Cathye's Adventures
 Dolphin watching in the Mekong Soda picked us up at 7.30am as planned and we headed 15km north to the village of Kampi, where you can take a boat out to see the endangered Irrawaddy river dolphins. Soda's tuk tuk was not the flashiest on the rank, and we wondered if it would make it?! The suspension was completely shot and every time we went over a bump, we felt the shock on out feet through the rackety floorboards. These scooters don't have radiators so soda had rigged up a large water container to drip down onto the motor to cool it as we trudged along. We had to stop and refill the water container a few times on the way... Which was fun as we usually got water from someone's house and Soda knew everyone in this area! He was a French teacher at the local secondary school, and lived next door to the school at the pagoda with the monks. His parents lived in a village nearby as well. We passed lots of Soda's students on our journey and they all waved out. We passed a broken down tuk tuk at one point, with two tourists sitting beside it. A few minutes later soda got a call on his cell phone. The tuk tuk driver asked Soda to come back and pick up the two tourists and take them to the dolphins while the tuk tuk was being fixed. So we back tracked and picked p two young French travellers and soda was wrapped to be able to talk to them! They said his French was really good. At Kampi, we hired went with the French couple on a local boat to see the dolphins. This boat was 100 per cent safer looking than the ones we had travelled on to Koh Trong island. Our driver looked about 14! But he was excellent, he knew just where to find the dolphins among the small sand islands in the middle of the Mekong, and we had an amazing hour watching and photographing these elusive and rare creatures. We must have seen 20 or so individuals and there are only a couple of hundred left in the area. Just magic. We all had enormous smiles as we headed back to Kampi, where the French couple's tuk tuk driver, a friend of Soda's, awaited. We bought a couple of hand carved dolphins at the local souvenir stalls and headed further north to the 100 pillar pagoda and turtle conservation project run by the monks there. Here we met more of Soda's students, and had a lovely encounter with some rare soft shelled turtles, which are endangered in the Mekong. The monks explained their project to us and Soda interpreted. The monks are educating the local fishermen to protect the turtles and raising some in captivity to be released to improve local populations. On the way back to Krqtie, we visited one more Buddhist pagoda. This one was on the top of a small hill, so we climbed to the top through the forest after a brief monsoon shower. The view from the top was brilliant around the local countryside. The tuk tuk ran out of petrol just before the end of our journey. Luckily, in Cambodia (and Vietnam) you do not need a petrol,station to buy petrol. Just about every second house sells it by the soft drink bottle-full, and some have small hand pump containers of it... So he only had to walk a few metres to get a 2 litre coke bottle full of petrol and pour it into the tank and we were off again. What a great day we had with Soda!
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Diary Photos
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Pot seller |
 Artisans at work, how the temple carvings were made |
 Master stone carver |
 Coconuts in transit |
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