Siem Reap to Battambang by Boat

Description

Siem Reap to Battambang by Boat is one of the most wonderful ways to travel including sightseeing, relaxation and refreshments. The trip will give you a lot of things to see, especially the lifestyle of floating villages on Tonle Sap Lake, beautiful nature, landscapes and birds. If you’re interested to visit Prek Toal Bird Sanctuary, we can prepare this trip for you.

The wooden boat with sunshade roof provides life jackets, comfortable seats, a wooden dining table, toilet and hammocks. The journey takes about 8 hours depending on the water level of the season. The friendly local boatman with his assistant will offer you a stop for a lunch break at one of the floating village restaurants on the half way. It is a wonderful river trip for a nature-loving family or group looking for adventure and a unique way to experience rural Cambodia.

You will be picked up from your hotel at 7:30 AM and travel 14 km from Siem Reap to one of the villages on Tonle Sap Lake. The boat departs from Chong Kneas dock, very close to the ancient hilltop temple of Phnom Krom. At the start of the trip, you will pass by the floating village of Chong Kneas where almost 1000 Cambodian and Vietnamese families all live in floating households and most earn their living through the fishing industry. Chong Kneas lives in houseboats that need to be moved with the changing levels. There are things to learn about this incredible natural flood barrier.

We cruise into the open waters of the Southeast Asia’s largest freshwater lake and after 1h30 of journey we make a stop at the largest floating village of Prek Toal to visit a Water Hyacinth Handicraft where the local resident makes artisanal products made from hyacinth. People collected Water Hyacinth plant (known as the long-life growing plant) free-floating, growing from the surface of the water. Using hyacinth stems that have been carefully dried in the sun, weavers create a variety of products by hand.

The boat ride will take you across the Sangker River, navigating a narrow waterway, we enter the medieval floating villages, where houses stand on stilts up to a few meters above the water, monastery and old wooden pagoda which is over 100 years old, fish farm in bamboo cage, boathouses, fishing boats with many kinds of fishing equipment and everything that lives on the water, animals like chicken, duck, dogs and vegetable farms. It offers the wonderful opportunity to observe life on and around the river during the trip. The authentic images of life on the river that you just don't see from traveling by the bus.

From time to time the landscape opened up, floating villages appeared out of nowhere, the activities of daily life, fishermen in long narrow boats casting their nets, children playing in the water, waving enthusiastically from their floating cottage home, businesses, schools, hardware stores, churches, government buildings float.

You will arrive at Battambang new boat dock after 8 hours of travel, the views of the small fishing village gave you a sense of Cambodian life by the river. These river homes offered open concept living with the front wall of the house opening directly onto the deck patios. It is hard not to peer into the houses of the villagers and witnessed the recurring cycle of daily life.

We have prepared the Tuk Tuk to pick you up and transfer you to the hotel in Battambang.