At 9am, our Khmer language teacher, Noung, picked us up in a tuk-tuk for a guided tour of a local village on the Tonle Sap lake.
It was with some trepidation that we decided to visit the commune of Kompong Phluk, as we had read many reports of exploitative practices, involving pressurised selling of food and school materials to tourists to donate to the village. In reality, the villagers don't seem to benefit from these donations, the money going instead to those orchestrating the buying and selling. I was expecting a tourist trap and racket, but experienced nothing of the sort due, I suspect, to Noung's expert guidance.
On National Route 6 out of town, traditional Khmer houses sprang up on stilts either side of the road. Whether constructed from bamboo or wood, clad in palm leaves or corrugated metal, the houses all share the characteristic of being raised off the ground by some degree. This is to create an area for storage under the house and, traditionally, a place for the family's animals. I mused that it would also be useful if the area flooded, thinking of the deluged ground-level houses we had seen in Thailand a few years ago. We would see just how effective this style of architecture is at Kompong Phluk.
Several kilometres out of Siem Reap, we came upon a sandy, rutted path, which seemed to be the only road in and out of the village. We bumped and bounced our way along, the driver struggling to stay upright on the undulating service. One side of the path was in the process of eroding into the surrounding low-lying fields - a process exacerbated by allowing large tourist buses to share the same route. In parts, the sand was so deep that the tuk-tuk floundered on the return leg and our guide had to get out and push.
When still several kilometres from the lake's periphery as marked on the map, we hit water. Tonle Sap - the great lake - fluctuates dramatically in size during the different seasons. In the dry season, it is around 150km in length, but can swell up to 200km in the wet season when water from the Mekong backs up the river. A host of boats awaited to take us the rest of the way.
In the boat, we followed the 'road', several metres below us. The only indication of the road were the tops of the trees that line either side. I remarked that there were no buildings visible. Were these completely submerged so that even their rooftops are under water?
Just then, the first of many buildings appeared in the distance, 'floating' eerily above the water's surface. It was the Gendarmerie and was followed quickly by a school and a number of other houses, all built up on stilts much higher than normal to accommodate the extra volume of water that inundates the region for six months every year.
Kompong Phluk is called a 'floating village', but it is not as I had anticipated having seen the houses on the Vietnamese stretch of the Mekong, which are built on buoyant platforms and could, if not moored, allow the occupants to relocate by simply floating downstream.
When the lake is swollen, the villagers routinely use boats to reach one another, to go to the market, the school, and to the pagoda. For this period, they live an entirely aquatic existence. However, the rains this year must have been less severe, as the level is a few metres shy of the high watermark. This means we could walk through parts of the village.
The main thoroughfare is strewn with rubbish. Our guide told us that, back when packaging was natural (such as lotus and banana leaves), the villagers tossed it into the water to return to nature. Old habits die hard, and so the waters are now littered with non-biodegradable materials. The villagers wait for the dry season, when the water recedes and leaves the litter behind, to burn it in small piles.
Noung knows the chief of the commune and has worked with the village to establish ecotourism. She told us of an ingenious initiative she ran, in which discarded PET bottles were packed with rubbish until firm enough to be used as building materials. From these ersatz bricks, she managed to build a bridge and a clinic. She laments that the efforts stopped owing to lack of funding.
We strolled through the commune and the single pagoda that serves the community. The villagers went about their business and seemed not at all bothered by our presence, save for a smile and a friendly wave. In fact, I didn't see a single other tourist, which led me to suspect that the busloads of Koreans and Chinese we saw before must have been taken somewhere else entirely. Our guide was canny and moved about the village as though at home, picking up a watermelon for lunch later, and inviting us to sample the 'waffles' prepared in a metal mould, which were more like small madeleines, made with cassava flour and coconut.
Kompong Phluk means 'harbour of the tusks', so called because the area was a watering hole for elephants. In addition to the regular flooding, the wind blowing uninterrupted over the vast lake would make this location yet more inhospitable were it not for the protection provided by the trees planted in the middle of the 20th century. Of course, this forest spends half of the year partially submerged and a bevy of rowboats waited to take us through the beautiful flooded scene.
Through her contacts with the head of the commune, Noung had us invited to his house for lunch. No doubt on important business, the chief himself was not there as we clambered up the wooden ladder of his stilted house. However, his wife received us and had prepared lunch.
The meal was simple home-cooked food typical of the villagers' diet, which we ate sat on the floor in a circle. Stir-fried wild morning glory was chewy, salty and savoury, while the thin omelette was sweet from the finely shredded onion inside. With a simple spinach and vegetable soup and a mountain of rice, we feared that the flexible bamboo floor would give way and deposit us in the water 12 feet below.
Passing a field of yellowed, bent rice ears (as opposed to the carpet of fresh, straight, green shoots we were used to), Noung leapt from the tuk-tuk and offered our 'help' to the bemused but good-natured women bringing in the harvest. Harvesting rice is not a man's job (I should be fishing), but with the sharp sickle, it took less skill to reap the crop than I had imagined, but it is back-breaking labour. "Why are they harvesting now, in the heat of the day?" I asked naively. The answer is that the workers have been up since dawn bringing in the rice, but that it takes all day to work the entire field, eventually yielding about 300kg of rice. When the crop is ready, it must be brought in immediately.
Also on the way home, we passed Bakong - one of the older temples and part of the so-called Roluos group, which formed part of Hariharalaya, the first capital of the Khmer empire, before it was moved to Angkor. As a 9th-century structure, my first thought was that it has weathered the past 1100 years exceedingly well. The truth is that it didn't survive intact and, in fact, was in pieces when discovered by European explorers. Malcolm Glaize, who led the restoration efforts, states: "Before restoration the temple of Bakong was little more than a mound of earth [...] In particular nothing remained of the central sanctuary [...] except for the external outline of its base on the paving of the upper platform. From a pile of rubble it has now reassumed its entire silhouette." Bakong was an enormous jigsaw puzzle, and its resurrection is almost as astonishing as its original construction.
As though knowing my predilection for sweet things, Noung made another unscheduled stop at a market to let us sample some Khmer specialties: two different kinds of banana cakes, one a long slice of banana fried in a batter made from cassava flour (chek chien), the other a fried round ball of rice and coconut with a piece of banana at its centre. We ate some and kept the rest for tea.
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