For those who want to
see more than only temples.
This trip needs a half day, not to be confused with the floating
village (which have to our mind not such a great interest).
The tour includes a car with driver, boat, a pirogue to dive in
the flooded forest and lunch boxes at $70 for two persons, $75
for three persons and $80 for four.
Pictures of Kompong Phluk
Kompong Phluk is not a floating village
on the Tonle Sap, but a village on stilts located south of Siem
Reap in Prasat Bakong district. While fishing is often done by
ethnic Vietnamese, Kompong Phluk is almost exclusively inhabited
by Khmer fishermen. Of the 2,500 people living there, more than
90% are involved in fishing or related activities.
The village pagoda is built on the only hill in the area and therefore
has no stilts. It is the village meeting point and the dwellings
are distributed around it, usually in straight lines. The only
primary school, which is also on stilts, is near the pagoda too.
However, school attendance is very low due to poverty.
You will reach Kompong Phluk village with
a small but comfortable boat. Once there you will have lunch on
a traditional house with a local family or on the boat at your
own choice. Then, take small pirogues to visit the flooded forest
and the fauna and flora. On the way back you will also visit the
floating village and the fishing farms.
Information on Kompong
Phluk and Tonle Sap lake
The old skiff nudged gently against the
tree trunks and the boatman ducked his head to avoid low-hanging
branches.
Yellow birds hopped and twittered above him; fish swam below.
The boatman was making his way through a flooded forest, a strange
compromise of nature in which land and water time-share the fertile
plains of central Cambodia. It is an intricate ecology of flux
as the waters of the country's great
lake rise and fall with the seasons, now favoring the fish, now
the flatlands. It is a balance that is threatened now, with plans
to dam the river that feeds it, muting its annual rhythm. When
the restless lake, the Tonle Sap, breathes in, it expands like
a giant lung to more than double its dry-season surface area,
submerging farms and forests. When it breathes out, fish course
down the river by the millions, herons and whistling cranes cluster
around the ponds it leaves behind, and villagers abandon their
tall stilt houses to pursue its receding banks to new fishing
grounds. At its largest during the midyear monsoon, the lake is
30 feet deep and covers more than 4,500 square miles. When it
begins to drain in the fall, it shrinks to less than 1,100 square
miles and the water that remains is just waist-high.
In the 5,000 years since it was abandoned by a drying ocean, the
lake has given birth to a complex, self-contained world in which
rivers, plants, wildlife and human beings sustain each other through
the changes. When the lake is full, the so-called black fish fill
the flood plains, spawning and feeding. When it empties, these
homebodies stay behind, waiting in small ponds for the water to
rise again. Some find nests for themselves and their tiny offspring
in the hollows of uniquely evolved underwater plants. When the
lake empties, it is the migratory white fish - mostly catfish
- that choke the rushing waters as they race to spawning grounds
in the sea or high up the Mekong River.
It is the Mekong, flowing south from China, that feeds the life
cycle of the lake. Roaring with floodwaters during the rainy season,
it meets the river - also called Tonle Sap - that drains the lake,
just as they both reach the capital, Phnom Penh. The power of
the Mekong's current forces the Tonle Sap River to swallow its
own water, change direction, and flow back up to fill the lake
again. The changeable river, forever retracing its past, is often
taken as a
metaphor for Cambodia, a nation that cannot seem to break free
of its unhappy history. Around it, though, the world is marching
forward. In southern China, ambitious plans are under way to transform
the landscape by damming the Mekong and its tributaries. No one
can say exactly what will happen then downstream. But the annual
floods and the regular rise and fall of the lake here will be
affected, threatening its finely tuned environment.
Most of Cambodia's protein comes from the fish of Tonle Sap and
more than a million people make their livings directly from the
lake. This poverty-ridden nation has little alternative food or
employment to offer. Few people here know anything about dams
or China, and for now, the seasonal ebb and flow of the great
lake and the life around its edges continue as they always have.
Shoved northward by the Mekong, the Tonle Sap River pours back
into the
lake, bringing with it the young fish of the new season and feeding
the migrating birds that return to meet it. It inundates the rice
fields and mung bean plots that have given villagers a season
of farming and it floods the surrounding forests, driving the
birds and monkeys to higher branches. These forests, filled with
small white butterflies, are an otherworldly interlude at the
heart of the country. As the skiff of the lone fisherman rippled
though the quiet water, the trees around it seemed to spring to
life. Skittering up and down their trunks and branches was something
the Cambodians call water lightning, a reflection off the water
of the light that filters through the leaves. Jumping and wriggling
like an electric current, the thin bands of light seemed to make
the trees dance - strange nervous goblins trapped between the
smooth surface and the sheltering canopy. Emerging from the trees,
the boatman entered the waterworld of Kompong Phluk, a tiny village
at the mouth of the Roulos River, whose waters gave birth to the
Khmer empire of Angkor more than 1,000 years ago. There is no
sign of that ancient glory in this poor village, where palm-leaf
houses rise above the surface on 30-foot stilts, pigs and crocodiles
lounge in floating pens and quavering Cambodian melodies ripple
from radios across the lake.
Large nets are hung to dry in the sun alongside racks of drying
fish. Women in small boats paddle from house to house selling
the staples of village life, such things as cooking oil, rice,
cigarettes, incense, noodles, candles, chili sauce and sugar.
Already the water was beginning to drain from the village. There
was something like a scent of renewal in the air, an anticipation
of the reappearance of the earth. Under a bright blue sky, villagers
were preparing to pack up and follow the shrinking lake as their
fathers and grandfathers had before them. Until the lake rose
up again beneath it, Kompong Phluk would be a ghost town teetering
on crooked stilts.
Pictures of Kompong Phluk
