On the last day of our guests stay here in the Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary, we decided to go out for a day of fishing and swimming.
Mr. Mab 🔪 Filleter Of Fish 🐟
On the previous day the two sons of our visitor had some partial success with a fish trap they brought over from Germany. In addition to this my wife paid someone in the village to catch some fish to grill because one of the things the oldest boy wanted to do was eat new kinds of fish. As a vegan I had little advice to offer, so I left it to Mr. Mab to come up with a tasty way to prepare the fish.
In the above is a creature that has been known to burn her eyelashes while stealing fish from a grill. Luckily her tastes are mostly for gecko, shrew, and cricket meat, as well as some seaweed chips, corn, and nutritional yeast, all things we have in abundance at our house when there are no human meat-eaters staying with us. She brings all her kills to devour behind my computer chair, and this gives me a good opportunity to make sure she's getting enough to eat, but sometimes things get pretty gruesome.
🚙 The Trusty RAV4 ⛰️
My friend Andreas is a German resident of Cambodia, someone I've known for several years, and he is both guide and friend to the woman and her two sons who are holidaying in Cambodia. They both went to university together in Germany to become doctors, my friend Andreas became a family physician and his friend became a pediatrician. Last year he came with an old friend from highschool and they both successfully traveled south on a road all locals said was impossible in the rainy season. The above Toyota did it in stock form, only having to be pushed by villagers seven times.
On this day we didn't plan any distant trips, instead we opted to have fun in the village and explore the local swimming and fishing holes. Sakana was having fun with the boys catching fish from the river and adding them to the spirit house pond in the corner of our property. With no fish the pond becomes a breeding ground for mosquito larvae, so it's good to have something in there snack on the mosquito babies.
🚶♀️ Upstream Swimming/Fishing Holes 🚶♂️
The river behind our house was very low because it hadn't rained in months, and everything upstream from us is even drier and lower except for a couple areas behind none of our neighbor's homes. We went there in search of deeper water because one of things the boys wanted to see was a handcast fishing net in action.
On this day we brought along Bong T'heeun, my wife's half brother who is part of the in-law construction crew staying with us. He has experience using handcast nets, and he seemed quite happy to entertain the boys who speak only German, and T'heeun speaks only Khmer. Luckily fishing doesn't really require a whole lot of language.
On the previous day the guests had put a fishing trap in the above nook of the river, also the place where T'heeun had cast the net. The tiny little area was cut off from the rest of the river due to the low water, so between the trap and the net most of the fish in this isolated section were caught.
🏊♂️ Swimming Time (For Me At Least)
Just a little more upstream is the best swimming hole, the deepest and clearest section of river in the whole village, and because it doesn't contain the two tributaries the section of our river has, it doesn't flood as violently here either.
It is here when I took a few more pics and put my phone down to get into the water, but on this day the weather was a little chilly, so it was just me and Bong T'heeun in the water. I swam upstream from him and didn't intentionally send the fish in his direction, but I'm sure it didn't hurt his efforts because although a big area, this part of the river was also mostly isolated due to low water levels.
👋 Last Day In Town 🙏
Time to head out because our guests planned to leave on this morning, their last day at our place. I was surprised to see the oldest boy crying because he didn't want to leave our place. He was having so much fishing and riding in the tuk-tuk that he didn't want to go anywhere else in Cambodia, so I was honored by that. My own family members won't come to visit because they are scared, but a woman traveling solo with a 7 and 2-year old is having nothing but good times here.
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