My best travel day … ever.

My all-time favorite experience traveling to date was in 2008, when my friend Stephanie and I were in Cambodia. We’d been in Siem Reap for about five days and we were a little over temples. We read about these “Floating Villages” near Siem Reap in our guidebook, and we asked our trusty tuk tuk driver if he could take us to one.

Our trusty tuk tuk driver’s name was Souk Ah, and he’d been driving us around every day for the last five days. That’s why we trusted him. He barely spoke English – above telling Stephanie that he “would not always be a lowly tuk tuk driver.” She had stupidly admitted that she was not married, and this phrase became commonplace. Despite having little to no way to communicate with this guy, we somehow just felt Souk Ah was a standup dude.

He informed us that since it was April and 1,000 degrees outside, he could not take us to the Water Villages. “Too far. Too hot. No Rain. Cannot go. No go. Very far. Very, very hot.”

We begged and pleaded irrationally. We turned on the Southern charm. When that didn’t work, we offered more money.  Finally – probably because he wanted to marry Stephanie – Souk Ah relented. We took off the next morning in his tuk tuk, bright and early. We drove. And we drove. For several hours we drove, until the dirt road had nothing but fields on either side and the path became rutted to the point that we had to pull over. Souk Ah walked up to a hut off the side of the road and argued with a man there for a very long time, before coming back and taking his tuk tuk apart. He motioned for Stephanie to climb on his motorcycle (now separated from the back tuk tuk carriage). Via much hand waiving, gesturing – and Cambodian vs. American Charades – I realized the plan was now for me to ride with the random stranger on his bike.

There was this moment shared between Stephanie and I that day that I’ve never had with another human on that level. It was a moment of knowing you are either about to have an incredible, off-the-beaten-path experience – and see some real crazy shit – or you are going to end up robbed in a rice patty and sold into white slavery. I glanced over and we exchanged some terse mental notes without speaking. Something along the lines of “This is wrong? Yeah, we could die. Or, at best get robbed? Where the HELL are we? Bad idea.”

But we had come so far. It was hotter than a fry grease. My shoulders were pink and screaming. I couldn’t see getting back in the tuk tuk after three hours of driving. So, I climbed on the back of random guy’s motorcycle. With no helmet. And off we went.

It took a while, and I will admit that for the entire super-fast-down-the-crazy-rutted-dirt-track ride I was growing more and more alarmed. There didn’t seem to be water anywhere. We hadn’t seen so much as a drop for hours. Souk Ah and Stephanie were so far behind me and Random Cambodian Motorcycle Man, I could no longer see them. And then, just when I was about to tell him to pull over (for me to do what i have no idea), we came up on the coolest place I’ve ever seen. The Tonle Sap River was curving around rows and rows of colorful, thatched houses on giant stilts, 30 feet in the air. Children came scrambling down sketchy ladders to meet us, ecstatic. They spoke English and rapid fire yelled “No one comes here in April! No rain! Too hot! Too far! Very, very hot!”

We nodded in agreement. Souk Ah laughed his ass off. They showed us around their tiny town, took us in their tiny school house, showed us their favorite chickens and dogs and then we all walked down to the river. From there, we motored out in a small, flat-bottomed boat to the actual floating village, where houses rest on car tires (or really, anything that floats) and when the rainy season comes, they just rise with the water. In some spots, that means a 15 foot increase in water. Chickens, pigs and alligators are all kept in floating cages made from bamboo, and the kids are as adept at manning the boats as the adults. Laundry hangs outside the houses, which make use of everything from corrugated metal to cardboard beer boxes to bedsheets for walls.

Later that day, we returned to the village of stilt houses, and I asked the kids there if they’d ever been to Siem Reap. “No,” they replied. “Will you ever go?” I asked. “No, probably not.” Big. Giant. Smiles.

Siem Reap we estimated later was only 25 miles away, but it took us several hours to get back there. Those kids will likely never leave that village with its 90-odd families, its stilts and floating pig cages. I think about those kids all the time …. when I’m in my apartment, with my extra towels, my expensive shoes, my iPod, iPad, iPhone … my iLife. And I smile. Somewhere in the world, they live in another world. I have no idea where exactly it is on a map, but it’s the place where I had one of the best days of my life thus far.

This trip, I asked our guide to take my father and me to visit a floating village. I told him I wanted a non touristy one and – since it’s January – it wasn’t such a trek. We went to a place called Macherey Water Village. If you ever go to Siem Reap, this spot is a MUST visit. Any local tour guide could get you there and the experience – while nothing like my first one – was still epic amounts of fun.

You can see the photos from this trip here.