This one was a little different than the others we'd seen in that the huts weren't built against the shore. Instead, there seemed to be a raft-walkway that connected two separate islands, and the houses were attached to walkway in the middle of the water! One of the guides told us that this type of setup was used to catch fish in nets!
On the way we passed another floating-hut village on the water. This one didn't have any guest houses and it was really cool to see that the "tourist" huts were pretty much identical to how the locals live.
Traveling by motorized bamboo raft is a totally crazy experience. That combined with the surroundings made me feel like I'd woken up in some bizarro Legend of Zelda world.
And I use the term "boat" lightly. See those two things on the left? Those are the boats that we were going to be taking to cross the lake and get to the cave that we'd be exploring! They were actually rafts made out of bamboo with 5 HP engines tied to the back!
It only took us about thirty minutes to cross the island. We came out of the jungle and had to walk down a really steep trail to get to another "boat launch" area.
After we'd finished lunch, we went back out on the docks and we ended up striking up a conversation with one of our boat drivers. Which eventually led to him insisting that he take a picture...
Around 1pm we ate a delicious lunch. Here's Mer with two of the other tourists (If I remember correctly, they were from Germany) enjoying some post-lunch fruit.
Check out the totally jungley mountains in the background. Can you believe that this place actually exists in the world? Even though I was there, every time I see these pictures I'm like "What? That place can't be real!"
Our guide told us that we were going to be hanging out here for a couple of hours to swim, relax and eat lunch and then we were going to hike across the island and then take a boat from the far side of the island over to a cave!
Here's a pic of the big communal hut where our lunch was being prepared.
...we spotted a series of floating raft houses built along side the edge of the island (which pretty much looked like someone had dropped the top of a mountain into the middle of a lake).
Then we rounded a corner and what we thought was the other side of the lake turned out to be an island in the middle of the lake! We entered a cove of some sort and then a couple of minutes later...
The guy at our hostel highly recommended the tour of the lake and I took his word without asking him to go into too much detail about what we'd be doing on the tour. Around this time we'd be driving across the lake for almost an hour and we were starting to wonder if the whole tour was going to be spent on the boat.
After getting out of the truck, we stopped for a quick bathroom break and then hit the lake! Most of the other guests stayed under the boat's awning, but since Mer and I had slathered ourselves with sunblock, we decided to sit up on the bench on the very back of the boat and enjoy the sun and scenery.
The longtail boats are really fun. They're basically handmade boats with car engines strapped to the back that have been converted so that the drive shift turns a propeller.
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