“Land costs money,” Dalas, our 19-year-old boatman/guide, said matter-of-factly, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together to emphasize his point. This was his answer to our question on the reason the families currently residing on the Floating Village on Tonle Sap would prefer to live there.
If you are the type to be easily depressed, then you might want to skip this part of the visit. For cynics out there, it’s hard not to have a comment or two (or three) once they’ve witnessed a few things during a visit to Tonle Sap. I admit to having a cynical side, but I am also not averse to taking a front seat view to eye-opening scenes. This visit to the Floating Villages on Tonle Sap is, for lack of a better word, very enlightening for me.
A boat pass costs USD15.00, and it will last for about 4 hours.
Tonle Sap means “Great Lake”, and is the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia. It is also the home of several floating villages housing hundreds of families. During the rainy or monsoon season, I understand that the place could be quite breathtaking. But we came at the end of April, where Siem Reap is at its hottest, and the water is low, so it could get a lot muddy. Add to that some backfilling operation going on, and the water is, well, just plain brown.
Meet Dalas, 19, and Caai, 21. That’s pronounced as “Chai”, by the way. According to them, they both were born and grew up in the village, but moved to the “land” when their mothers landed (no pun intended) jobs there.
I was greatly impressed with how good they are in speaking English. Halting English, but the grammar is correct, and their accent still makes it very understandable. No surprise there, since Caai works on the boats in the mornings, and studies English during the afternoons.
We only visited the village of Chong Khneas. Later research showed that it is pretty much commercialized, and it shows. Amid the houses on stilts are stores, a church, a school/orphanage, restaurants, (there’s even a Korean restaurant), and a “crocodile farm” (which, when we went only had two crocs, cowering from the glare of the sun. This doesn’t hold a candle to the crocodile farms we have in Palawan, IMO.).
There is even a Community Floating Market, where they will convince you to buy food from them, which you will then bring to the church, which doubles as a pre-school housing kids, most of which were supposedly orphaned during the spate of flooding that lay siege on the area (as well as Thailand and Vietnam) back in 2011.
(You may note the cynicism coming out. I can’t help it. Please try to ignore it. Because, hey, scams using children are nothing new. Not in this day and age. See related stories here and here.)
The main source of livelihood in the area is fishing.
After getting off the boat, Sarat and Piru, our awesome tuk-tuk drivers, were waiting to take us back to town for lunch. But, before that, they stopped at the lotus fields to let us camwhore for a while.
Did I mention that our tuk-tuk drivers were awesome? Oh, yes, I did.
Next post: Ending the day at Phnom Bakheng, and a dinner-show afterwards. See ya then!
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