Day 10 - 'The Sebastien Vettel Experience'. We got up for breakfast early to be ready to leave to get the tuk tuk to Stung Treng centre for 08:30. Arriving where the minivan would pick us up and here is where the fun started!
I am guessing the van was a 10 seater, tops and when it arrived to pick us up it had about 7 or 8 in it already. You would have thought we'd be the last but oh no, you'd be wrong, very wrong indeed. As we climbed in, we noticed the whole back row was free so taking the first opportunity, we jumped to the back having to climb over a few people to get there. Not too bad we thought a we set off for what we thought was Kratie, approx 3 hours away. After a lap of the town for no apparent reason we stopped where we got picked up and took on board, one generator, one long steering blade for a boat, with propellor attached and one large bag of, I think logs. Guess where all these sat, yep, with us on the back row!! This also included 2 other people. We set off again and got slightly out of town and another person hopped in and then we found ourselves back at point one again where more people and bags got on, surely this was the last........We set off again and about 2 miles out of town we pulled over where a chap pulled up on the back of a motorbike and jumped in the van. I think we were over stocked by at least 6 people.
Right, off to Kratie, a nice leisurely 3 hour trip but no, we hadn't reckoned on a chap driving who was intent on setting the Cambodian land speed record for a minivan driving us! Being completely honest, I have only ever feared for my life 2 or 3 times and this was certainly one of them. We had nearly run over a child who was crossing the road before we'd made it to the highway and you thought this would slow him down but no, that didn't work either.
We ate up the first 40kms and then luckily the road started to get bad with 100 metres of tarmac followed by stretches of unmade rutted roads with massive holes in there. Would this slow him down? Well he went from 100km/hr down to 65km/hr!! With our head constantly bouncing on the ceiling it was no wonder the bloke in front of us put his motorbike crash helmet on (see one of the photos and video!) Literally every muscle in our bodies were tense and we were sweating from every pore. We did ponder whether to get him to stop and let us out but thought we'd go with it, put the iPods in and not think about it until the next time out heads cracked the ceiling.
About halfway through the journey, we were on a nice piece of flat road and we heard a couple of large thuds by the right rear tyre where Alice was sitting. Looking back on the road we could see pieces of something flying up in the air. Didn't think a lot of it, must have been something in the road. The driver pulled over a couple of miles later and inspected the tyre in question but jumped back in very quickly and sped off again only changing from first to second as the rev counter hit 8000! Another couple of miles down the road we pulled over and we all had to jump out. The driver pulled the jack out and started to jack up the van. He was taking the tyre off and by the state of it I'm not surprised. The bits we heard and saw flying the road was half the tyre!! See main photo, if that had blown at the speed he was doing I certainly wouldn't be writing this blog any longer! We wondered whether to stay off the van and flag another bus down but as it was about 40 degrees we didn't want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere.
Finally in Kratie, we jumped of the bus and scarpered as soon as possible. We wandered to the hotel we had seen in the guidebook as we hadn't booked anywhere yet, the Heng Heng 2. It was ok for $15 and the guy spoke decent English so could help us with the bus tomorrow and also our main purpose of staying there, to see the dolphins.
After checking in we went to a local restaurant where we were the only English speaking people in there so ordering was interesting and Alice ended up with something slightly different to what she ordered but no damage done. We went back to the hotel and sorted out our tuk tuk driver to take us the 15kms to see the Irrawaddy dolphins. A 45 minute tuk tuk ride later, sounds nice but very hot and dusty, we arrived at the boat station, paid the $9 each and jumped aboard a boat all by ourselves. A quick 20 minute ride up the Mekong and we were in the right area. With a little bit of patience and an eagle eye, there they were, a pod of at least 4 just bobbing along merrily. After about an hour and 200 photos later, mostly of just water (Alice) but also some expert ones (Chris) we headed back to land jumped in the tuk tuk and back to the hotel, not without the driver trying to divert us to some 'mountain' he wanted us to climb and see the view. No thank you!
We got back to the hotel just in time to see an impressive sunset over the Mekong from the balcony. We showered up and headed out to a backpackers restaurant, at the Star guesthouse. Bit of nice food and back to the hotel and into bed.........at 19:45!!