Wet and wonderful in Angkor country

Most tourists stay away during Cambodia’s rainy season, but they are missing a trick, says Nigel Richardson

Avoid the rainy season is one of great truisms of travel. But is it always good advice? I was intrigued by the idea of taking a more counter-intuitive approach by visiting the tourist honeypot of Siem Reap at a time when most visitors stay away. These rainy, crowd-free weeks are when Cambodia comes to life.

The Khmer Empire, responsible for the astonishing temples of Angkor, understood water and built complex systems of channels and reservoirs to manage it. Modern-day Cambodians manage it still. This is a culture built on water: not just the stuff that falls from the sky in sometimes apocalyptic deluges between June and October, but the Himalayan meltwaters that pour down the Mekong river from

May onwards, reversing the flow of its tributary, the Tonlé Sap river, and tripling the size of the lake of the same name, where the northern shores come within a few miles of Siem Reap.

By mid-September, when I visit, Tonlé Sap is the biggest freshwater lake in south-east Asia, measuring up to 150 miles (240km) long by 60 miles (96km) wide. More than 170 villages dot its marshy margins, the houses either floating on pontoons as the waters rise or perched on tall stilts with provisions, bicycles and even livestock slung in makeshift cradles beneath. Twenty miles (32km) south of Siem Reap, Kompong Phluk is a stilt village, its main street resembling a kind of ramshackle, tropical Venice as I drift down it in a painted boat rowed by Mom, a villager who has a gold tooth and wears a blue knitted sun hat. Mom chatters away through my guide, Chan Monychoth. She says she is happiest in the rainy season. The lake is big, it is easy to travel by boat and fish are plentiful – she catches up to 22lb (10kg) a day. To either side, kids splash in the water and women squat on verandas surrounded by profusions of vegetables and tropical fruit.

At the end of the village, Mom paddles us into a mangrove forest, where reflections in the water dapple the twisting branches, and macaque monkeys swing manically overhead. No, she is not married, Mom confides, despite being nearly 40; she was too busy being a “second mother” to her seven younger siblings to get around to marriage, and now she is too old. Telling us this, she grins like a winner in the lottery of life and places a banana in a vee of branches for a monkey to snaffle.

This is a lovely vignette of rural Cambodia, so green

GO WITH THE FLOWCycling in the rain; Kompong Phluk on Tonle Sap Lake, above