Mad About The Mekong

For those prone to sleepwalking I do not recommend a homestay in one of Cambodia’s Mekong floating villages. Waking in the night to use the toilet, I have to walk outside under the stars and follow a narrow plank over the water to do my business. My nocturnal visit to the bathroom is the cause of great commotion in the household. The floorboards on the 200 square foot home creak and the house itself rocks as I stumble up out of my mosquito net, careful not to step out the front door right into the river. In the small outhouse I squat over the hole in the floor. My hosts have kindheartedly put a western toilet over the hole for their homestay guests. I am unwell tonight and have mastered the plank-walk keeping the entire household awake. My emergency deposits in the river are congratulated by thunderous belching from creatures below; there are crocodiles underneath the toilet.

Home on the Sangkar

Being surrounded by water traveling through remote regions of Cambodia has its challenges. One can feel stranded in a floating house where children paddle to school in wooden canoes and shopping involves a trip up river to a floating market. Without a boat, the nearest coffee shop from my homestay in the village of Prek Toal is a 300-meter swim across the river. Swimming is not recommended due to the large jaws on the local livestock not to mention the crock’s supplementary diet of human feces.

The next morning I make my way to the coffee shop despite my bout with dysentery. I don’t bother swimming or hitching a canoe ride from the local school kids. I am exploring Cambodia by stand- up paddleboard.

The floating community of Prek Taol is located at the bottom of the Sangkar River where it flows into the northwestern side of the Tonle Sap Lake. From there the river and the lake flow into the Mekong and also from it, depending on the season. The Mekong River is considered in Cambodia to be the Mother. The annual floods push the rivers flow from the Mekong up into the lake and the Sangkar River creating one of the most unique bio-diverse fresh water eco-systems in the world. The Tonle Sap is a womb which becomes full late October or early November. At its peak it turns around and flows back out to the Mekong and then down through the Delta in Vietnam and out to the Bay of Thailand.

This is my third year exploring the cycles and balance of life sustained by Cambodia’s Mekong ebb and flow. In 2010 I paddleboarded nearly 400 miles of the river from Stung Treng at the boarder of Laos to Phnom Penh spending a month living along the river and paddling up to 25 miles a day. With the help of a grassroots Cambodian NGO I organized and led a group of eight Coloradans on the adventure to help raise awareness about proposed dams along the river and their consequences. It was the first ever Mekong adventure by SUP and was the maiden voyage of the non-profit Stand Up For Rivers. At the time we thought our expedition would create waves in the media as SUP was on the brink of becoming one of the fastest growing water sports in the world. By the end of that adventure we all went back to the mountains broke and exhausted, ready for another ski season working in the service industry. Under our belts however we had new skills and knowledge, not to mention great stories to tell. We could catch crickets as well as any 10 year old along the river and roast them on a fire for appetizers. Along the way we helped families harvest in the rice paddies. We learned a lot about what’s at stake along the Mekong and went back feeling deflated in our abilities to intervene in devastating dam projects already in the making.

I returned to Colorado that December to my full time job as a radio journalist skiing in my spare time. Yet in the depth of winter I was still dreaming of walking on the currents of the Mekong on my inflatable paddleboard. One morning I opened my computer to find that I had been tagged in a Facebook photo. The photo was taken in Kratie, a town along the Mekong. A group of young adults carried a banner in an organized protest. The banner read: “ Protect the Mekong. The River is like a mother’s breast milk.” I recognized some of the people in the photo from discussions we had in communities along the way down the river. Many people we encountered knew nothing about the dams proposed or they were afraid to discuss the subject . The photo drew me out of apathetic powdery winter slumber. Our expedition had made a difference. Even if adventure magazines weren’t tearing down our doors for interviews we had mobilized people in their own communities to stand up for their beloved river. When I leaned the following summer I was being laid off due to cuts in funding for public media, I decided to continue my paddleboard expeditions in S.E. Asia …come hell or high water. I saved as much as could that summer and lugged two inflatable SUPS on the plane back to Cambodia.

And high water it was. 2011 was one of the most devastating flood years S. E. Asia had seen in decades. According to United Nations reports an estimated 3000 people drown in Thailand and Cambodia and roughly a million houses were under water when I arrived in late October. At the time Starboard SUP workers left their factory in Bangkok under flood alert, hopped on their boards and paddled to deliver aid to trapped flood victims. Shortly thereafter I reaped the benefit of the floods by surfing Siem Reap in a tidal surge. (Perhaps I will tell this tale someday but for now I am sworn to secrecy…and besides, reader, you would not believe it anyway.) I also took advantage of the high water to organize a small expedition down the Sangkar River from Battambang to Siem Reap. As the swollen river vacated the forests and rice paddies to push its way out to the Tonle Sap Lake, I covered the one hundred mile stretch in four days. It was a record woman-powered run and a first-ever journey on the tributary river by SUP. For this trip I enlisted Srey Mao, a good friend and my translator from the Mekong adventure. We brought her parents and uncle in a small fishing boat for our support team along with a couple French backpackers who had never paddleboarded before but were chosen primarily for their fun-factor. Srey Mao’s family members had not had a vacation since the Khmer Rouge, a brutal war that killed a quarter of their population in the mid 1970’s and left them destitute. Before the war her parents were teachers and their future looked bright. Now they make a living climbing fruit trees and harvesting rice. They live on less than a $1000 dollars a year, not including what money Srey Mao contributes from her work as a freelance artist.

Battambang put-in

Once again I found myself in a remote village surrounded by onlookers feeling like a circus performer as I pumped up my SUP and loaded up the support boat. And once again the support boat for my journey was a humble craft that would magically transform itself into a floating kitchen of gastronomic wonders. The upper section of the Sangkar in Basttambang was littered with debris from the flood. Srey Mao was clearly excited to be back on a paddleboard, having learned the sport one year ago on the Mekong. She wanted to show off for her village and was also undaunted by the pig carcass and other surprises that awaited us in the muck at the river put-in near her family home. Our French comedians held their noses and climbed aboard the support vessel in their muddy Tevas. They took turns holding Thursday night’s chicken dinner. Its legs were bound but the pissed-off bird clearly needed her beak taped shut. Her voyage was cut short early however. In one bitter sweet moment she was permanently silenced and confined to the cooler, which by the way had no ice, a small overlook that delayed our start and that led to my own bothersome squawking. Ah yes, another maiden SUP voyage was launched in Cambodia.

Smiling faces on the Tonle Sap

A few hours after departure the river opened up and the smiling faces waving and shouting “hello, hello” from the shore began to make way for long stretches of flooded fields and forests. An orchestra of birdsong grew in intensity alongside the distant putter of the support boat’s motor purposely keeping a kind distance.

The light in S.E. Asia is different then it is in other places. I contemplate my obsession with paddle boarding and the Mekong in particular. The reflections play tricks on my eyes. Strange metallic colors melt from the sky into the water and bounce back into the sky. There is no up or down. I am in that place called abyss, sttanding on a moving mass of water, a mercury swirl, between worlds. Mirrors, water, sky, vast emptiness, nowhere and everywhere all at once. Fear, anticipation, even exhaustion eludes me. Eventually hunger calls me back.

Around the next bend in the river Srey Mao’s mother is preparing lunch on a small ceramic charcoal stove. It’s the number one famous Khmer dish called Fish Amok, a custardy stew that looks and tastes like its name. Fish, coconut and rice are the primary foods that will sustain us along the river.

Grocery shopping in a floating village

For the next several days I paddled with the current stopping in villages along the way to play with children on the sups and ponder the wonders of a floating life. To my amazement, in one village I came upon a floating ice cream man ringing his ice cream bell. I paddled to a small house and brought a young boy on my sup to buy a frozen coconut treat. It might have been the best ice cream I ever had.

Sweet hitchhiker

The villagers were excited to see these strangers floating through town and some were willing to switch vessels and try out the SUPS. One woman wanted to tie her pet monkey on my paddleboard but the poor screaming creature barred his teeth and I feared he would bite a whole in my inflatable board. Toddlers floated in metal washbasins while their mothers bathed with buckets on the deck of their home. At night we slept on a floating house or strung our hammocks on wooden platforms. In the morning the monks would paddle by with their orange umbrellas to offer blessings.

On the first morning we woke up on a covered raft and stared with dread at the small hole cut into the floor understanding its purpose but unsure how to “go”. Not even a curtain was strung to separate the hole from the rest of the room. Srey Mao and I contemplated sharing with the Frenchmen the old sarong trick but the idea of these guys squatting under the folds of a makeshift skirt sent us into hysterics at the poor fellows’ expense. We took mercy on them and suggested a visit to the school to use the bathroom. It is the only place in the village with a toilet that was equip with walls and a door. Our mistake on that first morning however was that we arrived a little too late. Already the students were tying up their boats and piling into the classrooms when we arrived. There was a great deal of confusion because a visit by foreigners to rural schools in Cambodia almost always involves gifts such as candy and pencils. The children did not understand why we came to see their bathroom. The following morning I am up at dawn determined to beat the children to school. As I step onto my SUP one of the Frenchmen hands me a roll of toilet paper. “Don’t forget your homework,” he chides.

Perhaps because our trips to the toilet led us directly to schools that first year down the Sangkor, I was unaware of the strategic placement of the crocodile pens adjacent to and under the floating homes. Along the way we paddled up to the pens and peered inside at the sleeping beasts, sometimes tapping the cage with our paddles for excitement. Often they would be piled on top of one another barely opening an eye to see whose there. We saw so many croc pens on that journey that we joked about croc bacon, croc stew, and croc steaks. We asked along the way if people ate the crocodiles. One man shook his head, laughed, and just said “Loy loy”, the Khmer word for money.

In the wild the fresh water crocodiles known as Siamese crocodiles are critically endangered in S.E. Asia. Yet they are also one of the top ten exports in Cambodia. Commercial crocodile farming and hydroelectric dams are believed to be the biggest threats to the dwindling population. Farming crocodiles in Cambodia began in the 1940’s after the French banned skin harvesting in the wild. By 2000 nearly 400 farms around the Tonle Sap produced over 20,000 crocs. Most are sold to Thailand and Vietnam where they are skinned or sold as stock. A small percentage end up sliced, packaged and ground to make exotic “local fare” for gullible tourists in Siem Reap. It’s true Cambodian’s have a reputation for eating just about everything but I have yet to meet one who admits to eating crocodiles.

When we arrived in Prek Toal at the end of that first journey on the Sangkor my companions and I bid farewell to our support team. Srey Mao’s family reversed the journey and headed back up the river. Near the mouth of the lake we flagged down a tourist boat to Siem Reap. Along the way we did what most adventurers do on their way back into civilization. We spoke of showers and hamburgers.

Later that evening cleaned up and dressed for a night on the town we walked down Pub Street where we chose a restaurant made famous for it’s crocodile burgers. Already feeling nostalgic for our trip through the floating villages on the Sangkor, we each ordered the signature dish and a bottle of red wine to share.

“Sante” said one of the Frenchmen. “Bon Appetit,” said the other.

If only I knew then what I know now.