THE TONLE SAP LAKE: DISCOVER CAMBODIA’S HIDDEN GEM

About 50 km from Siam Reap lies a large lake called Tonle Sap. Locals have been living on its shores for thousands years, managing different ways to adapt to the different levels of the lake during ‘rainy season’ and ‘dry season’. They use two kind of housing: floating houses and stilted houses, built on high wood piles. The different villages can be visited with organised tours that you will find in agencies in Siam Reap, but I highly recommend booking a tour with ‘Community First’, which will show you the village of Kampong Khleang. This is in fact a non-profit organisation, whose guides grew up in this village and whose earnings go directly to the local community to support educational projects for the inhabitants, who live with the bare necessities and sometimes not even that. The guides speak very good English and will take you through the village where they were born, making you feel much less like a tourist and much more like a visitor welcomed into their community.

Stilted houses over Tonle Sap Lake.

The tour started in the early afternoon. Our guide picked us up with a jeep and drove us to the village, making a few stops along the way to taste traditional rice cooked in bamboo canes and some sweet potato snacks. The guide spoke very good English and we asked about any curiosity about Cambodia and the way of living near the Tonle Sap lake. Once we arrived at the village, we visited the school where 50 children study thanks to the money from the tours. Then we met the locals and as we walked down the main street we were greeted by many children playing around us. A very heart-warming experience. Then, a motorised canoe took us along the main canal, we passed by hundreds of stilted houses and finally reach a village made of floating houses.

In the end, we returned to Kampong Khleang surrounded by the sounds of nature and lit by the orange colours of the sunset. This was, for sure, the most authentic part of the whole trip and I recommend everyone not to miss the opportunity of meeting with the locals on the Tonle Sap Lake.

Sunset at Kampong Khleang.