House on stilts, Kampong Phluk
Tuesday March 3, 2009
It isn’t easy to get to Kampong Phluk, particularly at this time of the year. My journey began with a 20 minute taxi ride along the paved road heading south from Siem Reap. The taxi then turned off onto a dirt road, taking us past small villages and houses made of palm leaves, standing on wooden stilts. The road got progressively rougher and the ride more bumpy, until the driver announced that he could go no further, and pulled over.
Miraculously, at this point several motorcycles drew up alongside, offering transportation for my two traveling companions and me for the next leg of the trip. After negotiating a price, we each climbed onto a motorcycle, and headed off down the road. Well, not exactly a road. It was more like a pitted track, punctuated by the occasional pool of water or sandpit. At one point along the road, we had to squeeze past a convoy of three carts, being drawn very slowly by cattle.
Fishing, Kampong Phluk
Next we boarded a long boat, expertly maneuvered by our young Khmer boatman along a narrow, shallow, winding, sometimes congested, and very muddy channel. Ten minutes into the journey, we came upon the first of the three villages that comprise Kampong Phluk. The village was unlike any place I have seen. It consists of rows of palm-leaf or wooden houses, each precariously perched atop thin wooden stilts, some up to 10 meters above the ground. At least, that’s where they are stand today, during the dry season. In the wet season, the village is surrounded by the waters of Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s remarkable great lake and the source of sustenance for this any many other fishing communities.
Tonle Sap is an extremely unusual body of water. In the dry season, it is a shallow lake, about 2,500 square kilometers in size. At its southern end it narrows to a river which joins the Mekong River at Phnom Penh. During the wet season, however, fed by rains in Southeast Asia and China, the waters of the Mekong rise to such an extent that the flow of the Tonle Sap reverses, draining water from the Mekong into the lake. The lake deepens from less than 2 meters to up to 11 meters, and expands to six times its dry season area, flooding the lands alongside the lake, including the land where Kampong Phluk is located (see map below.)
Tonle Sap in the dry season (dark blue) and wet season (light blue.)
The lake is one of the world’s richest inland fishing grounds; Cambodia’s 14 million inhabitants rely on fish from the lake for more than half of their protein intake. For the people of Kampong Phluk, the lake is the source of sustenance, income, employment, and a central part of life and culture. As we passed through the village and into the lake on our boat, it seemed that just about everyone was involved in fishing or something related to it. Boys folded fish nets or swam in the muddy water tending to fish traps; men stood on the shore with hand nets, on the lookout for fish, or fished from boats on the lake. Women laid out shrimp to dry on the dry ground, and girls repaired nets.
Floating house, Kampong Phlug
For all of the bounty of the lake, it was clear that Kampong Phluk is but no means a wealthy place. Four out of every five Cambodians live on less than $2 a day, and there can be little doubt that the people of Kampong Phluk are among them. Sixty percent of the country’s population does not have access to clean water, and this almost certainly includes the people of this village. There was also no sign of electricity here (unless you count the television set I saw running off a car battery in one of the houseboats we passed.)
In Kampong Phluk
In recent years, Kampong Phluk has acquired a new source of income: tourism. My two-hour boat and motorcycle adventure cost me $16, and at those rates my driver and boat captain must be among the wealthier people in the village. But for all the friendliness I encountered along my journey (and there was lots of it) I found myself wondering about the price that the villagers pay for the dollars of visitors like me. Tourists come here to see an unusual way of life, some striking vernacular architecture, and some beautiful natural scenery. But they also come to indulge in poverty tourism, gawking at people because they are poor, invading their privacy by pointing lenses into their homes, and perhaps leaving with a romanticized notion of both poverty and the “traditional” lifestyles of rural Cambodians.
I believe that people like me take on an important obligation in exchange for the privilege of visiting Kampong Phluk and the myriad other places in the world where some people engage in a daily struggle for survival and others visit them as tourists. That obligation requires us to do our best to understand – and not simply enjoy – the places and the people we have seen; it requires us to learn about them and the societies in which they live, and to try to figure out how our lives are connected with theirs (and they almost always are, whether that connection be economic, political, environmental, or perhaps spiritual.) It also requires us to try as best we can to imagine how the world must look from the vantage point of those who lives we have glimpsed, and how we must look to them. And finally it requires us to transform our understanding into action.
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In writing this blog, I consulted the following sources:
Tonle Sap: The Flowing Heart of Cambodia (December 6, 2005.)
Map by Matti Kummu (Helsinki University of Technology ) Wikipedia Commons 2006.
Tonle Sap Biosphere Reserve Environmental Information Database
Human Development Report: Cambodia (United Nations Development Program.)