Day 124: Ban Lung to Kratie

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2059204&l=b072f&id=1101094

The following morning I rose with the sun to catch a 6:15 bus to Kratie (pronounced kra-cheh), five hours southwest of Ban Lung and halfway to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. There wasn’t much to do in Kratie, but I planned to check out the market, wander around town, and maybe take a trip up the Mekong to see some freshwater dolphins if time permitted.

When the bus finally arrived at the Ban Lung station at 7am, my sleepy fellow passengers and I were rather annoyed, but the reason for the delay soon became apparent: the bus was a total piece of trash. Falling apart inside and out, it was a wonder that the thing was still running at all. We packed our luggage into the compartments under the bus, which didn’t even close properly, but the inside of the bus was full and so there was little else we could do.

The first half of the ride, over dirt roads, was horrendous, despite the fact that two days earlier in the minibus it had been quite alright. I attributed the difference to a lack of shocks on the current bus. The second half of the trip was considerably better, as the road between Stung Treng and Kratie had been paved only a year earlier.

The whole way to Kratie we stopped every half hour for what I at first assumed were bathroom and cigarette breaks. But when I finally ventured outside the bus at one of the stops to see what was going on, I realized that the bathroom and cigarette breaks were ancillary; the real reason we were stopping was to dump water over the bus’ overheating engine. Once we even stopped at a stream to refill the water bottles that we being used to store the engine-cooling water. Clearly, this bus was in tip-top shape.

We finally arrived in Kratie, to the relief of everyone aboard, but when we pulled our luggage out from under the bus all we saw were orange blobs. It seems that due to the fact that the luggage compartments wouldn’t close, the dust from the dirt road had blown in and covered everything in a thick layer of orange. That night I spent half an hour scrubbing my pack until it was decidedly black again.

I found a $4 room in town, and the guesthouse owner convinced me to come along on a trip up the river to see the rare Irrawaddy dolphin, one of the few marine animals that can live in both salt and fresh water. I had an hour to kill before we left, so I headed for the market, which turned out to be cleaner and far less interesting that the ones in Stung Treng and Ban Lung had been. Only a few women were screaming out prices, dead animal carcasses were nowhere to be found, and everything had a depressing degree of organization that seemed unfitting for a place where chaos is so often king. Apparently the dirtier the Cambodian market, the more interesting it is. I guess that shouldn’t surprise me.

The trip to see the Irrawaddy dolphins was surprisingly successful; though my guidebook had warned that seeing even one dolphin wasn’t a certainty, my boat saw at least ten, and some of them multiple times. The closest one surfaced a mere four feet from the bow of our boat! Unfortunately, by the time I swung my camera to snap a photo of one of them, it had usually vanished under the surface of the water; even my best photos show only a dorsal fin or a tail breaking the surface. Nevertheless, the chance to see these rare creatures (fewer than 100 remain in the world!) was well worth the trip.