Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia
Abby Seiff
Potomac Books: 2022
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It’s late afternoon and the muddy track through the centre of the village is bustling. Around me vans and cars are moving slowly, loaded with ice bins, large red-and-white containers strapped to roofs and trunks, filling the inside of vehicles. From the driver’s seat, with the window down, the smell is unmistakable—fish! It should come as no surprise: Chong Kneas is a market hub of the Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s ‘Great Lake’, with thousands of tonnes of fish passing through it each year.

The wet monsoon of 2022 has been an extreme one and the lake is brimming, its water lapping at the house foundations below the bank. Nearby, the temple hill of Phnom Krom has become a virtual island, the rising water touching its edges for the first time in a decade. The Tonle Sap is high and the market street is buzzing—all appears well. But the reality is very different.

The future of the lake is in jeopardy: fish numbers are plummeting, its flooded forests have been plundered and the annual pulse of water that lies at the centre of the Tonle Sap’s fecundity has been compromised. It is a story—its origins, events and implications—that lies at the heart of Abby Seiff’s Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia.

• Tags: Abby Seiff, Cambodia, Issue 29, Wayne McCallum