Temples Day 3 and floating Village

After two days of only temples, on the third one we visited a floating village on the Tonlé Sap lake. This lake is so special to the Cambodians and also from a geographical point of view that we must give you a bit of stats! 🤓
This lake is home to 90,000 people who live in 170 floating villages. The lake is linked to the Mekong River by the Tonlé Sap river. During the wet-season the level of the Mekong rises causing the Tonlé Sap river to flow northwestward. The lake surface increases from 3000sq km to 16,000sq km! In October as the water level of the Mekong begins to fall, the Tonlé Sap river reverses direction and drains the water back to the Mekong!

When visiting the lake during the dry season, the most impressive thing is the skill of the boat driver to avoid all the other boats that are just left on each side of the river. The river is so narrow that sometimes she even had to jump on different boats to make our own go through. The trip was to go from the main entrance pier and arrive at the lake. Most of the houses are built by this river but some houses are floating on the lake. This is fine for the dry season but during the wet season they need to pull their house with a little boat back into the river because weather can be quite terrible on the lake when it rains! In between the village and the lake there is a dense mangrove forest, at that time of the year you can see the whole tree but during rain season only the top is out of the water and it is common to navigate in between them.

After the village we did another two temples. These are in a different complex than Angkor Wat and are older. They were constructed to create the second capital of the Khmer empire.Read more