Kratie and the Mekong Dolphins: Cambodia’s Quiet North

There are fewer than a hundred Irrawaddy dolphins left in the Mekong and most of them live in a deep pool a few kilometres upstream of a town nobody stops in. Day one of the Cambodia ride goes there, and it is the right way to start.

The town at the top of the tourist map

Almost everybody who visits Cambodia does the same triangle: Phnom Penh, Siem Reap for Angkor, and the southern coast. It is a good triangle and it contains most of the country’s famous things.

Kratie sits north of all of it, two hundred and seventy kilometres up the Mekong from the capital, and it is the point at which the tourist map runs out. The town is a grid of French colonial shophouses along a riverfront, with a market, a handful of guesthouses and not much else. Nothing about it is spectacular.

What it has is the river, and what the river has is dolphins.

The ride up

Day one of the Real Cambodia Ride runs Phnom Penh to Kratie, two hundred and seventy kilometres, and it functions as a shakedown as much as a destination.

The road follows the Mekong north through the flat, populated, intensively farmed country of the lower river. It is not technical riding. It is fast, straight, occasionally busy, and it does the job of getting everybody used to the bike, to the traffic conventions and to riding in the heat before the terrain starts asking questions in the Mondulkiri hills on day two.

What it also does is show you the Mekong properly. This far down, the river is enormous and slow and brown, with sandbars appearing and disappearing according to the season and villages built on stilts along the banks. In the dry season it drops several metres and reveals whole islands that are underwater in the wet.

By the time you arrive in the late afternoon you have ridden a decent distance and you have some idea of what the country looks like at ground level, which is a better introduction than an internal flight.

Kampi, and what is actually in the water

Fifteen kilometres north of the town, at a place called Kampi, the river has carved a deep pool. In the dry season, when the water level drops and the shallows disappear, the dolphins concentrate in pools like this one, and Kampi is the most reliable of them.

The Irrawaddy dolphin is not what most people picture. It has no beak. The head is rounded, almost blunt, with a mouth that curves into something that reads as a smile, and the dorsal fin is small and stubby. It grows to a couple of metres and it is grey.

It is also a freshwater population, which is the rare part. Irrawaddy dolphins exist in coastal waters across the region, but the Mekong group lives its entire life in the river, hundreds of kilometres from the sea.

You go out in a small wooden boat with an outboard, the boatman cuts the engine at the edge of the pool, and then you sit and wait and watch. They surface to breathe, briefly, with a soft exhalation you can hear across the water. They do not leap or perform. It is a quiet thing.

The number, which is the difficult part

The Mekong population is critically endangered and has been for decades. Surveys have put the number at somewhere under a hundred animals, and while there have been recent years with more calves surviving than dying, the trend over the longer run has been down.

The causes are the usual ones. Gillnet entanglement is the biggest single killer, because a dolphin that gets caught in a net set for fish drowns. Historic use of explosives and electricity for fishing did enormous damage. Habitat fragmentation from dams upstream has changed the flow regime and the sediment load the whole ecosystem depends on. And the deep pools they need in the dry season are a finite and shrinking resource.

Conservation work has had real effect: river guard patrols removing illegal nets, community-based protection agreements, and a tourism model that gives local people an economic reason to want the dolphins alive.

That last part is what you are participating in when you take the boat out, and it is the honest answer to whether visiting is a good thing. Done through the official operation with the fee going into the protection scheme, it is part of the mechanism keeping the population alive. Done badly, with an unlicensed boat chasing animals for a better photograph, it is part of the problem.

How to do it without making it worse

The rules are simple and they matter.

Go through the official dolphin-watching operation at Kampi rather than negotiating privately with somebody on the bank. The fee is modest and it goes where it should.

Insist the engine goes off. A boat under power near the pool is stressful for the animals and the good boatmen cut it without being asked.

Do not ask to get closer. The distance is the point, and a boat that approaches is a boat that changes the animals’ behaviour.

Go early morning or late afternoon, which is both better for sightings and cooler for you.

And manage the expectation: you will see backs and dorsal fins surfacing at a distance, probably several times, and you will not see anything like a dolphin show. People who arrive wanting spectacle are disappointed. People who arrive wanting to sit on a river at dusk and watch a critically endangered animal breathe are not.

The other thing at Kratie

Across the river from the town sits Koh Trong, a long sandy island in the middle of the Mekong reachable by a short ferry.

It is flat, rural and almost entirely undeveloped: pomelo orchards, a couple of villages, a floating Vietnamese community at one end, and a track running round the perimeter that takes an hour or so. In the dry season a beach appears along the western side.

Taking a bicycle round it in the early evening, after the boat trip, is one of those small unremarkable hours that people remember disproportionately. It is also a useful reminder of what most of Cambodia actually looks like away from the temples.

Riding north from here

Kratie is a threshold as well as a stop. Everything south of it is the populated lowland Cambodia most visitors see. Everything north and east of it is the part almost nobody rides.

Day two climbs into Mondulkiri, and the character of the trip changes within an hour: red laterite, pine hills, elephant country, and a road that used to be a legendary ordeal and is now largely sealed. Day four crosses to Ratanakiri in the far northeast corner. Day five and six run west across the top of the country through Siem Pang and Tbeng Meanchey on roads where you will go long stretches with nothing in the mirrors.

Starting that at Kratie rather than at Siem Reap means the trip builds outward from the river rather than inward from the famous temple, which is a better shape for a fortnight.

The river as a through-line

Worth noticing, because it is the thing that ties the route together.

The Mekong runs six thousand kilometres from the Tibetan plateau to the South China Sea, through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Our routes cross it or follow it in almost every one of those countries: at Chiang Khong in Thailand, at Luang Prabang and Vientiane in Laos, at Kratie and Phnom Penh in Cambodia, and in the delta in Vietnam.

Riders doing multiple trips with us end up with a strange composite memory of the same river in five different characters: a fast clear mountain river in northern Laos, a working waterway at Vientiane, this enormous slow brown thing at Kratie, and a maze of channels in the delta.

The dolphins live in one specific and narrow part of that, which is part of why they are in the trouble they are in.

Season, and why it matters here specifically

Dolphin viewing is better in the dry season, roughly November to May, because the falling water concentrates the animals into the deep pools. In the wet season they disperse across a much larger river and sightings become a lottery.

That happens to coincide with the better riding season in Cambodia, so there is no trade-off to manage. November to February is the comfortable window: dry, cooler, and the landscape still green from the rains. March to May is dry and extremely hot. June to October is the green season, wet and atmospheric, with red laterite in the northeast that turns to something with the friction of wet soap.

For a first Cambodia trip, aim at the cool dry months and you get the best of both the riding and the river.

What else lives in this river

The dolphins get the attention and they are not the only remarkable thing in the water.

The Mekong is one of the most biodiverse river systems on earth, second only to the Amazon by some measures, with well over a thousand fish species. It holds the giant freshwater stingray, which reaches several metres across and is among the largest freshwater fish in the world. It holds the Mekong giant catfish, which grows to nearly three metres and is critically endangered. It holds the giant barb, Cambodia’s national fish.

All of those are in serious trouble for the same reasons the dolphins are: overfishing, habitat fragmentation from dams, and the alteration of the flood pulse that the entire system depends on.

You will not see any of them from a boat. What you will see is the fishery that depends on them: nets set from the bank, traps in the channels, the morning catch laid out at the market in Kratie, and a great many people whose living comes directly out of the river.

That is the context the dolphin conservation sits inside, and it is why the approach that has worked is the one that gives fishing communities a reason to want the animals there rather than simply telling them not to set nets.

Eating and staying

Kratie is a small town and the food is straightforward Khmer cooking: fish from the river, amok, lok lak, rice with everything. The riverfront restaurants are unremarkable and pleasant, and sunset over the Mekong from a plastic chair with a cold beer is the correct way to end day one.

Accommodation ranges from basic guesthouses to a couple of decent riverside places. This is not a town with a luxury option and nobody should expect one.

Which is broadly true of the whole northeastern loop, and worth knowing before booking. The Cambodia route trades hotel quality for country nobody else rides. Riders who want five stars every night should look at the Thailand routes instead.

Riding out of Phnom Penh

Day one starts in a capital city, which on any motorcycle tour is the part people are most nervous about, and Phnom Penh is easier than its reputation.

It is smaller and less frantic than Bangkok, Hanoi or Saigon. The traffic is dense but slow, the road grid is simple, and the volume of large vehicles is low. What it has instead is a total absence of lane discipline and a convention that right of way belongs to whoever is already committed, which is disconcerting for about twenty minutes and then becomes readable.

The rule that works everywhere in this region applies here: be predictable. Hold your line, hold your speed, and let the traffic flow around you rather than making sudden corrections. Everybody else has already planned around where you were going.

Within half an hour you are out on the road north with the river on your right, and the city is behind you for a fortnight.

The country you are riding into

Some context, because the northeast makes more sense with it.

Cambodia is small, flat in the middle, and forested around the edges. Roughly sixteen million people, most of them concentrated in the lowland rice belt around the Tonlé Sap and the Mekong. The provinces the route heads for, Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri, hold a small fraction of the population across a large area, and the people who live there are largely indigenous highland groups rather than ethnic Khmer.

That is why the riding changes so completely after day one. You are not moving between towns in the same country so much as leaving the populated core for the margins, and the margins in Cambodia are red dirt, forest and elephants.

The forest is also under real pressure. Cambodia has lost a great deal of primary forest to logging and plantation conversion over the past two decades, and you will ride past both the remaining forest and the rubber and cassava that has replaced it. Anybody paying attention will notice the difference between the two within a day.

Why a fortnight in Cambodia beats three days at Angkor

The wider argument, since this article is really about the shape of a Cambodia trip.

Angkor is extraordinary and it deserves the rest day the itinerary gives it. It is also the thing everybody does, and doing only that leaves you with a country reduced to one archaeological site and a beach.

The version that starts at Kratie, climbs into the eastern hills, crosses the empty north, comes down through Battambang and into the Cardamoms is a completely different experience. It is a country with elephants and dolphins and forest and red dirt in it, and Angkor arrives on day seven as one part of it rather than as the point.

The dolphins are a good early signal of that. Day one, and you are already somewhere that is not on the postcard.

What to expect from the roads on day two

Since day one is the easy one, it is worth knowing what follows, because the contrast is sharp.

Kratie to Mondulkiri is two hundred and ten kilometres and the character changes within the first hour. The road leaves the river, climbs out of the lowland, and enters red laterite country: pine forest on the higher ground, rubber and cassava plantations where the forest used to be, and long empty stretches.

The surface is largely sealed now, which is recent. This was for years one of the legendary rough roads of Southeast Asia and the reason riders talked about Mondulkiri at all. The sealing has made it accessible and taken some of the myth away, which is the trade every improving road in this region makes.

What remains is altitude, cooler air, and a province that feels nothing like the rest of the country. The rest day there is on day three, and it is well placed.

Riding Cambodia for real

Our fifteen-day Real Cambodia Ride starts and finishes in Phnom Penh, which means it is entirely unaffected by the closure of the Thailand land border, and it runs Kratie and the Mekong dolphins on day one before climbing into Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri, crossing the empty north through Preah Vihear province and Koh Ker, taking a full rest day at Angkor, then Battambang, the Cardamom mountains, Koh Kong and the Kampot pepper coast.

Roughly two and a half thousand kilometres, small group on a fully supported guided tour, with a road captain, a tour guide, a mechanic and a support vehicle, everything included. Have a look at the 15-day Real Cambodia Ride or the Cambodia motorbike tours page. If you want to know which months give you the best dolphin sightings and the best roads on the same big biking tour, message us on WhatsApp.