Siem Reap-Cambodia: for all those willing to discover the Angkor Wat temple & the incredible Lake Tonle Sap, this is where you go … If the country has a long border with Thailand, everything there is very different. French is still to be heard, poverty is more obvious & you can feel how History has left deep scars, through concerned looks & smiles… The first impression you have if arriving through a land border is a harsh one: the long concrete bridge joining the border is erected above … a vast gulf of plastic waste. Despite all those aspects – or may be even because of them, Cambodia feels like an authentic & really moving place, with green landscapes really remembering me some norman countryside
Angkor Wat is as splendid as mystical as it is said to be & the idea to go paddling around the site on the dovers has obvisouly crossed my mind … Not so easy to do though, as the local police officer opposes a firm « no ». No need to insist… it is only a few hours later, upon leaving, that I decided to give it a try again. A policeman more intrigued than the others seem to find some fun in the challenge… I’m not totally sure he understood what I wanted to do, but here we go, & here I am drawing under the bridge. Magical! really curious to know managed to do so previoulsy…
My next SUP navigation twill be the Tonle Sap lake a few kilometers away. A lake / river that can extend from 40 to 140 kilometers, the lake is both a reservoir & an overflow for the Mekong & benefits from an exceptional ecosystem gathering hundreds of species & has been recognized a biosphere by Unesco in 1997. A boat takes us to the nearest fishermen village, a great opportunity to put my guide & my driver on a board … and some local children as well!. Despite the fact that it is supposed to be a lake, Tonlé Sap really feels like a huge sea…the wind is blowing, choppy waves are making it hard to raw sometimes. Here close to the water, the plastic phenomenon is particularly visible & frightening…even if this doesn’t prevent children from having fun bathering.
