Another day begins. The village alarm clock goes at 5am.Loaded ferries and small boats carry children to school and people to work. It has just gone 6am.

Today is our last day on the river. Tomorrow we return to Oudong to take a bus to Seam Riep and then to Angkor Wat. This morning we visit a local village market for the lake area. Here is your shopping list:

 sugar cane juice fermented?

  Water bugs

 It’Bunnings!

All you need to build a basic stilt house.

Just upriver is a floating village. Houses are floated on the green bamboo sticks you can see above. They are tied together and then cross bars of wood and bamboo are added. Some houses may be floated on large empty plastic drums. The house floor is added and then the house walls are added. 

As you can see in the picture above, some houses are set up as shops for goods, others are used as fish processing plants, or coffee shops. One enterprising person had chickens in a coup and had done a bamboo extension with dirt on it to grow herbs and vegetables. Some small boats provide “fast food” of rice and vegetables to the people in the houses. There is a communal house and school. Most of the houses are owned by ethnic Vietnamese. They are moveable if necessary and no tax.

Tomorrow we leave the ship and bus to Seam Reap. From here we will go to the Ancient city of Angkor Wat. The river is too low to allow us to enter the lake.