Photo of the day, 21 May 2010

O.K., so maybe a photo every day was a little ambitious...
This one's from the floating village in Tonle Sap:

Before I visited one, the words "floating village" conjured, for me, an enchanted hamlet, magically adrift on a glittering river.  In reality, the community living outside Siem Reap on Tonle Sap, while visually striking, was very sad.  The very act of visiting felt strange.  Ben and I left the comforts of the River Village Manor, our lovely guest house, with our guide, Kerri.  Thirty minutes in the tuk tuk later, we had passed progressively less and less elaborate homes lining the road.  Just before we reached the dock where tours leave for the floating village, we saw a huge tract of land that had been cleared...Kerri informed us that there are plans to build a 5-star hotel there.  Well!  That would certainly change the "vibe."

We paid a man in a hut and then walked down to a small fishing boat and began our journey out to the center of the lake.  The river is extremely shallow in parts, so our boat driver would climb on the bow and push us along with a long stick that he wedged into the mud, gondolier style.  I thought our boat was rustic enough, until some actual fishing boats zoomed by (often sending the muddy low-river-tide water sputtering into our boat)...then I saw some additional tourist boats returning to the dock - just like ours, fitted with plastic chairs and a roof and thin plastic sheeting that could be lowered to protect tourists and their expensive cameras from the muddy sprays of the 'real' boats.

Stuck in the mud

All of a sudden, there was a child at Ben's shoulder, standing on the edge of the boat with an ice bucket full of drinks: "Cocacolasodacoldwater?" he asked.  After the initial shock Ben declined, and looking down over the side of the boat saw that several small boats (essentially canoes with motors) had sidled up to ours to offer us, the tourists, cold drinks.  Children would jump on and off the tourist boats as their drivers (could it be a parent?) maneuvered around the widening section of the lake.  

And then the mouth of the lake opened up and deepened and we were in the "village."  

I'm not sure what to say of the village.  I didn't get a chance to talk with the people who lived there...and part of me thinks, that's a good thing.  To have their day to day lives be a tourist attraction is enough of a disturbance without having curious outsiders like me come knocking and saying, "so what's life really like here?"

There's a central dock where tourists are let off, given the opportunity to spend more money (drinks, souvenirs), and where more teams of child and parent zero in on tourists in their boats.  The girl in the first photo is one of these kids.  They jump onto the dock with snakes around their neck and adorable smiles, stare right up at you and open their hand while repeating, seemingly, the only English they know: "One dollar." Ben had brought his guitar, so instead he sat down and played a song for them.  The children seemed to like this - they communicated that they were listening with smiles and furtive glances at each other, before resuming the "one dollar" chorus.  And then we just sat there, for half an hour.  Ben playing songs, and letting the kids (there were 6 or 7 of them now) strum while he held down chords.  I realized that taking a photo would prompt more requests - "one DOLLLLLaarrrrr!" - so I snapped a few without anyone noticing and then sat back and enjoyed the music.  The kids seemed to, too, though their mothers looked a bit wistful, a bit disappointed that we were not obliging with our dollars.  It's much easier to look at ruins - buildings - places that have been long abandoned by humans - that to look at people - and sadly, "looking at" was the encouraged verb.

I'm glad we went.  I think it was a treat for those kids to be allowed to stop saying "one dollar" for a few minutes, and watch, with what was once described to me as awestruck wonder, a white dude in a hat sit down, hang out, and made beautiful sounds.  If that's not the very essence of music, I don't know what is.