Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the foot of Phnom Krom, you can get a feel for the village just by walking along the
causeway; during dryer parts of the year the village is moved further out onto the lake,
and you'll have to get into a boat to see it properly.
Tourism nothwithstanding, Chong Khneas remains a genuine
floating village
(see box
below), with houses (most of them little better than floating shacks) built on bamboo
rafts, lashed together to keep them from drifting apart and arranged on an informal
kind of grid-plan, with streets of water between.
GECKO exhibition centre
Daily 8.30am-5pm • Free, but donations appreciated
Chong Khneas is home to the
GECKO exhibition centre
(Greater Environment Chong
Khneas O
ce), an NGO whose main role is to improve the environmental awareness
of the local fishing population. The small centre has exhibits on the lake's flora and
fauna, and on the traditional lifestyles of the fishing communities living around it, and
also offers a rare opportunity to actually get inside a floating building.
3
Kompong Phluk
Around 35km from Siem Reap by road (turn south off the NR6 at Roluos) • Entrance to village plus boat trips $20/person
South of Chong Khneas on the lake is
KOMPONG PHLUK
- more authentic and, for
now, more relaxed than Chong Khneas, although it is embracing tourism with a will.
This is a
stilted
rather than a floating village (see box below), its buildings raised upon
high wooden pillars, with the lake waters lapping around their bases. At the height of
the
wet season
in September water levels can rise well above 10m, completely
drowning the surrounding patches of forest and sometimes flooding the buildings of
the village itself. During the
dry season
, lake levels fall progressively, and between
March and May the waters usually vanish completely, receding around 500m from the
village and leaving its houses stranded atop their huge stilts amid an expanse of mud.
For most of the year the village is marvellously photogenic, its ramshackle wooden
houses and the tops of surrounding half-drowned trees rising improbably out of the
waters a kilometre or so offshore. Visiting at the height of the dry season, although less
obviously picture-perfect, allows you to appreciate the buildings' remarkable
architecture, with houses towering 10m or so overhead atop their platforms, like some
miniature bamboo Manhattan. Living conditions are as basic as you'd imagine,
although the village comes equipped with its own gendarmerie and school, perched in
magnificent isolation amid the waters at the entrance to the village.
Villagers offer memorable rides in sampan-style boats between the trees of the
surrounding flooded forest, while a marvellous raised wooden walkway between the
trees has also been constructed, which is planned to connect to a big stilted restaurant
FLOATS AND STILTS
The Tonle Sap villages are often generically described as the “floating villages”, even though in
fact not all of them are. Genuine
floating villages
, such as Chong Khneas - or those at Pursat
and Kompong Chnnang (see p.109 & p.112) - are exactly that, with houses built on bamboo
pontoons bobbing raftlike on the water, meaning that the entire village can be towed to a
new location on the lake according to seasonally rising or falling water levels, and allowing its
inhabitants convenient access to the best available supplies of fish. Conversely, other lakeside
settlements, such as Kompong Phluk, are actually
stilted villages
, and float only in a
metaphorical sense, their buildings being constructed on top of raised platforms perched
above the water on high wooden stilts (like a supersized version of the traditional Khmer rural
house). Needless to say, these villages occupy a fixed position, irrespective of prevailing water
levels, and come the height of summer are generally left high and dry as the lake waters
recede, stranding them amid lakeside mud.
