Tonlé Sap

LakesSiem Reap,Cambodia

Fragile nature — stay on the trail, leave no trace.

A Cambodian lake whose river runs backwards each monsoon, swelling from 2,500 to 13,000 square kilometres and turning stilt villages into towns reached by boat.

September·Peaking now

Sep–Nov

The flood is at its height — up to nine or ten metres — and canoes slip between half-submerged trunks through the drowned forest, the lake's signature and the one window when the flooded canopy is navigable.

Year-round The floating and stilt villages, the fishing life and the open lake are here every day of the year. The water's height, whether the flooded forest can be paddled and the bird colony all swing hard with the seasons.

Tonlé Sap is a lake whose own river runs backwards for months every year. When the monsoon swells the Mekong, the Tonlé Sap River reverses and pumps water inland instead of draining it away. The lake then spreads from roughly 2,500 to over 13,000 square kilometres and deepens from about a metre to nine or ten. What that does to the shore is the reason to come. Villages like Kampong Phluk stand on wooden stilts six or seven metres tall, and at the height of the flood the whole settlement — school, shop, place of worship — becomes a water-borne town reached only by boat. Canoes slip between half-submerged trunks into the flooded forest, quiet green tunnels where the leaves brush the surface. At dusk the water turns orange and violet, fishing boats drift past in silhouette, and lake and sky blur into one. Come in the dry months and it is another place entirely. The flow has drained back to the Mekong, the forest stands on cracked mud, and the stilts tower absurdly over dry ground. This flood pulse is one of the largest on any freshwater system, and the drowned forests along the rim work as fish nurseries while the water is high. UNESCO named the lake a Biosphere Reserve in 1997. The pulse is now weakening. Upstream dams and riverbed sand mining are blunting the flood the whole lake lives by, and the fishery, the villages and the bird colonies in the flooded forest all depend on it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The flooded forest is only navigable from about September to November — come then to paddle beneath the canopy; by the dry season the village sits on cracked mud and the scene changes completely.
Pick Kampong Phluk or Kampong Khleang over Chong Khneas — the village closest to Siem Reap is the most touristy and hard-sell, while the farther ones still feel genuinely lived-in.
For the Prek Toal waterbirds, go December to February and start at dawn — after February the lake drops too low for boats to reach the breeding colony.
Take a small paddled canoe, not a motorboat, into the drowned forest — the fee goes straight to local families, and the near-total silence is the whole point.

Things to do

1
Boat through a village that floats
Thread the water-streets of a settlement built entirely on the lake: houses, shops, a pagoda, a school, a clinic and a fuel seller, all of them bobbing on pontoons. Nothing here stands on the ground. The whole town is re-moored and rebuilt each year as the shoreline advances and retreats.
2
Pass beneath the stilt houses
At Kampong Phluk, glide down lanes of homes perched on stilts six or seven metres high. In the wet season you pass almost level with their doorways; in the dry season the same houses tower far overhead on bare wooden poles.
3
Watch the lake's fishing life up close
See families work the water as they have for generations — nets cast from narrow boats, traps set among the reeds, children paddling themselves to school. The whole economy of the lake plays out within arm's reach of your boat.
4
Paddle through the flooded forest
In a small paddled canoe, slip off the open lake into the drowned forest, where the water has climbed the trunks and the lowest leaves brush the surface. Your guide paddles in near silence through green tunnels that exist only when the water is high.

Watch

Nearby

25 km