The day began with a visit to a local fish farm – tilapia, I think. The method here is interesting – there is a fish … cage I guess it can be called … of timbers or bamboo with net in between. The cage is about 30 feet square and there can be a building on top! The cage can float or sink as needed and is remarkably effective. We saw the farmer feeding the fish and trust me, this is what a feeding frenzy looks like – yikes.
The next adventure involved a bicycle rickshaw ride through a small town. These rickshaws are for only one passenger and that passenger needs to have a decent sense of balance, but it was great to see the town at a slow pace. We stopped at a silk weaving factory – family-owned and weaving simply beautiful fabric. It was fascinating watching these old machines weave in patterns and the factory workers’ sharp eyes and skilled hands smoothing and untangling tiny knots in the nearly-invisible silk threads. We walked a bit to another factory that specializes in a traditional silk-dying method that creates an extremely shiny black silk, using only a local berry as the dye. The fabric is dipped, squeezed and spread on the grass to dry – and the process is repeated 100 times – that’s one zero zero. The results are simply beautiful. The family has also started experimenting with other colors using all-natural local dyes.
A return rickshaw ride and we were back on the boat, ready for departure to Cambodia (that’s Campochea here).
After sitting at the border (an invisible line in the middle of the river), we were finally able to continue on toward Phnom Penh. We also viewed the film, The Killing Fields to give us a little context about the role of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodian history.
journeys 