Day Fourteen and Fifteen: Angkor Wat and the Tonle Sap
There is nothing more awe-inspiring than Angkor in sunrise. We walk in silence, marveling at the size of the temples and the weight of history that presses on us. I have been anticipating this moment since flying into Siem Reap yesterday.

The Angkor temples, a World Heritage Site, were built during a long stretch between 9th and the 15th century and number over a thousand! Angkor Wat, the most awe-inspiring of them all, took over 30 years and shows showing an incredible display of Hindu and Khmer art.

The temples are incredibly diverse in style and condition. Some like Preah Khan have given way to the marauding forests. Some are giant serene faces that will remain imprinted in our memories. Some only have empty walls standing and nothing else. And some are over run by busloads of tourists. My favorite is the Bakheng, a small mountain temple honoring Siva, with flowers pushing through the stone, silent and tranquil in the afternoon light. The Angkor kings started out as Hindus and ended as Buddhists. Today, more than one Angkor temple is a living monastery for Theravada Buddhists.

The bas reliefs capture life for all Khmers; the modest fisherman plying his nets, the soldier fighting off attacking Cham, the general in charge of the troops, and the women waiting at home for their return. The reliefs also capture monkeys half hidden in the carved leaves, gigantic fish that seem to be smiling in the waves, elephants with men on them and elephants nestling their young in the wild, pouncing tigers and large koupreys, all part of the Khmer world over ten centuries ago. And, still they stand, an integral part of Cambodia's today.

Nearby the Angkor temples is the Tonle Sap, the largest freshwater lake in Asia and the heart of Cambodia. It is easily distinguishable from space. The Tonle Sap is unique because every monsoon season, the Mekong river swells up so much that the waters flow back into the Tonle Sap river and force the lake to increase five times in size. Not surprisingly, the lake is very rich in biodiversity and fisheries.

The water is an oily black when we get on the boat. It is hard to believe that this is only a lake; it spreads out as far as I can see. Our boat is heading for Prek Toal village, a fairly well off fishing community, where we will visit a local school attached to the Environment Research Station of the Prek Toal Biosphere Reserve. We watch other boats glide by; some of them have regular cargo, carrying kerosene or rice from one end to the other. But others are actual shops, full of clothes or vegetables that go calling from houseboat to houseboat. There are water taxis, carrying children to school. There are water restaurants where the cook will quickly fry up something you point at in little kerosene stoves

The people of the Tonle Sap live on the lake and I mean that literally. Everything is on the water; houses, entire villages, even schools; they all rest on floating rafts some of which are connected to the land by wooden planks. There are people here who will live out their entire lives, moving with the water, on this incredibly bountiful enormous lake.

As we get close, some of the water ways are near impassable due to the overgrowth of water hyacinth. It is an invasive species in the rest of the world, quickly choking other plant life and destroying river ecologies. But here, the people have learned to harvest it for their use and also use it as a barrier against choppy water and strong tides. Keep in mind that the water can rise up to thirty feet in the monsoon season! And, yes - all of this is in danger. There are at least two hydropower dams built in southern China already, Manwan and Dachaoshan. Another, Xiaowan, is under construction. And many many more are planned.

Day Eleven: Forest Dwellers
Today, we travel by elephant. In the wet season, the forests are very dense, trails are hard to find and the undergrowth is too thick to walk through. I get to ride a young frisky female. Her mahout - the elephant driver and keeper - allows her to play in the water, and as we splash through little streams, she constantly uses her trunk to reach back towards him.

The Phnong, a local indigenous group, live in small scattered forest villages that are often temporary. They rely heavily on slash-and-burn farming for dry rice cultivation and other plants and supplement this with hunting, fishing and gathering wild foods. We meet with one of these groups that have settled in the area. The community is governed by a council of local elders and has a village headman. The headman wants to highlight the problem his people are facing; outside encroachers have been cutting down trees and are now mining in the area that they have traditionally been entitled to. Martin later confirms that at least 4 new mining concessions were recently granted in this area. This has so many potential adverse effects; from conflict with local communities to destruction of fish spawning habitat, and poisonous effluents that contain mercury and cyanide reaching people and fish species downstream.

One of the most important strategies that WWF utilizes is the formal establishing of land tenure or land user rights for local communities. Not only will this give them more incentive to sustainably manage natural resources but it also protects them from various encroaching groups. This is a long term strategy. It will take time and lots of resources to expand to the rest of the landscape. While we work with the Phnong and other communities to set up these rights, WWF also aims to help local communities attain better standards of living. The ecotourism component of the Srepok Wilderness Area project must have a clear link between conservation, sustainable resource management, and community well being.

On our way back through the forests, we see a total of seven black shanked doucs, made up of two groups (one a young mother with a baby). Doucs are possibly the most beautiful primate in the world. Unlike the red-shanked doucs, the black-shanked doucs are black and grey, with a bluish white face and yellow around their eyes. They are arboreal, living in trees and spend at least half the day foraging for food. They are very social and live in groups with twice as many females than males in most groups. It is not uncommon to see them travel in single file through the forest, led by the dominant male. The hushed forest seems to hold its breath as they show themselves. This is one of the most magical moments I've had on my trip.


Hear what the Phnong people feel is needed to manage the forests they live in: Windows Media | Real Video

Day Nine: Srepok Wilderness Area
Ever since I began working on the Greater Mekong Program, I've struggled with languages. Do I even try to learn a language when each country has several and none of the major ones overlap? If so, which one do I pick; should it be in terms of learning ease, number of people who use it or availability of lessons back in Washington, DC? So of course, what I've done is effectively master the most basic greetings in all. I can greet someone and thank them in Vietnamese, Khmer, Thai and Laotian. But, in Khmer, I've made a larger effort. We bump and jolt our way through the dark forest, with every turn promising to overturn the truck. The roads are slippery due to the rains and we get stuck several times. I decide to review my list of useful Khmer words, those integral for survival. You know, just in case.

Day Eight: On the Road Again!
It's 5 am. I get up blearily and we roll out with our cameras, trying to capture what fine examples of biodiversity are available in the market today. Fish markets are one of my must see spots everywhere I go in the Mekong region. It is incredible what you can find; creatures that you thought existed only in your 6th grade nightmares, every type of fish available in the region, as well as prawns, snails, frogs, turtles, snakes, all squirming about in basins and buckets or marinated, as you prefer.

On our return, we are reunited with Teak with whom I will be traveling with towards Mondulkiri. There is much strapping and tightening of our supplies in the back - it will be pretty rough going in parts. The drive can be summed up in one word - dusty. By the time we tie the tarp on the back of the truck, the dust has already settled into the folds. Our truck is flanked by large Honda motorbikes, the preferred means of traveling for many of our staff. These guys strap on their field gear and intrepidly ride all over the country. It takes a stomach of steel to ride on these roads, for we spend as much time off the road then on to avoid the gargantuan holes.


Driving through Cambodia is both idyllic and unsettling. On one hand, the country is a lush unending line of rice paddies and coconut or palm trees, presenting a sense of security and wellbeing. However, the towns often have a tired feel to them and it is common to see people standing around aimlessly, without the usual activity that one sees in a busy town. Like any poor country, the contrast between the rich and poor is infinite and impossible to ignore.

People in Cambodia are broken into rough groups of ethnic Khmer, the Khmer Loeu, the Chinese and the Vietnamese. While the ethnic Khmer are found mostly in central and southeastern Cambodia, the Khmer Loeu live mostly in the northeast and southwest areas of Mondulkiri, Rotanakiri and Kratie. The term, "Khmer Loeu" itself is not authentic. The government coined the word; literally "highland Khmer"; to create a joint identity for the highland tribal groups and the lowland ethnic Khmer that they have historically rebelled against.

We get to Sen Monorom, the last major town before we head into the Srepok Wildneress Area, late afternoon. Much of the money here comes from gold mining or logging and it feels like a rough and tumble frontier town in the middle of nowhere. And yet, just about everyone has a cell phone in their hand as they obsessively turn them off and on - From here on, all telecommunication access is unreliable. Seated in one of the restaurants in town, we can hear Khmer, English, French, various hill tribe languages and Vietnamese all around us. The radio is blaring a combination of traditional Khmer music and karaoke Madonna. This is the face of globalization.

Day Six: Dolphin Communities
Today, we visit the local communities along the stretch of the river. For the most part, the communities that WWF works with are fishing villages that have relied for centuries on the river for their survival. The WWF Mekong Dolphin project is focused on setting up sustainable livelihood programs to deter over-fishing in these areas and to create incentives for local communities to care about dolphin conservation. One of the best ways to do this is ecotourism or more appropriately, dolphin tourism!

The houses in the villages are all on stilts due to seasonal rising of the river – already the water is close to the top of the stilts. With us is Or Channy, the executive director of the Cambodian Rural Development Team (CDRT) who works closely with Richard. As part of the sustainable development projects, Channy shows us various project activities around the village including a water pump and a fisheries pond that an enterprising villager has set up with co-financing from the project. Instead of fishing in the river, he now fishes from the pond and unlike most fishermen, he has a more secure and reliable livelihood.

There are two major concerns worrying Richard and Channy. Originally, when the tourism regulations were firmed up by the dolphin project, CDRT and Tourism Dept., the community in Kampi received 40% of the dolphin area entrance fee and participated in dolphin ecotourism decision making through a committee. This 40% share was used to fund community development projects. Recently, this system has been discontinued by the government authority which has taken charge of the project. Now, only a few villagers that operate tourist boats or sell goods to tourists at the site benefit from tourism. This takes away the economic incentive for villagers to cooperate with WWF since people no longer benefit from dolphin conservation. Moreover, the villages upstream that are located adjacent to dolphin habitat have restrictions imposed on their fishing activities by the government but don't receive any benefits from tourism. Consequently, they feel left out when comparing themselves to Kampi.

Despite this, WWF has made great strides here. Local fishermen have begun to switch to more sustainable fishing methods instead of gillnets. Gillnets are the most common fishing method, cheap, easy to use and indiscriminately catch dolphins, baby giant catfish and seven-stripe barb. Gillnets are particularly responsible for the rapid population depletion of giant fish species. Of special interest to us are deep pools; areas in the river where fish breed and feed during dry seasons and dolphins in particular are limited to during low waters. WWF is working to limit the use of gillnets in these deep pools and talking with some of the local fishermen, I see that they are too. Over the course of the last few years, they can see the fish disappearing in front of their eyes. They are as keen as we are to protect the remaining fish populations; it is their future.

Day Five: Mekong River Dolphins
The next morning, we head out on to the river to count the dolphins in two pools, Kampi, which is a regular tourist draw and Chroy Banteay, which doesn't allow tourist boats. It is hot, hot, hot on the river. We are on a long-tail boat, supposedly counting dolphins. In reality, all we can see are occasional silver blips rising out of the shimmering water. They are suspiciously synchronized. Just when you spot two on the right side of the boat, you catch another from the corner of your eye on the left side of the boat. When you whirl back to the right, the waters have closed over the tails of the first two.

The dolphins usually emerge out of the river in twos and threes, just a heartbeat apart from each other. They are silverfish grey all over. Unlike other dolphins, they have a much more rounded head with no beak. Instead, they have a large smile that curve across their face and large button eyes right next to their mouth. Each time they come up for air, you can hear a wet snort of spray and it is impossible to restrain the "oohs and aahs". There is something so wonderful about seeing them in the wild. Richard and San, his program officer, (both of whom can distinguish among them) say that there are 11 individuals in this pod.

During lunch, we sober down. These dolphins we saw are some of the last remaining few of the Mekong dolphins. Meanwhile, the threats seem insurmountable; mining, pollution, over-fishing and large hydropower dams. In response, WWF's Living Mekong Program, which works on freshwater conservation, has taken a two pronged approach -- one is the Mekong dolphin project itself, and the others involves coming up with alternative scenarios for hydropower development. It promotes more widespread demand side management, energy efficiency and energy conservation to reduce the rapid escalation of energy demand. WWF wants to support increased use of alternative energies such as biomass wind and solar power to meet that demand as much as possible. But, additional hydropower development is inevitable in this region and so, we work with the major players in the region such as the Mekong River Commission and the Asian Development Bank to try and ensure that this development takes place with the least social and environmental impacts possible.

Day One: Flying in
Cambodia, more than any other place settles into peoples' minds as one of those distant countries that is too authentically third world. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge, the Killing Fields. These make up Cambodia's history, at least on CNN and in the movies. Anything recent is disheartening; impoverishment, corruption, trafficking, illegal trade, unresolved conflict, and of course, the stymied UN crimes tribunal.

Except, I love Cambodia. Cambodia is captivating. For me, it is an intoxicating combination of history and modernity, chaos and serenity, starvation and generosity, and destitution and rich heritage. It is also the heart of some of WWF's best conservation efforts in the Greater Mekong region.

For this trip, I will zigzag through the country for two weeks; Phnom Penh in the south and then north east up the Mekong River to the WWF Mekong dolphin project in Kratie. After that I veer east to the Srepok Wilderness Area in Mondulkiri before I return to visit the Angkor Wat temples and spend a day on the Tonle Sap, one of the world's greatest freshwater lakes and a natural wonder in its own right.

When I arrived at the Phnom Penh airport, eight high ranking military officers are sitting in a row waiting for my paperwork. I hand my passport to the first officer, my application to the second, my photos to the third, and shuffle along watching my passport change hands until finally, I have my stamped passport in hand. But, wait. The immigration officer stops me and asks if I'm Cham. I say no. He tilts his head and repeats, "half Cham?" questioningly. I reply, "no, half Indian." He looks down at the passport. "Ah, Indian." He is smiling so this must be a good thing. I smile back, relieved and walk out into the humid evening.

Teak, the head of WWF Cambodia, has come to meet me. He has an affable smile and a sudden rapid fire laugh. He went to Yale for his graduate degree but returned to Cambodia five years ago to work on natural resource conservation. On the way to town, I mention my experience with the Customs officer and he tells me that the Khmers like Indians. We have a shared history that goes back over 2000 years when Cambodia was called Funnan and was part of the India-China trade route. Also, I apparently look part Cham, the Muslim minority in Cambodia and a fusion of Indian, Chinese, and Arabic cultures.

For now, I'm just happy because I'm closer to home in more ways than I thought.