The Floating Village

This weekend we visited the floating village of Kompong Luong. Floating villages started to emerge when Vietnamese immigrants and refugees were displaced to Cambodia. Since they were not allowed to own land, they came up with the ingenious idea of settling down on the waters of the TonLe Sap lake, between Siem Riep and Phnom Penh. I don't know for sure, but it seems like the villagers might preserve Vietnamese as a second language as I saw some books in Vietnamese in the local school.

Floating houses

If you are wondering how on earth a floating village stands together, it's pretty much a cluster of humble wooden houses, each built on a plank on top of a bunch of sturdy mobile cylinders. These allow the owners to tow their homes up and down as needed. Of course, in order to tow your home away you need a vehicle, so every household has a boat that serves as car, bike, pets toilet -yes, people have cats and dogs here too, and they poo wherever they can- or even mobile takeaway.

Grabbing a bite at a floating food "stall"

Now, these blessed villages do generate an insane amount of rubbish that, obviously, goes right into the water -the same water where they bathe, wash their clothes and use for any household activity. From cans to old fishing nets and plastic containers, daily waste piles up at the bottom of the lake and along the shores, building a disgustingly colourful landscape and dying the waters a greyish brown, sometimes coated with a bright green icing :-S 

The little ones are well used to rowing their way from home to school

When in Rome, do like the Romans. So, after arriving at the floating guesthouse we rented a boat for a leisurely ride around. Rowing our way to the local beer store wasn't as easy as it seemed: actually, the night fell upon us on our way back to the guesthouse and we got lost... While we were trying to find our bearings, we noticed that our raft was swiftly filling with water and starting to sink. We rushed to harbour at the nearest house. The family kindly "rescued" us and called the guesthouse to pick us up. The waters aren't deep -knee level maximum-, so it's not that we could have drowned or anything. But the sole thought of falling into the murky water scared us to death. If it hadn't been for those kind locals maybe we would have woken up the morning after with an extra arm from the radioactive waters.

"Rowing" down the lake

After the turmoil of our shipwreck, we had dinner and just chilled at the guesthouse porch. As I have explained in previous posts, in Cambodia there is not much to do when the sun goes down. So you can just image how it is in a floating village. Conversation soon had us wondering how people could live in a water-world and in such conditions. Most of them must have health problems caused by living among rubbish, the lack of physical activity and the long hours squatting on their little rafts... But when you think about it, is that not surprisingly similar to how we lead of lives in our cities, with our good ten hours sitting in from of a computer screen? True, we are not that prone to infections, and the feeling of being confined in a high-security prison may be much less noticeable... But, where do we draw the line? And who actually feels more like a prisoner -one of these villagers, or us?

Bonus track: wherever there's a soul, there's the Church