Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Dolphin watching at Kratie

I had breakfast at You Hong with Kotoe. She shares my passion for mango so we both shared a mango and papaya salad coated with yoghurt and honey, along with one of the restaurant's delicious iced coffees with sweet milk. The food at You Hong is first class, and it's a fantastic little place to waste a couple of hours, soaking up the hustle and bustle of Kratie's streets. The only problem that i can foresee travelling with Kotoe is that she seems quite content with arriving at a place and seeing only the inside of the guesthouse walls. I know half the fun of travelling is the experiences you share with fellow travellers rather than the sights you see, but i prefer the happy medium of being able to do both.
This afternoon i caught a moto taxi out to Kampi (15km north of Kratie) where i would then charter a boat out to (hopefully) see one of the 75 Irrawaddy dolphins still inhabiting this stretch of the Mekong river in Cambodia. When i arrived at the boat pier at Kampi I met an Irish girl called Maria and the 2 of us chartered a boat with 2 Khmer ladies ($2 each), a boat driven and navigated by a boy who couldn't have been more than 12 years old!
As promised, we did see Dolphins but only from a distance, and only the gleem of their backs as they jumped out of the water. There was a mother and her baby swimming around our boat, and as their bodies left the water, we could see the baby tucked under the stomach of its mother. Unfortunately the dolphins were too fast and too far away for me to be able to capture them on camera, and i'm not sure the whole experience was worth $7 but I don't get many chances to see dolphins in their natural habitat, so i didn't want to turn down this one.
Photo to follow

No comments: