When you look out into Lake Tonle Sap trough polarized lenses, it looks exactly like the desert. Mud-clouded water meets horizon and there's nothing else, save an occasional fishing boat. As we left the dock, boats skimmed past carrying mollusk-hatted women.
After about 90 minutes on the sampan, we motored slowly through a mangrove-like forest to reach Kampong Phluk, a village essentially on stilts (it's now the dry season). Our guide, Pech, not only spoke excellent English (and French), but also, his accent was good and I was able to understand most of what he said. He was extremely knowledgable, calm and personable, and his great respect for the villagers (and theirs for him, despite that they didn't know him) was readily apparent.
We strolled through the village on a road that will soon be submerged, when the villagers will go from place to place--each others' homes, the pagoda, the "market", to school, only by boat. The water will reach the floors of homes now reachable only by ladder. Monks will do their daily alms rounds, begging bowls in hand, in canoes. Pig cages--and everything else now at ground level-- will be raised like elevators.
The electric-colored pagoda stands in sharp contrast to the brown-and-gray of the rest of village life in the dry season. Here are some first snaps of the village: a festival, at which you see mostly village elders, here, in a death-related celebration, honoring the remains of someone recently deceased; a man makes a sap-based shellac for boat hulls; pig-fat (for cooking) for sale in plastic sacs.
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