Kampong Phluk

This guide to Kampong Phluk in Siem Reap opens on stilts six to nine meters tall standing bone dry, in a village built on a bet about a flood that hasn't arrived yet. It follows how roughly thirty seven hundred people here read the Tonle Sap, a lake fed by a river that reverses its own current each monsoon and swells to more than five times its size, and how each family works out its own stilt height by trial and error rather than any engineer's plan. Past the last house, crab-eating macaques move through a flooded mangrove forest that villagers have spent recent years replanting instead of clearing.