Cambodian Water World

I am Kevin Costner. At least for a couple of hours. Thatched houses and brightly colored rundown schools, the paint chipping off and fading from the harsh sunlight, float around on muddy water. Long, thin brightly colored boats flow down a mud-red, murky-looking, but not all too deep lake. Children’s heads bob up and down in the cloudy water, making it look deceptively deep. Then suddenly, they rise up to stretch, standing there in all their full naked glory, eyes beaming, reflecting the bright sun and opaque waters of the gigantic paddling pool. This is Chong Kneas, a floating village akin to Water World a bit outside of Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Our long, narrow boat rocks slightly making my swimming-impaired-self violently clutch the sides, mouth agog with ever-so-slight panic. All of a sudden a jagged-toothed girl appears between the seats, waving a can of coke under our noses assuring us pointedly that we want one of her numerous beverages to quench our parched throats. Upon several friendly refusals she is gone with a shrug, clambering down onto her awaiting skiff, impish grin and motor ready to roar off to the next unsuspecting tourist who wrongly believes he/she has escaped from the constant calls of “What you wanna buy? What you need?” The water does nothing to deter the sale pitches.

A kid plays with his father in a nearby boat – a huge and dangerous looking (adored pet?) snake treacherously entwined around his small shoulders and neck. His father looks unconcerned and flashes us a toothy grin as we pass. We zoom by a large floating craft with a gymnasium resting on top. Eight or nine boys are standing idly around shooting hoops. There is nothing else around them but glistening water, water, water.

Our driver is a dark Cambodian man who flashes a tartar-nicotine-coated friendly smile every now and again once we’ve been on his watery territory for a while. He points out things that perhaps we’d miss – schools, floating stores and a pit of crocodiles that conveniently sits next to the floating tourist stand. The crocs sit almost as still as handbags, with a worrying straw hat and disquieting unmatched shoe sitting ownerless in their midst, a disconcerting nibble taken here and there.

The clouds are massive and fluffy, like huge wads of medicinal cotton or Big Top cotton candy floating up in the sky. The layers of water, occasional streaks of green seaweed, brown thatched homes, light brown sun-bleached roofs and perfect cerulean sky as far as the eye can see are magical.

On the way back our driver stops to help a friend in a becoming straw hat who is driving an Asian-American looking couple, eyes bored and shaded by dark sunglasses. They look as if they have been there a while. The driver ropes his boat to ours and begins sucking petrol from one of the cans aboard our ship with gusto using a massive, thick plastic straw.

A tuk tuk drives us away from the water village back towards Siem Reap. The drive back is just as jumbled as the ride there. The dirt roads are rough and uneven, and despite our tuk tuk driver’s best efforts to avoid the numerous small ditches, the ride is bone shaking. I half expect another tuk tuk to pull up behind us and a small, puckish child to clamber in from the back window thrusting forward cans of coke to quench our parched throats.