The Southeast Asia Travel Specialists Since 1999
What follows is a brief account and selection of photos of our Cambodia boat trip from Siem Reap to Battambang. I think we first ran this Cambodia boat trip way back in 2000. It was a very different country in those days and the journey across the Tonle Sap and up the Sangkar River to Battambang was an adventurous…
The mouth of western Cambodia’s Sangkar (or Sangkae) River lies concealed amid a maze of water-hyacinth clogged waterways, endless reed marshes and clouds of egrets in the far northwestern corner of the vast but shallow Tonle Sap Lake. Anyone with a window seat between Bangkok and Siem Reap may have peered down on these extensive wetlands and unique eco-system where…
A few photos from our recent Cambodia Overland tour: good trip, great bunch of travellers and we think, (hope), much fun had by all! First up a colourful collection of hats on the fried spider and grub vendors in Kompong Cham Province’s Skuon Town – on route for Siem Reap. The rainy season weather held out well for us too…
Traditionally the kingdom’s 2nd largest city, the western town of Battambang Cambodia has surely been overtaken by now by booming Siem Reap and although still relatively prosperous from the Province’s fine farming land, (indeed it’s sometimes known as ‘Cambodia’s rice bowl’), it has been largely bypassed by the country’s tourism boom. Well until recently that is but these days Battambang’s…
The famous floating villages and fishing communities around Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake are well known with the more easily accessible ones such as Chong Kneas and Kompong Phleuk now firmly on tourist itineraries. Far less known are these river nomads of western Cambodia – people who spend the whole year travelling up and down the rivers leading into the huge…
Our boat journey through Cambodia from Siem Reap, across the Tonle Sap Lake and down the Sangkar River to Western Cambodia’s Battambang Town, was a particularly tricky one this month due to the combination of low water levels on the lake and a slow current on the river itself which had lead to a serious build-up of the pestilent water…
We’ll round up our Cambodia boat journey series on this highly picturesque river with a selection of typical Sangkar River landscapes. We do feel that photos, or at least our photos, don’t really do the scenery justice though. It’s not like trying to capture a beach, mountain or say a sunset – these are such broad vistas and 360-degree landscapes…
Following on from our bird-life post here’s a selection of some of the everyday, local life on the Sangkar River we’ve photographed on recent trips along this spectacular, picturesque and unusual river in western Cambodia: The lower stretch of the river, closer to the great Tonle Sap Lake sees the largest fluctuation in water levels between rainy and dry season…
Just a few pix from our latest visit to the Prek Toal Saray Water Hyacinth Handicraft Project in Cambodia’s Siem Reap Province. Already mentioned this excellent scheme a few times before, (e.g. see here), so won’t go into any details for now but thought we’d add a few photos on the subject since our recent trip was by far the…
Thanks very much to Blanca who actually mailed us these Cambodian boat journey photos ages ago but which we only recently retrieved from a semi-redundant in-box! Now getting out and pushing trucks, buses and assorted vehicles stuck in the mud is part of adventure tour mythology but on the Cambodia Overland tour in question we thought we’d better go one…