Inside Cambodia: Lost Palaces in the jungle and Floating cities | Investigate Asia

In the heart of Southeast Asia lies the kingdom of Cambodia with its fascinating elusive charm. After years of turmoil and conflict, Cambodia is now well on the way to reconstruction. There's a yearning for peace evident in the revival of the ancestral arts, but also in the rediscovery of Cambodia's natural treasures. Here there are people committed to a better life and to a new battle, saving the environment. Tonle Sap, a miracle of nature, is the lifeblood of Cambodia. More than just a lake, it is the elusive domain of water. With its floods and droughts, it sets the rhythm of life for three million Cambodians. Orn Sao is a child of the lake. Water has always been part and parcel of his life. I have, in fact, always lived on the lake. I wouldn't know what to do on dry land. What's more, I know how to handle boats and skiffs. On land, they use bikes, scooters, and cars, and I don't know anything about all that. I don't know how to do the things they do on dry land. Orn lives on the western part of the lake, in the village of Prek Toal. Which literally means end of the shores. Six months a year, the river overflows its banks and floods the forest. A village like any other, or almost, for here nothing is fixed. Everything floats. Life is suspended, gliding along the surface of the water. That's enough. Get out of the water. I don't want to. We teach them how to swim so they won't be afraid of the water later on. We worry they might drown. They start learning when they're three or four years old. It's so, when we go off somewhere, we don't have to worry about an accident happening back home. Like children all over the world, they love swimming, but not bath time. It stings. Life on a lake means adapting. To go anywhere, you have to take a boat, even if it's just to drop in on the neighbors. From a very young age, the lake dwellers have to know how to handle a wide variety of craft, even more so since there are no traffic regulations on Tonle Sap. The village school is a very popular spot because it's the only place where the children can run. Orn is getting ready to leave for 10 days. He's a ranger in the Prek Toal Bird Sanctuary. My big worry is if my family gets sick during the night, there's no one to take them to the hospital. On dry land, you can always walk, but here, you have to know how to handle a boat. You wearing daddy's hat? Come on, a little kiss? Today, daddy's going away to work in the forest. I'm off. There are 42 rangers to keep watch over the sanctuary. The patrols always take place in tandem. For Orn, the profession of forest ranger runs in the family. He's teamed up with his brother, Rota, for their patrols into the flooded forest of Prek Toal. In 1997, the UNESCO declared Tonle Sap a World Biosphere Reserve. Good morning, sir. Ah, it's almost finished. I'm coming up now to give you a hand and to see that fantastic view from up there. The rangers have constructed a dozen such platforms. They're used to survey the zone, to count the animals. They also serve as base camps. Building a platform like this takes two days with five or six people. But if there are only two or three of us, you have to figure six, seven days. First, we have to study the type of tree. Then, we have to figure out the best angle for the platform, so we have an unobstructed view. That makes it easier to count the animals. Now, there has to be a clear view and the tree has to be the tallest one around. The two brothers cut the motor and row into the heart of the reserve to avoid spooking the animals and to spot eventual poachers. Thanks to our efforts, poaching has been reduced about 90 percent. We make our rounds. We're stricter. We take shifts to keep watch over this place night and day. Hi, guys. How's it going? Great. So, what's the report today? Have you seen anybody bothering our animals? No, nobody. Just some local fishermen. We gave them a friendly talking to. It's time for the new crew to take over until the next change in shifts. It's so hot. You take notes and I'll observe. Move forward. Check the ferron yellow first. Wait, I'm focusing. There are loads of birds. I see white all over. 23, 24, 25 females. 11, 12, 13, 13 nests. The fish-filled waters of Tonle Sap make it a paradise for migrating birds that flock here in the mating season. But the excessive poaching of nestlings and eggs has disrupted the ecosystem. Out of 100 species listed, 11 are in danger of extinction. Before, my father and I used to poach animals for a change of diet because we ate nothing but fish. And to bring in a little money. When we were poaching, we'd take everything. We would empty all the trees. There'd be nothing left, not a single species of bird. Then later, there were groups from the Ministry of the Environment and NGOs that came to inform people about endangered animals to explain and educate us about the reproduction of species. Because there were some birds on the brink of extinction. So, my father and I thought it over. And we decided to get involved and to work for the protection of nature and birds. To preserve them for future generations. The lake is a source of life for the birds, but for the people as well. The water hyacinth, an invasive plant harmful to the environment, is an abundant source of raw material for the village women. They've formed a cooperative and export their craftwork all over the world. Fishing is still the main activity on the lake. It has allowed the lake dwellers to meet their needs since the dawn of time. Ten days later, Orn has finished his shift and is now back in the village. Hello, my friend. Hi, Orn. You haul up your nets? Yes. Can you sell me 20 or 30 kilos? I don't have that much. I'll take whatever you have. I have 12 and a half kilos. Okay, go ahead. Orn needs a lot of fish. He has many mouths to feed. This fellow here is in fine shape. We have about 60 crocodiles in all here. And there are four categories. The one-year-olds, two-year-olds, three-year-olds, and the over tens. These crocodiles help round out Orn's meager ranger's salary. They're sold for their meat and for their skin as well. Orn started his crocodile farm about 10 years ago. Back then, I captured some in the wild. I can say that now because these laying females here, they're at least 10 years old. And these are the crocodiles I captured with my father for breeding. Now, I didn't take many. We captured two or three. Okay, well, four or five. And we keep them for breeding. Go on. Pull the rope that way. Pull, pull. Hey, camera, come here. We're leaving. It's time to go. Twice a year, they make the big move. They don't bother with trucks and packing boxes here. They simply move the house with the whole family inside. There's the high water season and the low water season. Now, when the water level rises, we move back towards the forest. When the water recedes, the level is low. And that can destabilize the house, make it rock on the bottom, you see? So we head for deeper water so the house doesn't get grounded. As the Khmer saying goes, you have to follow the channels to enter the estuary, which means we have to adapt to all sorts of situations. The birds do the same thing. In the high water season, they leave the lake. Then when the water level drops, they come back to the same spot. This former poacher has radically changed the direction of his life. Protecting nature is his way of refusing to yield to fate. About 100 kilometers away, young Aman Nam also decided to challenge destiny. 352 steps and a 76-meter climb separate the gods of the Vat Banan temple from mere mortals. Usually, I train from 8 to 11 a.m. and from 2 to 5 in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. I've been doing circus for 10 years. At first, your muscles get really sore. Sometimes, your joints hurt. The training is hard and it takes up a lot of time. You really have to persevere. The main thing is to stick with it for your own future. Aman is 19. He was born in Batambang province in the west of Cambodia and is now a student in the town's circus school. First off, I do circus because the far circus school is right near my house. Before, my family was in a bad way. We were poor. My brother was training then, so I would go watch him. And I saw that the school would give out cookies. So whenever cookie day came around, I would go train too. Aman goes home after each training session. His brother, Sopa, is also a circus performer. While attending the far school, he was spotted by the national circus school in Quebec. I'm beat. I've been at it all day. Sopa now works with the world-famous Cirque du Soleil. Between tours, he shares his experience with his younger brother. Here's the family photo. My parents have 12 children and seven of them are in the circus. There's my brother Brandy, Sotia, Aman, Kontia, Tira, Perlo, and me. I saw that my brother traveled to France. So one day, I asked him how come he got to go to France. And he said, if you want to go to France, you have to be in the circus. I tried it and I liked it. But I feel like I have a lot of support because I have a brother in Canada, another who is a professional in the CMREAP circus, and my big brother who's a good circus teacher. So I'm surrounded by family who can guide me in my choices. I would be very proud to be as good as them. Thanks to the success of his children, the situation of Aman's father has improved. And now he has a tuk-tuk. Today, he's taking Aman to see his brother perform at CMREAP, 170 kilometers from Battambang. When my children started going to the far school, I thought they were just going to learn how to read and write. That they would be doing a normal program. I didn't know they'd be doing circus arts. And afterwards, I watched their training every day because I was afraid they'd get hurt. I'm very happy to see my children doing so well. My dream is to become a performer who plays all over the country, all over the world, and all the countries that I've never been to. That's my dream. I want to see, to hear, to experience how beautiful it is and how difficult it can be. Where my limits are, that's it. I want to experience everything. Every day of the year in the CMREAP Big Top, the acrobats warm up before the show. Det Kwon is one of the nine founders of the school that trained all these performers. At the beginning, we only taught drawing at the school. Then in 1996, we started a music department. And then in 1998, we started the circus school. The idea was to help the street kids, the vagabonds, the poor children. And give them the chance to learn an artistic profession. Aman has gone backstage to see his brother. You need help? No, no, no, you'll mess me up. I'm going now. When I see how talented my big brother is, I'm not jealous of him. On the other hand, when I see the others, I want to do better than them. But when it's my brother trying out something new, I want to do just as well. But it's not in a spirit of competition. This entire adventure sprang from a place free and open to all. A unique school. Which literally means light of the arts. It's open to underprivileged children and goes from kindergarten through high school. An education in the arts here puts the smile back on the children's faces. Keep your hands up, straight, straighten up. Okay, go down to the end, come back and turn here. Brandy is Aman's eldest brother. The career of an acrobat is short. He retired from performing at 33 and became a teacher and choreographer. Keep your balance. Yeah, just like that. When I was a child, I was in the street selling cakes. It was what you could call the life of poor people. Soon as I started studying here, it made me very happy. It changed my life and that of all the members of my family. My brothers, my sisters. It's all thanks to the generosity of the Phar School that encouraged us to go on stage and sent us to study abroad. These kids are like me. There's no need to force them. They came of their own free will. They saw something amazing. They liked it. So they come to train like me before. Learning the profession means sweat, sacrifice and injuries. On stage, there's no harness, no nets. These athletes are entering a high-risk profession. I'm Venezuelan. I think that it's the same where I'm from. Both are countries that are not rich, so I can really understand. You always have to have the dream, the motivation to go far. Circus in Cambodia dates back to the 6th century AD. It was not merely an affair of street performers. It was ranked among the noble arts and entered into the spiritual world of pagodas and temples. The totalitarian Khmer Rouge regime tried to put an end to everything that recalled the divine and the kingdom. Very few dancers capable of teaching the age-old gestures of the apsaras survived. Here at the Phar School, they're reviving these arts that nearly disappeared. The memory of the circus is also engraved in the Holy of Holies, in the temples of the ancient kingdom of Angkor. Det spent his childhood in refugee camps. The arts have allowed him to heal the wounds of war. For 23 years now, he has devoted himself to the revival of his country's ancestral arts. This section here illustrates the circus in pre-Angkor times. Was the circus the same back then as it is now? I think that back then they didn't have as many techniques as now. Look, on this bas-relief, you can see a man. He's on his back juggling a wheel. And here is a man lifting three others. They were strong to be able to carry three men. As far as overall technique goes, that's international. It's universal. But what marks us off from the others is that here, it's inscribed in this wall, which proves that it goes back at least to that time. Look, it's carved into the stone, indelible. This bas-relief is kind of damaged. But even so, you can see the detail of the sword swallowing. It's going down his throat. His throat has to be perfectly straight for it to pass. Otherwise, there's an accident. My specialty is the fire staff. I didn't know the first thing about it. I saw the other kids spinning fire staffs, and I wondered how they managed to make the flame flare up. Shanda is in the same class as Aman. To become a circus performer, one has to strive for perfection, to surpass oneself, and then to surpass the others. I practice all the time, even at home. I take a normal stick with no flame. Little by little, I got to be comfortable with that. Eventually, the teacher noticed me and let me practice with fire. I think it was because he saw I was making good progress. The circus is an art that dates back to ancient times. And I'm happy and proud to be carrying on this art today. We work to improve so that it continues to evolve, so that people here and abroad realize that it is a beautiful art form. Becoming a circus artist means rehearsing tirelessly to make the public believe, at least while the show lasts, that magic is possible. With their bodies as their only instrument, they prove to us that dreams can become reality. Aman's story is also the story of many other children like him, the story of poor but determined kids who give their all for their dreams and eventually work their way into the spotlight. Present-day Cambodia is resolutely turned towards hope and the future. To travel to the ends of the earth, to pursue one's dreams wherever they may lead. The idyllic shores of Cambodia are the unexpected scene of an extraordinary adventure. Thirteen kilometers off the southern coast of Cambodia lies a string of islands as beautiful as they are fragile. Beneath the surface of the water, marine life is suffering in silence from the damage of illegal fishing, which is rampant here. Twelve years ago, Paul Ferber began a new life. He left England and landed on these tropical islands in the Gulf of Thailand. He has never gone back. He decided to devote himself to this sea that gave him a new lease on life. I'd like to think I'm an advocate of the sea. When you see something that's wrong, you have to try and do something. You have to try and do something to make it right. So the aim of being here is to protect all of the ocean, to bring it back, to make it what it once was, which if you're looking at a couple of hundred years before that happens, it'll never happen in my lifetime. But if I can actually just bring it back to a point where it's a healthy functioning ecosystem and it will do the rest itself. With the help of the government, Paul settled on this previously uninhabited island, Koatse. He's the founder of MCC, Marine Conservation Cambodia. His NGO regularly receives a dozen or so Khmer and international volunteers and scientists. In order to protect the marine life, they designed a system of reinforced concrete towers. Everyone lends a hand for the work, even Paul's son, Bee. Bee, you know why we do this? Yeah? To make the house for the fish to live in. Maybe if we're really lucky, we can grow some oysters on them too. The oysters will clean the water. Yeah? We put some seagrass, the seagrass very good. Yeah, the seagrass around them, yeah? Okay. It's pretty good, four years old and the first thing he says is, can we have seagrass too because it cleans the water? One, two, three. The very, very first initial idea was anti-trawling. Trawling is such a horrific and destructive way of fishing. It's like cutting down all of your fruit trees, you know, just to get one harvest. So the idea was to create something big enough, heavy enough and stable enough to stop trawling boats. They can almost be like little miniature natural aquaculture units. After two years, there would be able to be a sustainable harvest. So at least one block would sustain one family with collecting oysters. Mussels, we can grow them in there. You know, it's not just about making the ocean beautiful again. It's about making sure that all of the people out there have something again. We see the life coming back all the time. The first changes were very slow. You know, six months, seven months and we've seen maybe three or four more fish and the water is still pretty dirty. But now, after three years, it's starting to explode. It's amazing. You go in and every other day you're seeing a species that you haven't seen here before. It's really hopeful. I mean, it's still only our tiny little area. But with the government agreeing to expand the conservation areas over the next year, we can expand. We can take that and start to just build more and more. Life on the island unfolds to the rhythm of nature and the activities of the community. Paul now lives permanently on the island along with his wife and five children. The scientists that pass through take turns in homeschooling the children. Delphine Duplan came here from Quebec two years ago. She's in charge of mapping the project. Here is the island of Caussé. Here is the dock and the reef and the protected area where we'll place the blocks. A zone 500 metres by 150 metres. There'll be a block placed every 50 metres. These underwater towers will be like sentinels all around the island. You can't see them as you would see them on the land. But the fishing boats will realise right away if they try to sail in here. It's like an invisible shield. The island has an interesting past. Now it's in the front line fighting for the environment, but it also bears the scars of yesterday's wars. For the island is situated in a strategically important spot near the Vietnamese border. They began to build bunkers here during the Second World War. This continued under the Khmer Rouge who were at war with their neighbours. I come to the pier often at night. From here I can tell exactly where the boats are from the noise of the engine. I can tell what type of boats they are because we're attempting to stop the illegal boats that are destroying the area. When we first started here you could literally feel the noise on the island. You'd feel it through your feet. The island would be shaking with the noise of the boats. They were so close, it was big and it was every night. Now it's decreased a lot. If we were to hear an illegal boat now, the first thing I'd do is inform to the Fishery Administration. Then we would inform to the police. And depending on their answers or whether they can do anything was depends on whether we would then go out to tackle that boat. Paul watches over a zone of about 80 square kilometres. He records each one of his interceptions. And sometimes they have to get tough. Okay, two sets of pair trawlers straight through the middle of Cambodia. There he is here. One over here. Go over there. Cambodia's territorial waters have been ravaged by illegal and destructive fishing methods like trawl nets, dynamite and electricity. That night there were so many illegal boats that Paul and his crew received armed assistance from the authorities. It's one way to keep the outlaws at bay. At dawn, the horizon is once again calm. It's time for the local crab fishermen to haul in their traps. Paul keeps himself informed through regular contact with all the local fishermen. They're doing pretty good, all the crab in here. We're on a long tail. Small scale fishing using what they call lopka dam. Lopka dam is basically a collapsible crab trap. They've got 2,000 of them that they laid out last night and they're pulling up now. Something cut the line. There was one or two damaged traps. But every time they lay their traps, they don't know whether when they come back to pick them up, those traps will still be there. When the trawling boat comes through, most of the time they just don't care about the small scale fishermen. So there'll still be a line of traps underwater. As their net comes through, it catches those traps. When they pull up their net, they could be three or four kilometers away and they've dragged all of that fishing gear to there. It's got damaged along the way. And then once they do pull it up, they'll just have some ropes and some traps and they'll just cut that. They don't want it. They don't care about it. They cut it and throw it back in. We really, really, really want to support these guys because this type of fishing gear is very, very sustainable. It's true. I myself have lost thousands of traps, especially over there. There are little fish and crabs, but when the trawlers come through, they just rip up everything. Even the coral. Paul himself refuses to fish. So when he gets the chance, he buys seafood from the locals to support the type of fishing he believes in. Paul has had a thousand and one lives. He attended police school. He has worked as a mason. He was a stone cutter, florist, tree doctor, first aid worker. When he became a diving instructor, he saw how urgent it was to save the sea. He was a trailblazer in creating Cambodia's first marine sanctuary. I loved small stuff. When I went diving, it wasn't about all the big things you could see or the clear water. It was about finding all of the really bizarre and strange camouflage creatures. Ghost pipefish, the nudibranches, all of the small marine life. A creature right out of a page of mythology has riveted Paul's attention. When I came to Cambodia, I did a dive in Samlum where I saw 56 seahorses in one hour. Four different species and from juveniles to big, beautiful, colorful adults, it blew my mind. I had never seen anything like it. And I started to video them, photograph them. I used to go out every day. Just spent, that was all I did. I used to take, every time I went out, just go to see the seahorses. Paul is one of the rare specialists in seahorses. This unique species where the male bear the young. Some of them have been marked, so a cleaning is in order to identify them. Even though it has survived for over 40 million years, the seahorse is now besieged by many dangers. It is a much sought after remedy in traditional medicine. People attribute all sorts of powers to it on account of its strange looks. And then, for whatever reasons, the trawling fleets from Sinupville and including a few Vietnamese boats which came specifically for the seahorses, just started to trawl all of those areas. So I would go down to see a seahorse I'd been filming for a month or two months and there was nothing, there was no home, there was nothing, the sand was bare. The, I remember seeing a little purple one, all crushed, it had just been crushed. And yeah, they destroyed everything I loved. So that's pretty much how MCC started, they destroyed the areas. Paul is a model of courage and determination. He has made radical life choices straight from his heart and mind. How many you got, mate? You got enough? Jasmine! He's 40 years old, he's not rich, but he is free. Most important, he's protecting what he holds most dear, his family and the nature that surrounds him. Let's go see your mama. Not already? Yes, see? Two or three days and can eat, okay? My feeling for my children, I see that there's so many things that are wrong with the world. And the biggest one is that we destroy it, we destroy it every day. And kids are taught in schools and just through the TV and magazines to aspire to so many things that really are just not that important. The latest fashions and who's got the best trainers and, you know, fantasy stories about things that just are completely unreal. I want them to grow up with an appreciation of the earth and a connection to it, and a connection to nature that allows them to be change makers, you know? I hope that I instill in them enough of the importance that unless some people stand up and start to do something to change, then nothing will change. The world will become darker in their lifetime than it ever has in mine.