Last night, Travis, met on the bus the day before appeared at my guesthouse. It was a good surprise but I have to admit that I knew our ways will cross path at one point again. 

It was the kind of morning you just don’t want to talk to anybody, you have put your pajama and you have bad hair day because you know that you’ll have 11 hours to spend in a bloody minivan with four people on a range of three sits. A tuk tuk drove me to another guesthouse and just when I arrived, a guy who looked too happy for this early hour smiled at me. I’m not a bad person, I smiled back but I tried to avoid everybody’s eyes to not smile again until I sat down in the minivan and rolled my sweatshirt as a pillow under my head and sleep. Making new friends was not the plan. Sleeping WAS the plan.

But it appears that we sat next to each other’s and that the “too-happy-americain-even-at-an-early-hour-of-the-day” was the nicest and the most interesting person you could travel next to in a small van in Cambodia. We talked about that later and we had both the feeling that we just met each other’s again, like if we knew who we were already. Strange feeling, which is usually a good omen to find new travel buddies.

It is so naturally that we decided to stick together for at least few days and if things were ok, maybe until the end of our trip in Cambodia. I wanted to see Kratie for the fresh water dolphins, it was Travis’ second plan as he will finally not visit Lao this time. 

I finally had my scooter ride in Kratie, direction the pier. We stopped on the way in a strange place where everybody was chilling, drinking and eating and we have been offered to taste these huge water snails by a group of Cambodian guys. It was probably the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. The smell, the texture, the size, everything was wrong in it and I decided to spit every out in the sea. I know it was really rude and gross and I usually try to taste everything people offer to me but it was just impossible to swallow that disgusting and horrible thing without throwing up. 

Experiencing different kind of food is probably one of the best way to understand the culinary field of a country but seeing these travelers putting scorpions in their mouth in Kao San road made me laugh a lot. I understand that for some people, that’s the most exotic thing ever and maybe they feel like they HAVE to try to eat weird things to be real adventurers but I’m not a Leonardo Di Caprio in The Beach, just arriving in Bangkok and having a drink with a snake’s heart inside to have strong sensations. I’m more into Pad Thai, fried rice and curries you know…
    
    
    
    
    

And here they are. A bit far away from us, but still living in the Mekong, the last fresh water dolphins in Cambodia. That reminded me the time I was on this catamaran in New Zealand and the skippers asked us to jump in the cold and trouble water to swim with a gang of fifty, 2 meters tall wild dolphins. Scary but unique.

Travis was more experienced as he has been a dolphin kayak guide in Australia for a bit. Our guide was not really talkative but we had the chance to have an expert on board… Big lessons about dolphins: how they can drag you down at the bottom of the sea to rape you or how they have bisexual sex all the time… The kind of things you don’t learn in books.