Kampong Phluk, Tonle Sap
A stilt village on the Tonle Sap where the houses stand six metres above the dry-season ground.
Kampong Phluk, Tonle Sap
Kampong Phluk is a fishing community on the northern shore of the Tonle Sap, about thirty kilometres from Siem Reap. It is built on stilts, and the stilts are the striking part: six metres and more, so the houses stand high in the air for half the year and barely above the water for the other half.
That is because the Tonle Sap reverses. When the Mekong is in flood it pushes water back up the Tonle Sap river and the lake swells to several times its dry-season area, which is what the village is built for. In the wet season boats move between the houses; in the dry season the same route is a dusty road beneath them.
Boats run out through a channel of flooded forest to the open lake. The village is a working fishing settlement rather than a display, and it is markedly less visited than the floating villages closer to the main road.
- Angkor National Museum, Siem Reap — The museum that explains the Khmer empire, best visited before the temples rather than after.
- Angkor Wat, Siem Reap — The largest religious monument in the world, built in the twelfth century and never abandoned since.
- Banteay Srei, Siem Reap — A small tenth-century temple in pink sandstone, carved more finely than anything else at Angkor.
- Preah Khan, Angkor — A vast, half-collapsed monastic city north of Angkor Thom, quieter than any temple of its size.
- Ta Prohm, Angkor — The temple left in the grip of the forest, where silk-cotton roots grow through the masonry.
- The Bayon, Angkor Thom — The temple of two hundred serene stone faces at the exact centre of the walled city of Angkor Thom.
