Cambodian guy takes me to floating village with pet crocodiles 🇰🇭

When I landed in Siem Reap a few days earlier, Eng was my tuk tuk driver and he offered to take me and Tanya around Angkor Wat, so we did that and it was a cool experience, but he also told me about some other cool stuff to do in Siem Reap. I messaged him and asked if he’d join me to check out the floating village called Kampong Phluk, which is a Cambodian floating village based on the banks of the river that flows into South East Asia’s largest lake.

As we were driving there, which took an hour, we spotted some storm clouds, but Eng thought we’d be going in a different direction, but it was soon clear that we were driving directly into the storm. When we pulled up to the boat dock of this floating village, the Cambodian flags were violently shaking in the strong wind and it was starting to rain. We zipped up Eng’s tuk tuk windows and got into the boat, well, Eng ran to the boat.

As soon as Eng got to the boat, the rain started to get heavier and turned into a storm, so instead of having a nice boat ride on a Cambodian river to a floating village, we were caught in a storm on a boat in a floating village in Cambodia.

We pulled down the makeshift curtains, which did stop some of the rain, but we were already soaked at this point as the rain was heavy and being blown by the heavy wind in all directions. The boat driver who was a teenager, was completely soaked. As he was trying to embark on our boat ride down the river, in a storm, he kept crashing the boat into the embankment, but he seems to do it on purpose which I found super strange, but he seemed to know what he was doing.

The Cambodians who live in these floating villages are so used to rain that it doesn’t bother them, and it’s still warm so nobody is cold. Even with the wind, it was still about 30 degrees Celsius at all times throughout this stormy boat trip.

We set sail down the river, and it was so cool. I had never seen a floating village before, or anything even close to it - great experience. It’s not really floating though, well some things are like the restaurant we ate at, but the houses are actually on stilts. Eng said that during the wet season, the water is nearly at their balconies, that’s how much water fills up this lake. Consider how big the lake is, then think about making that lake and all of the rivers like 6 metres higher. That is an insane amount of water. So it must rain heavily and constantly in Cambodia.

In the restaurant they had a literal crocodile pit. The strange thing was that these restaurants float, so it was a floating crocodile pit within a restaurant - madness.

At the end we left the river and entered the lake - it is vast.

We then headed back up the river, this time able to see both sides of the river without the hinderance of heavy rain and the rain covers to stop us getting wet.

Very cool experience with a local Cambodian. Eng is a really nice guy and helped me out a lot in Siem Reap.

Location: Kampong Phluk, Siem Reap, Cambodia

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