It was my last day in Siem Reap and I'd been told that the drowned forest in Kampong Phluk was a must see, so I organised a car to go the 23 km or so south east out of town.
First stop the ticket counter which covered the entrance fee, the large boat to the floating restaurant, the row boat to go through the forest and of course a tourism tax. Then another 2 km to the boat station where over a hundred boats were lined up waiting for tourists, which seemed pretty thin on the ground. Change over to the boat, after scrabbling down the khlong bank and then off down the Tahas River through the village standing high above the water level on stilts, from what I've read most of the houses are about 6 metres above dry season ground level.
The Tonle Sap is the largest freshwater lake in South East Asia and is situated in a geological depression in the Cambodian floodplain in the north west of the lower Mekong. During the wet season, May to November, the volume of water coming down the Mekong and through the delta is greater than what the delta can discharge causing water to backflow, via the Tonle River, into the Tonlee Sap. Once the water volume reduces in November the flow reverses and the lake then begins to drain. During peak inward flows the lake area roughly doubles in size and areas like Kampong Phluk are inundated and the vegetation drowns, with the benefit of a free top dressing.
Around what becomes the flooded area is a belt of freshwater mangroves, which we were about to go through. Once we arrived at a floating restaurant, at the southern end of the village, we changed from the powered river vessel into a hand rowed flat-bottomed boat and were rowed through the mangroves for about 30 minutes before emerging at another floating restaurant on the Tonle Sap itself.
The day had been quite overcast, which I was cursing a bit as we were going through the village and the forest. My regret changed, however, when we entered the lake because the light was such that when looking at the horizon the sky and the lake seemed to blend making it hard to tell the transition between one and the other.
