveling on the Strung Sanker (Sanker River)

I wanted to see Tonle Sap because it's one of the Things That May Interest Only Me. In the western world we think of the monsoon season in Southeast Asia as being roughly akin to hurricane season in the states. But it's not. We can go years without seeing a major hurricane. During the monsoon it rains every day.

To fully understand how much rain falls, look at Tonle Sap. The lake is connected to the Mekong by a short waterway called the Tonle Sap River. I'm sitting in an internet cafe on the riverfront in Phnom Penh and can actually see where the rivers join.

During the rainy season it rains so much that Tonle Sap becomes five times bigger. The reason for the massive increase in surface area is not what you might expect. The Mekong receives so much water that it forces the Tonle Sap River to change direction and flow back into the lake.

From the boat it just looks like a lake, of course. But what was interesting was navigating the narrow twists and turns of the Sanker, and seeing how the local people live in a way that you don't see in a tourist area like Siem Reap.

We went through a narrow channel with vegetatin so thick that at times we had to lean into the boat to keep from getting whacked by passing branches.



We passed through a series of floating villages. People build houses that float on the river. When the river rises, the houses don't flood. Buildings on the riverbank are built on stilts.

The river is low now, which slows down the boats. During the wet season the trip takes about five hours. It took us nine. At times we had to slow to almost a standstill to navigate the narrow channels.



But these were major metropolises compared to what we saw for the next several hours before we reached Battambang. We traveled for miles and miles through areas where people lived on the river bank in thatch huts, or sometimes just slept on the ground under tarps. These were probably the poorest communities I've ever seen with my own eyes.



And yet we were always greeted by throngs of children. During the day we saw them working on boats. This little girl got caught by surprise.



Late in the afternoon they were all in the river playing. They would wave and yell and splash. I am in perpetual amazement at the resiliency and strength of children. I've met so many kids who are literally dirt poor. No shoes, no toys, no electricity, etc. And yet kids everywhere love to laugh and play and wave at tourists. It's truly one of the joys of traveling.