The next leg of this journey to Cambodia brought us on the Tonlé Sap Lake where we visited the floating village of Prek Toal with an overnight home stay on a raft house and followed with an excursion to the the Prek Toal Bird Sanctuary.
The Tonlé Sap Lake is the centre piece of a very particular ecosystem, as it retains water from the Mekong River during the monsoon season and releases it back to the Mekong during the dry season. In the process, the lake swells its footprint to 5 times its normal size. As the level of the water varies by about 9 meters, communities living by the lake have chosen to build their houses either on 10 meters bamboo stilts or as rafts floating on the lake. The yearly flooding creates an environment that brings nutrients to the water and promotes fish life.
Cambodians depend on fish for approximately 70 percents of their protein. So intertwined are the Cambodians and their fish that the country's currency, the riel, is named after the small silver carp that is the staple of many diets here.
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