Kompong Khleang

---

Today we have engaged Soryar (who drove us four years ago) to visit the stilt villages and floating villages of Kompong Khleang and Kompong Phluk.

Soryar hasn’t changed in four years, he is still a great guide who knows his info about all the sites and Cambodia’s history. We were right about Siem Reap having grown, Soryar told us that the population had doubled to 1 million people over that time. He was saying that a lot of the growth in tourism was coming from asian countries as their economies picked up. He still has little time for the Koreans, with them not putting anything into the local economy spending all their time in the Korean hotels. Last night we again watched the hilarious spectacle of the Korean tour groups being dropped at one end of Pub Street and walking to the other end taking happy snaps of other tourists eating.

The stilt house of Kompong Khleang are fascinating, because of the rise in the level of Ton Le Sap during the wet seasons the houses are on stilts up to 6 or 8 metres high. At the moment they are accessible by car and it is along climb to get home but during the wet all transport is by boat. The next part of our day was a boat trip to the floating village – a very interesting two hour round trip down the river and out on the lake. Pretty well everything that could be found in a normal village can be found in the floating village - shops, markets, schools and even a mobile phone tower on stilts. It really makes you think twice about having fish for dinner when you see the rudimentary toilet hanging out over the water where you know the fish are being caught from.

After lunch we were to go to Kompong Phluk but the overnight rain had made the road to slippery for our mini-bus so it was either onto motorbikes or back for a swim. Knowing that the stilt houses there were much the same as what we had already seen and Kim’s “love” of motorbikes, the swim won. A good day followed by a relatively early night in preparation for sunrise at Angkor Wat.

---