Ratanakiri: Veung Sai, More of the Same

Today played out more or less like yesterday except it started earlier, the bicycles were replaced with motorbikes and we tried our luck with Voen Sai, a village quite far North of Ban Lung. Actually, thinking about it now, today played out nothing like yesterday.

To start the day, we headed to Psar Ban Lung, the wet market right behind the taxi station, where we bought ourselves some very stylish SARS masks to keep dust from clogging our lungs. Mine's a dark grey Burberry plaid.

A peeing contest taking place in the market's parking lot. Good thing I'm not on the receiving end of it this time:

The road to Voen Sai isn't in the best of conditions and certain stretches require quite a bit of effort to navigate. Luckily, I was the passenger today:

Being the passenger gave ample opportunity to try my hand at drive by photography.

The approach:

SURPRISE!:

In true drive by fashion, we sped off after taking the above photo.

One should note that drive by photography doesn't elecit the same response from lazy water buffalo who are too busy wallowing in mud to care.

There wasn't anything going on at the Southern bank of the river in Voen Sai aside from an expensive (for the area) two minute boat ride to the opposite side. The area of the town we visited consists of a fair number of ramshackle huts in a rural Cambodian setting; Something we'd already seen in Kratie so we passed on the boat ride and doubled back to Ban Lung for a quick lunch at the American Restaurant.

Women wash their dishes close to the boat's launching point in Voen Sai:

Further upstream, more villagers bathe and hunt for snails:

We finished off the daylight hours goofing off at the meteor lake again, where I temporarily lost my only pair of glasses. Thankfully, Thien An salvaged them from the lake bed right after I slipped and bruised my backside (and my ego) on the dock in my panic.