#prek toal

[hungrytravellers]

Var’s New Home & Other Stories

If you’re lucky enough to travel, meeting people from entirely different cultures, with entirely different lives, is one of the many privileges. It  broadens the mind, is stimulating, educational and humbling, and puts our own lives into a different perspective. Here we continue our short series of posts telling the stories of some of the people we met on our recent tour of South East Asia. Life…

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[cvepphotography]

A Home of Its Own

[virginiasophie]

Today we travelled from Battambang to Prek Toal on a small open wooden boat. Preak Toal is a floating village on the Tonle Sap - the biggest fresh water lake in South East Asia. Upon arrival we took some smaller motor boats and went to see hundreds and hundreds of cormorans and some pelicans in the Prek Toal Bird Sanctuary Biosphere Reserve. We spent one night in one of the families’ home right next to their crocodile cage. It was amazing to see how people are living with nothing but water around them.

[veayoleta-blog]

Prek Toal Bird Sanctuary Tour is a special floating village tour to watch some types of waterbirds inside Tonle Sap Lake biosphere

Prek Toal Bird Sanctuary Tour by Veayoleta Travel.

[swingin-safari]

By night and by day.

Our night spent in a local families house in the floating village of Prek Toal

[trek-the-globe]

In the wet season, the Tonlé Sap river, full of water from the Mekong River, flows into and fills the Tonlé Sap lake.  In the dry season, this reverses and the Tonlé Sap lake drains out into the Mekong Delta.  The lake's margins shrink to just a fraction of its wet season size.  This attracts huge flocks of birds to the flooded forests that grow in the middle of the lake.

The photos here shows one such flooded forest, Prek Toal, a wildlife refuge that is a key ecosystem for many Southeast Asian birds.  The dry season has only recently started and one of the first birds to arrive is the Asian Openbill, a large black and white stork.  They come here in the thousands to breed and raise their young.  The forest shown here, complete with trees and shrubs and "meadows" is all standing in many feet of water in the middle of Southeast Asia's largest lake.

--Gene