The Floating Village

On our last afternoon in Cambodia we drove outside of Siem Reap to see the famous floating village on Tonle Sap Lake. We arrived to the “marina” which had about 50 long-tail boats just waiting for tourists to come. We then proceeded to go for about a half hour down a shallow, muddy canal which would lead us to the lake. The water was so muddy I felt like we were boating through a Steak ‘n Shake chocolate milkshake, and there were people SWIMMING and BATHING in the canal. The reason it was so muddy is because we were there at the end of the dry season/start of the wet season, which is when the lake is at its lowest. It is such a drastic difference that in the wet season the lake is 3x the size it is during the dry season. The people who live in the floating village on the lake do so because they make their livelihood fishing. There were trees and bushes on the banks beside the canal, and when the waters are high they cover the foliage and the fish go there to lay their eggs. The eggs hatch, the water recedes, and the new fish are forced out of the bushes and into traps set by the fisherman.

When we actually reached the lake, we saw one of the strangest living situations I have ever seen. There are hundreds of different floating structures made of all different sorts of materials -- wood, aluminum, tin, etc. They were all just sort of pieced together and looked as though they could fall apart at any minute. We barely saw any actual people (I think they were all hiding out in their huts because we were there during mid-day and the sun was on full blast) and the only noise we could hear was the humming engine of our long-tail boat. It reminded me of the movie “Waterworld”, especially when we saw the trash boat that was pulling heaps and heaps of trash to the mainland. It had about 10 oil barrels on it and was spewing out black smoke.

We stopped at a tourist center where we got out and saw the Tonle Sap Lake “exhibit”, which consisted of a dated and decrepit little room holding some fish tanks (some dirty with a few fish in them, some empty that looked like no one had bothered to clean them out) and a small exhibit showing some maps of the area and the fishing techniques of the region. There was also an alligator enclosure and a fish enclosure where fish scampered around in a small, muddy pool. All in all it was a depressing sight, and was even more so when as we got back onto our long-tail boat two other boats pulled up beside us. On one, a blind man holding a sign saying “Please help me I’m blind” literally reached into our boat and touched us while begging for money, and on the other a dirty woman with three naked kids begged also.

We followed the same canal to get back to the marina, and this time I noticed all the makeshift huts sitting on the side of the canal. They were temporary houses for fisherman who didn’t live on the lake, and Mr. Bobo said once the rains came and the water level rose they would just move their huts to dry land.