Kauffman Commentary

This morning our boat pulled out of Phnom Penh. We traveled about an hour upstream to an island in the middle of the river. This island, about 1 3/4 miles wide and 3 1/2 miles long, is home to 1500 families, 7,000 people and 2 public schools. It is also home to a silk workshop, where they produce silk and weave a wide variety of products from that silk.

The butterflies which make silk mate for 8 hours, after which the male butterfly dies and the female lays her eggs. The eggs are collected and placed in trays where they are fed for 48 days. They then are placed into bundles of twigs to spin their cocoons for 10 days. Most of the cocoons are collected (not all so they have more butterflies to continue the process), and dried in the sun to kill the worm. Each cocoon has about 450 meters of thread. When they are ready to make the thread, between 30 and 40 cocoons are boiled, the threads from each gathered together and twisted into a single thread. The threads are dyed and then taken to the weavers. Each weaver can make about 1/2 meter in an 8 hour day, depending upon the intricacy of the pattern.

We took tuk tuks back to the middle of the town which was where one of the island’s schools was located. The kids were returning from recess and all wanted to “high five” or fist bump the visitors.

After lunch on the boat, we left the island to continue upstream to Kampong Cham, where we’ll stay for a couple of evenings and eventually leave the boat to continue the adventure back in Vietnam, after our trip to Siem Reap.