The floating village

Kampong Luong is a Cambodian village with a difference: it floats on a lake. Each house is built out of wood, are sat on empty oil drums and floated out onto the lake to make up a small community of floating houses. I've never seen anything like it before; I've seen communities of houseboats, or houses that are built on stilts above water, but not ones that just sit on the water and bob around when a boat goes past! When the water level gets low, they lift anchor, attach them to boats and drag them further into the lake where the water is higher. Instead of going to the shops, the shops come to you at around the same time each day.

The village isn't on the usual 'backpacker' route in Cambodia and we haven't met many people who had even heard of this place. With that in mind, we were unsurprised to see very few other tourists of any kind there. It was quite a nice way to see the 'real' Cambodia, a place that hasn't changed or adapted itself to please or attract westerners. Of course this is ironic coming from a western tourist, don't think I don't see that, but I have found that the places I've enjoyed more from my time travelling are the places that don't exist purely because of tourism, but rather in spite of it. 

There is no means to book ahead and express interest in visiting Kampong Luong so we showed up early one afternoon and found a man with a boat who was willing to give us a tour of the lake and village, before taking us to a place where we could stay overnight on the water. The tour lasted for a couple of hours but with our lack of Khmer (the Cambodian language) and our driver's limited English, we couldn't learn much about the village itself. For example, it is divided into two halves; a Cambodian side and a Vietnamese side. Considering we were still very far from the Vietnamese border, we wanted to know why half of the village's population was Vietnamese but our driver couldn't tell us. I still don't actually know. (Side note: I have tried to learn some Khmer but I don't seem to be able to pick up the sounds and pronunciations very well. It's like my tongue can't contort in the right way to say a word right.) It was still so interesting to meander through though, despite any sort of explanation. 

The amount of rubbish in the was astonishing. At one point, our boat's propeller got caught in a plastic bag which then wound itself around the metal. Our driver stopped and unwrapped it, then threw it back into the water for the next boat to get caught in! I was quite surprised to be honest because they use the lake for everything: washing their clothes, themselves, their pots and pans and plates. People swim in it, they bathe in it, they wash their children in it, yet it's full of rubbish. There is a distinct lack of education around the relationship between rubbish/waste and a person's health everywhere in South East Asia, it's twenty times worse than Central or South America for littering (that's not an actual statistic, I just mean from my general observation). 

We stayed in a homestay, on the lake, it a fairly large but basic house. Kim and I shared a room, which was comprised of mattress, mosquito net and fan. 

There were some other backpackers staying there too and it was full enough that the family of four slept on cushions on the living room floor. A girl we had come to the village with offered them her room when she found out but they refused, saying that guests pay to get room and that it rarely happened that enough people show up that they had to do so, so they didn't mind; they were glad we were there as it is not always so busy. It was a nice house, at the edge of the village so we're not entirely surrounded by houses by had a view on one side out over the lake. It also overlooked an old tug boat, converted into the local petrol station.

The people were all very friendly, waving and calling hello to us as we sailed by. I did feel a bit odd at points though, thinking 'what must they think of us, coming to their home and seeing it as a tourist attraction; taking photographs and paying money to be ferried around, just to see their everyday life?' Having said that, the couple whose house we stayed in do appear to rely on the few tourists that come in order to make a living, so I suppose we were helping the local economy a little by visiting. I had a wonderful time and thought it was well worth going out of our way to see.