Siem Reap - A Sunday morning at Tonlé Sap Lake

The end of our trip through Cambodia is coming and we realize that we still didn't see the famous largest lake of Southeast Asia, Tonlé Sap.

From our hotel, we decide to book a tour to there, for 18$ per person.

We get up at 6.45 am again and make ourselves ready. The guide picks us up at the hotel and informs us that we (once more) are the only customers of the day, so it'll be a private tour.

Happy, we enjoy the view of the Siem Reap countryside through the window. After one hour, we stop in a village called Kampong Phluk.

This place is known to be a floating village on the lake. Tobias and me didn't expect what we are discovering. As the rainy season is still waited, everything is dry. The huge rice fields seem like a desert and the houses built on high stilts because of the water level look incredible. Without rain, without the Tonlé Sap, Kampong Phluk looks more like a wooden flying village. It's the very first time of our life we see something like this.

We meet Pagna, a local who wants to help his community overall. He manages a school in this village, poorer than Kidtea and so far from the town that not many tourists have the opportunity to help. Projects like this make the Cambodian future better in encouraging and giving a chance to children to learn and get educated. Pagna expresses us his need of volunteers from all around the World, but also of some financial help to buy books, pay the electricity, ...

http://www.pcef-cambodia.org/

We keep on walking on the main street through the village of small wooden high rises.

It's time to take a tiny boat with our guide, a local and his son. What an adventure anew ! There's so less water that the boat needs to be pushed in the mud, between the huge mangrove trees.

But once on the lake, after the muddy canals, it's magical. The lake is reaching the horizon. Plenty of fisherman boats and floating houses are reflecting their colors on the calm water.

The boat leads us to a floating restaurant where we take a beer and get some information about the lake and surroundings by our guide, Phyrom. We talk a long moment with him about the situation in Cambodia, which is really interesting.

Then we go back and as the boat is stuck in the mud, we have to end our way to the car by walk through the mangrove forest.

Once in Siem Reap, our driver stops us in different agencies that we can compare the prices to go to Laos, 4000 Islands (Si Phan Don). We finally find one where we negotiate 45$ for both of us instead of 50.

Tuesday at 6.45 am, the next big step of our trip will begin in Laos.