This is part 2 of a series of articles serving as extensions of Ken’s wonderful book Classic Wooden Fishing Boats of the Vietnamese Coast, now available as an eBook in our Library.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Coming Soon: Part 4
As it turned out, among all the amazing things to see and learn for the first time in a place so different from home, the most intriguing by far was this species of large canoe, used, apparently, both for family homes and for commercial fishing on the big river. The sample I collected is small, a few dozen boats, located in the capital, Phnom Penh in the South of the country and around Stung Treng, a small provincial town in the farthest North of the country, essentially at the border with Laos. That is to say, some isolated examples along the banks of the Hotel Zone of a large modern urban center, and the others in a remote rural area a long ways (about 330 km) upstream. The river in that stretch is full of islands, so the total river distance to hold other examples is huge. It’s probably reasonable to suppose you could find more of them between those two points but I can’t confirm it!
On that first trip through Phnom Penh in 2008 I hardly formed any coherent idea of these canoes, but a week later in Stung Treng, I walked out upstream and downstream from town and found a fleet of all sorts of canoes and larger boats in a “wild” moorage area, with an old man clearly either building or rebuilding at least two of the big canoes on the bank, and life going on on board much of the fleet afloat (or nearly so!). The first thing that became obvious was the variety of people: men mostly in “western” clothes, women and young women wearing striking flowing long dresses and modest head coverings, and younger children cooking and cleaning and visiting back and forth among the boats looking like anybody else’s kids. Though on that first visit, most of the boats seemed to be settled where they were, in a few cases, a family was rowing their home out into the main stem of the river, off on business.
So, on that first trip in Phnom Penh I had almost no context for the canoes, but seeing the boats and people in Stung Treng began to make things clear! The following trips through both areas found me much better prepared to “see” the boats in context, and to contrast the Phnom Penh boats, their appearance and apparent uses with the same boats upstream in Stung Treng.
I just glanced at the larger tor boat, not that interesting, but I really enjoyed the “Bopha Angkor Tour” boat, whose crew included a little girl with a big smile. She certainly looks as though she was built in the Vietnamese delta downstream, and certainly could have been! The big canoes were like nothing I’d seen before. Note that all five canoes are decked basically right at the sheer linek, and the living quarters on the two at the right of the photo are all on deck, not dropping down into the hull. At that time I didn’t even realize that the stack of bottles on the foredeck of the long black canoe and the bundle wrapped in burlap was actually the fishing gear.
0 Responses So Far to “Cambodian Canoes, Part 3: Cambodian Canoes for Living Aboard and Commercial Fishing”