Gill and Anna came to help on the building project today in an effort to get it finished. I suggested to James that he swap with them and have a day at the school for a bit of respite from the heat and dirt at the building site, but he wanted to come to get the job finished this week, so we all went to the building site.

We all got to work straight away on building the walls. To do this you need to take the trellis frames we have built and you turn them over so that the nails holding them in place are sticking up vertically. Imagine something that looks like a bed of nails. You then have to lay a metre-long section of palm leaves taken from the surrounding trees and woven by the family and then soaked and dried so that they lay flat against the trellis. You push the leaves down over a row of nails and push them down until the nails poke through them. Then you take a long strip of bamboo and hammer it down and bend the nails over the top to hold it all in place. We had 9 panels to make of various shapes and sizes between the whole team. It was a very painstaking process as you had to be careful not to stand on any nails as you worked. One of the panels was also about 25 square metres which took a long time to finish.

Gill, Anna and I worked with the father on a couple of panels whilst James worked upstairs with Sinn to build the door and window. He is getting pretty handy with a drill now and was fitting bolts and door handles. Anna was also getting handy with a drill pre-drilling holes in he bamboo strips that held the palm leaves in place. Gill and I helped with bending the nails over with a hammer and trimming off the edges with a saw and some scissors. I managed to slice into my little finger with a saw and cut my other hand on a nail. Luckily Gill was on hand to clean and patch me up.

It was more than 40 degrees again but Georgia brings plenty of water and electrolytes to keep our energy levels up. We finished at about 11am when it just got too hot to carry on so we went back to the hotel to cool off. We had time for a swim, some lunch and a nap before Sinn came to pick us up at 3.30 to go to Tonle Sap. It is a vast lake just to the south of Siem Reap where people live in floating houses. The lake is fed by the Mekong river and swells from its current size of around 2,000 square km to around 12,500 square km in the wet season.

Sinn drove us to the dock where you get the boat out to the floating villages. The boat goes out down a shallow channel that has to be constantly dredged to allow the boats through. The channel is full of boats trying to get up and down. It is very similar to the roads here, complete chaos. The boats are amazing. They look like the have been cobbled together with bits of wood and the propellor mechanism at the back looks like a Heath-Robinson invention. It was all incredibly noisy and muddy. The silt from the bottom of the channel had been piled high on the banks by mechanical diggers. The whole scene looked and sound like some kind of post-apocalyptic vision.

Once we had cleared the jetty we headed up the channel towards the lake. We couldn't see the lake due to the piles of earth on either bank. We grounded the boat a couple of times on the way out and the driver had to use a long pole to free us. Despite all the river traffic nobody stops, they just plough on churning up muddy water. It really did feel like we were extras in a Mad Max movie.

When we finally cleared the channel and got to the lake we could see the floating villages clustered around some larger floating markets. Sinn explained that there were really 2 main villages, one where Cambodians lived and one populated by Vietnamese. Apparently they don't get on and there are occasionally fights. We stopped at a market and as we docked a girl rowing a tin washing up bowl came alongside. She had a python round her neck and wanted a dollar for a photo with it. We gave that a miss and stepped onto the market, which was a collection of stalls, a bar, a fish farm and a crocodile farm. What else would you expect to find on a floating market!?

There was also a viewing gallery two floors up so we could get a better perspective on the lake. I'm sure it is much more beautiful in the wet season, but it was interesting to see how these people live and work out on the water. We got back on our boat and head back down the channel. We seemed to have the slowest boat as everything else churned past us. There wasn't much room to overtake though as the navigable channel was about 10 feet wide and there was also oncoming traffic to worry about. At one point a boat tried to go past us and ran aground. Our driver seemed to find this amusing but the tables were turned a few minutes later when our steering mechanism snapped and we also ran aground. The other boat had managed to free itself by this time and laughed as they flew by.

It was getting dark at this point and my sense of humour was starting fail as the driver tried to fix the steering mechanism. James was also falling asleep sitting upright in a wicker chair which wasn't all that comfortable. As it turned out it only took about 10 minutes to fix the steering as it was just a case of attaching a couple of pieces of string together. We got back to the jetty just as it was dark and got back in Sinn's minibus to head back into town for some early dinner. We were all tired after a long day and wanted to get an early night.

We ate at the Tigre de Papier on Sarah's recommendation. James hd a pizza and Anna tried some Khmer food with noodles. It was all pretty tasty apart from the Nem (spring rolls) which tasted like they were filled with sawdust. We the went round the corner to the Blue Pumpkin for a very nice Italian style ice cream before getting a Tuk-Tuk back home to bed. James walked in, collapsed on our bed and fell asleep so I had to carry him back to his bed.