Living on the water

Image28 November – I have left behind 7 hours' sailing that I did to travel from Battambang to Siem Reap. The road wouldn’t have been quicker, in spite of the moderate distance, 170 km. By boat however the experience was novel and particularly so in this region where you can see not only an unusual environment, but also the lifestyle of people living in the so called floating villages.It was not the most comfortable trip. During those 7 hours I was sitting, lying, crouching, squatting; I just didn't know what a posture I could take to alleviate the ache in the muscles caused by the obliged position. Sitting on the cabin roof, on the other hand, was nice, but also a forced choice, since all the indoor seats were taken and the group of the last 15 or so passengers, all foreigners, was seated on the roof.Usually the roof wouldn't be an area apt to accommodate people, but on these boats they cram as many passengers as they can in their greed for profit, here too at special rates for foreigners.

 

It was a long trip under the sun – and it is no joke here – but I was adequately equipped with long sleeves, cap and shades. My big backpack was at the bow of the boat and before long I needed to fetch it to retrieve my camera that I had forgotten. After spotting it in the sloppy luggage heap, I had to insist with the boatman who didn't want to let me wreck it by taking an element out from the base. But I succeeded and it didn't collapse. I nearly managed to lose a foot though, because I realized way too late that while I was letting myself down from the roof I had a spinning wheel of the old noisy engine at just few centimetres away from me. But my scare from self-delusion may have been bigger that the actual risk.

ImageThe river scene was very interesting to observe and the lake too, when the two banks had been lost and we had enterer the myriad intricate canals bordered by floating vegetation in some places, and somewhere else rooted at the bottom, some sparse trees rising from the water here and there. I couldn't spot a real lake shore, and only the last stretch was across open waters just before reaching land at the pier, 11 km away from Siem Reap.Plenty of people live on the lake shores and even in the canals inside the lake. Stranded as they are and lacking land transport, how can they possibly live birth, illness, death? How can they face the darkness of night, bad weather, the monsoon? Some own a miserable however dignified little darned dinghy, on which they must spend their day, their family life. Their limbs must be crippled, although I noticed that they use their arms a lot to manoeuvre the big nets stretched on large bamboo frames, that after being plunged in the water are heaved up with some trapped minnows. Yet after 7 hours in a boat I felt broken-boned and I couldn't wait to get off, so I can hardly imagine spending a whole lifetime in these conditions.

Some villages consist of just a group of boats in the middle of this wilderness, others look more organized, have some stilt houses, even a school. I saw shop-boats that take around foodstuff, coal, odds and ends to eat and live. Several boats were fitted with a rudimentary TV aerial and I saw someone selling car batteries that must be the only source of electricity to operate the TV set. In some boats clothes were hung out to dry after being washed in the unclear waters, in others fish were drying out in the sun.The passage of our relatively fast boat formed waves that rocked these flimsy boats, and brought unrest with a wave that broke on the river banks, agitated or risked entangling the fishermen's nets marked by many plastic bottles that held them to the water surface. I saw plenty of small-sized fish wriggle in a funny jump out of water at the passage of the wave. Surely this panicky jump risked landing them on the muddy shore and choking them in the absence of water. It's maybe better to wait for one's own destiny without too much zeal to change it…