Qualla: Boeng Tonle Chhmar https://qualla.com/boeng-tonle-chhmar en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:39:17 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/w/6/6/0/boeng-tonle-chhmar-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Boeng Tonle Chhmar https://qualla.com/boeng-tonle-chhmar Boeng Tonle Chhmar: Introduction https://qualla.com/boeng-tonle-chhmar/ Photo credit Harald Hoyer from Schwerin, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0. In October, if you take a boat out from Peam Bang on the northern rim of the Tonlé Sap, you can steer through the crowns of trees. The trunks are somewhere below the hull, invisible in water stained the colour of strong tea, and the branches you push aside were shading dry ground in April. This is Boeng Tonle Chhmar, a wetland of about 146 square kilometres where the annual Mekong flood does something no other landscape quite manages — it does not merely inundate a forest, it converts one into open water and then, six months later, hands it back.

Read more: Boeng Tonle Chhmar on Qualla

Image: Harald Hoyer from Schwerin, Germany | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/6/6/0/boeng-tonle-chhmar-wp/w660-boeng-tonle-chhmar-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Boeng Tonle Chhmar: A Forest That Drowns on Purpose https://qualla.com/boeng-tonle-chhmar/ Photo credit Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin from Chalakudy, India, CC BY-SA 2.0. The flooded forest is the Tonlé Sap's most important habitat and its least photogenic. The trees are short, tangled, and unremarkable to look at in the dry season, which is precisely why so much of it has been cut. What they do is structural. Their trunks and roots slow the incom...

Read more: Boeng Tonle Chhmar on Qualla

Image: Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin from Chalakudy, India | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/6/6/0/boeng-tonle-chhmar-wp/w660-boeng-tonle-chhmar-a-forest-that-drowns-on-purpose.mp3 0:06 2 full Boeng Tonle Chhmar: The Bird Cities https://qualla.com/boeng-tonle-chhmar/ Photo credit Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin from Chalakudy, India, CC BY-SA 2.0. The colonies are the other reason this place is protected. Painted storks nest here in numbers, their pink-flushed wings unmistakable when a flock lifts off a shoal. Spot-billed pelicans work the shallows in ragged lines. Oriental darters — the snakebird, which swims with only it...

Read more: Boeng Tonle Chhmar on Qualla

Image: Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin from Chalakudy, India | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/6/6/0/boeng-tonle-chhmar-wp/w660-boeng-tonle-chhmar-the-bird-cities.mp3 0:06 3 full Boeng Tonle Chhmar: Three Words on a Convention https://qualla.com/boeng-tonle-chhmar/ Photo credit Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin from Chalakudy, India, CC BY-SA 2.0. Boeng Chhmar was designated a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention on 23 June 1999, registered as site number 997 — one of Cambodia's first. That same year it was gazetted domestically as a multiple use management area of 145.6 square kilometres. It als...

Read more: Boeng Tonle Chhmar on Qualla

Image: Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin from Chalakudy, India | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/6/6/0/boeng-tonle-chhmar-wp/w660-boeng-tonle-chhmar-three-words-on-a-convention.mp3 0:06 4 full Boeng Tonle Chhmar: Five Villages That Move https://qualla.com/boeng-tonle-chhmar/ Photo credit Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin from Chalakudy, India, CC BY-SA 2.0. The protected area sits within Peam Bang commune, in Stoung district of Kampong Thom province, and the commune holds five floating villages — Pov Veuy, Pechakrei, Peam Bang, Ba Lat and Doun Sdaeng. Their houses are built on rafts or on stilts tall enough to clear a ten-metre rise...

Read more: Boeng Tonle Chhmar on Qualla

Image: Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin from Chalakudy, India | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/6/6/0/boeng-tonle-chhmar-wp/w660-boeng-tonle-chhmar-five-villages-that-move.mp3 0:06 5 full Boeng Tonle Chhmar: What the Flood Still Has to Deliver https://qualla.com/boeng-tonle-chhmar/ Photo credit Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin from Chalakudy, India, CC BY-SA 2.0. Everything about Boeng Chhmar depends on a pulse arriving on schedule and reaching a particular height. Dams upstream on the Mekong and its tributaries have begun flattening that pulse, holding water back through the wet season and releasing it in the dry, and in July 2020 the la...

Read more: Boeng Tonle Chhmar on Qualla

Image: Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin from Chalakudy, India | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/6/6/0/boeng-tonle-chhmar-wp/w660-boeng-tonle-chhmar-what-the-flood-still-has-to-deliver.mp3 0:06 6 full