January 22: Kompong Pluk (Floating Village) and Flooded Forest

We signed up for a small group tour to the Floating Village, about 45 minutes outside of Siem Reap, on the edge of Tonle Sap Lake. The lake is the largest freshwater body of water in all of SE Asia — 62 miles across at it’s widest and 160 miles long.  It occupies a geographical depression and floodplain of the lower Mekong River basin and varies in size, depth and volume based on the season. It contains an exceptional large variety of interconnected eco-regions with a high degree of biodiversity was designated as a UNESCO biosphere preserve in 1997. We were there in the dry season, and it was still quite vast, but not very deep.

Kompong Pluk is a village built on stilts that sits on one of the canals that lead into the lake. During the wet season the canal level raises 12-15 feet, and people traverse from house to house and the children head to school on boats. In the dry season, children were riding their bicycles in the street, and shrimp was drying along the roadside to be sold to make shrimp paste. We wondered how odd it must be for the children to have several months where there was a boat out the front door, and other months where it was another set of stairs to the dusty street. The primary occupation is fishing, although at this time of year there was also some farming being done.

At the mouth of the lake is the Flooded Forest.  Not mangrove, because it’s fresh water, but an entire jungle of trees under a few feet of water. And there is no dry season — this forest is as it is all the time. We took a flat bottom canoe ride with a woman paddling us along, and were surprised by the “mobile” stores along the way — women enterprisingly selling soft drinks and snacks to the tourists in the canoes, from their own canoes.

It was fascinating to watch life along the river. Small children must learn how to swim at a very young age, and are put to work to learn the tasks involved in fishing very early in their lives.

The heat exhausted us both, so when back in Siem Reap we stopped for some tea and lunch, and headed back to the hotel for our afternoon rest.  Dinner tonight is at another restaurant highly recommended and then we will head to the night market, which is located just off Pub Street — should be a lively night.