Here Be Dolphins

The city of Kratie is a small, dusty grid of streets along the Mekong River, 7 hours northeast of Phnom Penh. The woman at the ticket desk had been kind enough to give me a front row seat, which meant plenty of leg room and an unobstructed view of all the near disasters along the gently rolling road. My seat mate turned out to be an Australian gal named Elysha, the only other Westerner on the bus. She'd been volunteering in Phnom Penh for the past four weeks and was headed to Kratie to visit the friend of a friend. Social remora that I am, I invited myself along for the ride.

We're both glad that I did. At the bus stop her friend Sithy (pronounced "city") and his friend Taon (pronounced "town") met us with big grins and their motor bikes. After dropping our bags, we hopped on the back and zoomed 15 km upriver, past wooden houses on stilts and glimpses of the broad Mekong, to the official dolphin viewing site. Wonders of wonders, the Irrawaddy dolphin somehow managed to find its ecological niche in the turgid waters of this river, poking along just fine until the gill nets and pollution of their human neighbors began taking their toll. There are currently between 80 and 100 of the critters left, and this site near Kratie is one of their main protected areas. They look surprisingly like the porpoise on my arm, although they are light gray in color with rounder heads and longer bodies.

Elysha and I climbed aboard a little wooden boat with our 17-year-old skipper and motored upriver to join a couple other boats. It was the oddest thing to hear a dolphin blow in fresh water. They poke their bulbous heads out of the water first to exhale, then roll smoothly back under the thick brown water. How they see anything down there is entirely beyond me. Eventually the rest of the boats left, and we tied up to a submerged tree to revel in the quiet and watch the sun creep lower on the horizon. One solitary dolphin surfaced repeatedly right beside us, silhouetted against the evening sky. Eventually he moved on and so did we.