Morning Kampong Phluk and Tonle Sap Lake Tour
On our last full day in Siem Reap we took the Kampong Phluk and Tonle Sap Lake tour with tour guide Sarat from Green Era Travel. I booked the tour on Trip Advisor for myself and my two children (ages 4 and 5). The date somehow got changed while I was flipping between web pages, but when I called Green Era Travel, they were gracious enough to fix the date for me, which I really appreciated as my children and I were already quite excited about the tour.
On the morning of the tour, we were picked up in the hotel lobby by our very nice tour guide Sarat and had a comfortable van ride to Kampong Phluk. The scenery on the way was very interesting, with pale bony cattle grazing along the roadside to small dusty village markets to uniformed school children riding bicycles along the dry dirt roads to school. Mr. Sarat provided some interesting commentary as we drove along about how the Angkor temples were built with sandstone dragged 80km by elephant and ox cart and other cultural background about Cambodia that I probably would have enjoyed hearing had my children not been squabbling!
Once we arrived, we were given ice cold water bottles and then boarded a long narrow boat with a blue fabric canopy. Life jackets were provided although the canal was very shallow due to it being dry season. The tour started along a small muddy manmade canal which then became a proper river through a fishing town called Kampong Phluk.
We were fascinated by the colorful blue and yellow wooden stilt houses along the river. They were very tall and narrow with steep ladders and flimsy wooden railings, some with balcony gardens full of colorful pink flowers, and I wondered how the many young children we saw running along the banks, playing (or working) on the fishing boats, and climbing those ladders survived to adulthood. Mr. Sarat told us that during the wet season the water reached halfway up the stilts and you could see children diving into the water from their balconies. For their own safety, they are taught to swim by age 2. Many of the people we saw were barefoot and some of the young children were naked or mostly naked. The water was not particularly clean as the infrastructure for garbage removal and indoor plumbing was clearly undeveloped. The village had just gotten electricity the year before, and previously they would use car batteries to power their televisions. We passed by a large three-building school along the river bank and Sarat told us about how the children would canoe to and from school together. I was really struck by how different a life from us the families in the fishing village lived, and hoped my very privileged, urban dwelling children noticed too. Although the people we passed by did not look particularly unhappy, it seemed to me a difficult life, always either hot and dusty or wet and muddy.
After we passed the village we floated by a mangrove forest before the river opened up to Tonle Sap Lake, a lake so large we could not see across it. We boated to a floating restaurant where we had some cool drinks and got a look at a floating crocodile farm attached to the boat. The restaurant employees helped my children up on top of the wooden cage where they could peer down through the wire mesh at about 20-30 small baby crocodiles crawling in the shade below.
After that, we boated by a few fish farms with wooden fences and nets on our way back to the river. At the mouth of the river, we passed by many large wooden fishing boats being sanded, repainted and otherwise worked upon on the banks. We then got out of the boat and walked through the village back to the van, my children relieved to have neither drowned nor been eaten by crocodiles (a very small risk given the very small size of the crocodiles).
As we walked along, some local children on foot and on bicycle ran after us wanting to play with my daughter and son. They were ranging in age from 6 to 2, I would guess, and were barefoot and very dusty as you would be if you lived and played there. They had great big smiles and after following us around a bend, turned back towards the river. My children wondered where their parents were, as they are never allowed to roam free as such. I would guess they were working somewhere nearby but they could have been watching them from out of sight.
Walking through the village we saw another small open air school where about 10-15 children sat in wooden desks in the shade and listened to their teacher’s lesson. A red donation box was prominently displayed and a white board listed the most needed school supplies and costs of each. We put some money in the box and hope it is actually used for school supplies as intended. A few young boys that were not in school bought a bagful of snails from a roadside stand, a favorite snack among the children Mr. Sarat told us. We also saw thousands of tiny shrimp drying in the sun along the road, as well as fish buzzing with flies. The last thing we saw before boarding the van to return to Siem Reap was a wedding ceremony, with a long narrow tent covered in pink and white flowers set up in the center of the road. Inside, people lounged in the shade on rugs and floor pillows or shared food at tables. We did not see the bride or groom but an employee at our hotel told us that, in Cambodia, it is traditional to marry very young as living with a boyfriend or girlfriend before marriage is not culturally acceptable.
Overall, this was quite an interesting, educational, and beautiful tour that showed us an entirely different side of Cambodia than what you see in Siem Reap or on a temple tour. I hope it also helped my children see a different way of life from their own. Sarat was an excellent guide, providing just the right amount of local information and setting a comfortable pace for the tour, as well as offering us ice cold water bottles just when we needed it! He was also very helpful and kind to my children. I highly recommend his tour for families. It was safe and enjoyable for my children. And we were back at the hotel in time to eat lunch and swim at the pool before the afternoon thunderstorm! Thank you, Sarat and Green Era Travel, for a unique and unforgettable morning.
Review of: Tonle Sap Lake and Kampong Phluk Half-Day Tours from Siem Reap
Written May 09, 2018
