Forgive me, this article is pretty long . Mostly because I couldn’t choose among all the pictures I took that day. They are all the reflexion of amazing moments…

The slow boat from Battambang to Siem Reap costs the same as a ticket to visit the floating villages in a boat around Siem Reap. This day was a bargain because I had to go to Siem Reap anyway and because for about 9 hours, you can observe hundred of floating villages on the way.
Ok, the journey was a bit long but what an experience! This is another activity in Cambodia which starts to be touristic but is not designed for the tourists yet. The young Swedish lady sitting next to me received incessantly branches and insects on the face proved this fact. Obviously, the captain was doing all he could not to crash the boat on the side but the river is curvy and pretty narrow, maybe not designed for these kind of big ship. Adam,met on the boat that day, read stories about the water not being high enough, a drunk captain and people going into the river to push the boat. Luckily our captain was not under alcoholic substances but that didn’t change the fact that we crashed on a floating house and destroyed the roof. Oops…

     
    

I had the really sad impression that ecology was only a concept in Cambodia. The very first part of the trip, while the sun was slowly rising and the people were waking up to go fishing, I noticed that everything was decorated by old and dirty plastic bags. It looked like the piloti houses on each side were vomiting unknown objects into the water and I was horrified to see that this river, as disgusting it was, was used by the locals to wash themselves, fish, clean the dish and of course as toilets. I’ve never been in India but about what people told me, I had the vague impression to be navigating on the Gange.

  
   
    

While we were going north, the real magic happened. Less dirty, the river started to be finally attractive. Gigantic nass activated by hand appeared after each corner, thousand of children waving and screaming hello at you as if their life were depending on your answer, mud fight on the side, dark skinned ladies washing themselves in colorful sarongs, men fishing between the lotus, flowered patterns cloth drying on the balconies and old grannies selling handmade food on their little boat.
You better know how to swim at an early age if you want to survive around here. Children are playing around but I was pretty surprised to see a lot of them helping out their parents cultivating the fields around or fishing.

   
    
   

Chak chak chak chak… You approach sometimes big platforms from where this particular sound emerges. Follows a strong and disturbing smell of rotten fish. In the shadow, hundred of woman and kids cut millions of fish apart. The perfume is unbearable…
Five years old little girls stop their mechanic gesture, a knife as big as themselves hold in the air. Just the time to give you this sad and empty stare before going back to their job again.
Why these cuties were not at school? Why do they have to work? At an age where my mum forbid me to use round ended scissors top security, these babies are masters in preparing a fish with a razor blade machete.

   
    
 

I had this strange conversation one day with an expat and his wife about the children prostitution in South East Asia. I’ve been horrified from his answer: “we can’t judge, it’s not our country, we are just traveling here.”
First, it’s not from any culture to prostitute any children in the world. Second, I think that yes, we can judge. That made me think a lot about what should be our actions to protect the human right and especially protect the kids in a country where we are “just traveling”. Discovering the world means opening your mind to different cultures, different way of living but it would be really stupid not to have an opinion on big subjects. Visiting a country and appreciating the differences from the place you call home doesn’t have to rhyme with loosing your values.
I’d like to think that everything is not black and white, except when it’s about kids security and well being. However that day, I changed my mind a little bit… I would love to have your thoughts about this subject because maybe I’m totally wrong.

   
  

  
  
 

   
    
   

I had the impression that a lot of kids were going at school but not on a regular basic. These children were living in the countryside and life there is pretty hard, there is no social security and philosophy will not help your parents to feed you at the end of the day. Also, I saw so many old people, so so so old that they had no age anymore, working on the fields… You can imagine that their kids and great children are taking care of them in a way. What would happen if all the youngs were leaving these floating villages to study in big cities? What would happen to these old ladies and gentlemen?

   
    
   

   
   

It was maybe time for me to adjust my European way of thinking about education. In a way, I had no idea what these kids were studying and how they were studying it. Maybe their dream was to stay there, work with their family and keep the culture and tradition of their ancestors?
Maybe I couldn’t come with my ideas about how to save a child if saving him or her doesn’t particularly means force him to go to school from 9am to 6pm everyday.
Education is important for the mental construction of any human, to learn how to think by yourself, to have references and not do the mistakes of the past. I still think that education is essential of course…

   
    
   

   
    
   

Adam and I spent the entire day talking about our lives like old friends on the roof of this boat, while preparing our skin for the nicest sunburn ever.
Friends of him recommended a nice tuk tuk driver (contact me if you would like his phone number) who nicely came to the pier to pick him up. He invited me to share the tuk tuk and drop me at my hostel. When he saw the swimming pool at the European guesthouse, he decided to stay there. We jumped in the water while a heavy rain started to pour down. It never gently rains here.

   
    
   

That night, we met a welsh young boy who had a bike crash and was really happy to show us all the pictures taken after the accident. Including the one with his elbow so opened that we could see his bone. We became friends, of course.