Floating village on Lake Tonle Sap.

Tonle Sap, the largest fresh water lake in Southeast Asia, is itself a natural wander. The great lake exist as an ecological anomaly. In early June, at the start of the rainy season, the water level of the Mekong River rises to divert part of its flow of its course to the South China Sea and redirect it into the Tonle Sap. This forces the current to reverse direction, beginning a process that by the end of October will see the great lake increasing its size almost tenfold, making it the largest freshwater body in Southeast Asia.

The Tonle Sap lake, fed by the mighty Mekong and the Tonle Sap Rivers, is a vast expense of water that forms the most significant topographical [natural] feature in Cambodia. The ‘Great Lake’ represents a people’s identity and way of life for the thousands of Cambodians who live on the lake and are dependent on the Tonle Sap and its ebbs and flows to maintain life.

There is a whole community here; besides homes, there is a school, police post, fire station, church [temple] and a few restaurants as well. This self-sufficient community of the great lake, known commonly as the floating village of Cambodia, draws crowds daily to observe life and to share their time in this wonderful neighbourhood of the great Tonle Sap Lake.   

The Killing Fields

 Without the use of high-tech means of mass destruction, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge leadership were able to kill 1.7 million Cambodians and lay waste to the country. We confronted Cambodia’s tragic past on a guided tour of the Tuol Sleng genocide Museum, a former school which served as a Khmer Rouge torture centre. It’s estimated that more than 20,000 people were held and tortured here. We ended with a visit to the Choeung Ek Memorial, where a stupa made up of some 8,000 human skulls marks the site of the infamous Killing Fields of Pol Pot. This was the execution ground for the torture victums of Tuol Sleng and standing in this peaceful setting it’s almost unthinkable to imagine that to date nearly 9,000 corpses have been exhumed from this area.

TODAY