Probably the part of the trip most different from my usual experiences was our excursion on the Tonle Sap -- for 2 reasons: the lake & the people.
A huge lake, the Tonle Sap is quite close to the temples at Angkor (5-10 miles). And most likely, the abundance of fish is the reason the temples are there in the first place. But that's not the strange part. The lake belongs to the Mekong River system and serves as a kind of natural reservoir for it. In the rainy season it fills up, in the dry season it drains out. And not a little. The water level of the lake rises and falls 30 feet -- that's 3 stories. And it more than doubles its surface area. ("Read more details":http://www.peaceofangkorweb.com/TonleSap.htm from our trip leader Dave.)
So if you're someone looking to make a living from this lake, how do you live? We saw two solutions: boats and stilts. The first village we encountered was Chong Khnies, known as the Floating Village. The key feature here is the causeway -- it's a gradually sloping road a couple of miles long. The village is at the end of the causeway. So as the water recedes, they simply move the village. Some buildings are boats, like the museum, church & police station, which can moor elsewhere (Dave told us of losing the museum one time). And the buildings on land are dismanteled and rebuilt -- first moving down the causeway, and then moving back up.
The second solution was saw in Kompong Phluk -- the village stays put and everything not on high ground is on stilts. When you look at "the photos":http://www.greg-willis.com/gallery/TonleSap/041128_105858 , imagine the water coming up to the bottom of the houses.
But this was also the poorest area we visited.
Unlike Vietnam, the remote villages in Cambodia have no power lines providing them with electricity. But electricity is pretty cool and people are clever. They got their power from carts of "car batteries":http://www.greg-willis.com/gallery/TonleSap/041128_103920
And these folks live their entire life on the lake. Their entire life. Everything you do during your 24 hour day, they do on the lake. In short, makes you want to stay in the boat. But it's a big lake and being that the solution to pollution is dilution, they seem to be no worse for it.
If you go all the way to Cambodia, you should go on this excursion or at least part of it. The temples are why you are there in the first place, but they are monuments to past glory punctuated by aggressive selling -- they are not the whole picture of Cambodia. When you are out of the beaten tourist path, you can experience the friendliness and warmth of the people of Cambodia. I know that sounds trite, but the smiles and enthusiasm of the folks who greeted us were genuine. And genuinely amazing. And it gave me a sense of the living Cambodian people and the present glory of their generous hearts.
