Em & Tola's Travel Blog

After an extremely early morning and a horrid 8 hour bus ride, we were in Kratie. A city with 100 000 people right on the Mekong river. Our new destination was much smaller than we expected it to be. It felt like we had gone to the countryside where we finally did not have to deal with endless rows of cars and hordes of tourists.

Kratie is known for one thing, and one thing only. It is the home of the rare freshwater Irrawaddy dolphins that live right outside town in the Mekong during dry season. Unmissable of course, so we rented a scooter and headed down the river. A wonderful 30 minute drive through rural Cambodia brought us to the dolphin site.

To our surprise, we were the only ones there. We got into a boat and we suddenly had the Mekong all to ourselves. It did not take long until we heard something spraying water right off the side of our little wooden boat. The first dolphins appeared 3 meters away and kept surfacing with short intervals throughout our 1 hour on the boat. There are supposed to be around 40 dolphins still alive in the area and we might have spotted a fourth of them. They where very peculiar looking creatures. Google them!


After a both calming and exciting experience on the Mekong we jumped back up on the bike and headed to a lookout point where we got to see the area from a pagoda located 100 meters above the water. Later during the day we headed to watch the sunset from a bridge and it was quite the experience to see young Cambodian children herding cows as the sun set over the Mekong.

We were told that this was what Kratie had to offer, so the fact that we had to rest for one day after we caught a bug did not make us feel too bad. If Kratie feels like a small city it will probably feel like Tokyo after have experienced our next destination, the small town of Sen Monorom in the Mondulkiri province.