Kratie

The stretch of the Mekong around Kratie has been settled far longer than the town itself. Upriver at Sambor the area is linked with a royal capital of the pre-Angkorian Chenla period, whose rulers held the middle Mekong before the rise of Angkor, and the rapids and deep pools above the town marked the limit of easy navigation from the delta.

Modern Kratie grew under the French protectorate in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a river port and administrative seat. Steamers working upstream from Phnom Penh towards Stung Treng and Laos called here, Chinese and Vietnamese merchants settled along the bank, and the rows of shuttered shophouses on the riverfront date from that period. Rubber, timber and river trade supported the town, and the province was one of the more isolated parts of the country, reached mainly by water until roads improved.

The eastern provinces were heavily bombed during the Indochina wars, when the Vietnamese-controlled supply routes ran through the forests nearby, and the region came under Khmer Rouge control early in the war; the town was emptied like the rest of the country after 1975. It escaped serious destruction, however, which is why the colonial centre survives largely intact. Since the 1990s a paved highway has replaced the river as the main link to Phnom Penh, plantations have spread across the province, and the town has taken on a modest trade in visitors drawn by the dolphins and the quiet of the riverfront.

Kratie is a lowland Khmer town, Buddhist and conventional, and life runs through the pagodas, the market and the river. Monks walk for alms at first light, the wats hold the ceremonies that punctuate the year — Khmer New Year in April, Pchum Ben in the autumn, ordinations and funerals — and the hill shrines at Phnom Sombok and the pagoda at Sambor draw people from the surrounding villages.

The town has long been mixed. Chinese and Vietnamese traders settled along the riverfront in the colonial period and their descendants still run shops and restaurants; a floating Vietnamese fishing community lives off the north end of Koh Trong; and Cham Muslim villages with their own mosques stand along the Mekong nearby. In the districts east of the river, Khmer settlement gives way to upland peoples whose villages lie towards Mondulkiri.

The dolphins have shaped local identity in the past two decades. They are regarded with affection and a degree of reverence, the stretch of river from eastern Kratie province to the Lao border was declared a limited fishing zone in 2012, with gill nets and fishing cages barred, and boatmen, guides and stallholders now depend in part on the animals, whose Mekong population is listed as critically endangered. Evenings are social and unhurried: families gather on the promenade at sunset, children swim from the sandbanks in the dry season, and the town is quiet well before late. Visitors are expected to dress modestly away from the water and to keep noise down near shrines and on the boats.

Kratie is the capital of a thinly settled province where about seven in ten people live in the countryside, and almost everything happens between six in the morning and the middle of the afternoon. The market opens in the dark, schools and offices run through the morning, the hottest hours empty the streets, and the riverfront fills again at dusk with walkers, food carts and exercise groups.

The economy is farming, fishing and trade. Rice is grown on the flood plain, and the riverbanks and islands produce vegetables, maize, sesame and fruit, with pomelo orchards on Koh Trong. Rubber and cassava plantations, many of them established on former forest land, have spread across the province and are a source of both jobs and long-running land disputes with rural and indigenous communities. Fishing on the Mekong remains important, but catches have fallen with dams upstream, illegal gear and pressure on the river, which also threatens the dolphins.

Most people live in wooden stilt houses on the plots behind the centre and in the villages along the river road, where newer concrete houses are appearing as money returns from relatives working in Phnom Penh, Thailand and South Korea. Tourism provides a small, seasonal income to guesthouses, boatmen and drivers. The province's persistent concerns are river health, land, debt and the distance to decent healthcare.

Kratie eats from the Mekong. River fish is grilled over charcoal, fried, stewed in sour soups or dried and fermented into prahok, the pungent paste that flavours much of Khmer cooking; small fish are salted and dried on racks in the villages, and fish sauce and prahok sit on most tables. Meals are rice with two or three shared dishes and a plate of raw herbs, cucumber and banana flower.

The dishes are those of lowland Cambodia: nom banh chok, rice noodles under a green fish gravy of lemongrass and turmeric, eaten at breakfast; kuy teav, a clear pork and rice-noodle soup; samlor machu, a sour tamarind soup with fish; samlor korko, thick with vegetables and roasted ground rice; and, in restaurants, beef lok lak with a lime and black pepper dip and fish amok steamed in banana leaf.

Kratie's own speciality is krolan, sticky rice with coconut milk, black beans and sometimes sesame, packed into a bamboo tube and roasted over a fire until the tube chars; it is sold in bundles along the roads out of town and taken home by travellers as a gift. The island opposite supplies pomelos, and mangoes, bananas and sugar palms grow along the river. Drinks are iced coffee with condensed milk, sugarcane juice, palm juice in season and beer over ice at the riverfront tables.