Qualla: Lake Yeak Laom

Lake Yeak Laom: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jensre, CC BY-SA 3.0. A giant dug this hole. That is the Tampuan account, and it is more specific than most origin stories: his daughter had run away with a suitor, and he tore open the earth to get her back. Rain filled the pit. The water has been there ever since. The geological account agrees about the hole and disagrees only about the digger — roughly 700,000 years ago a volcano opened in what is now Ratanakiri province in north-eastern Cambodia, and what it left behind is a crater so close to circular that it looks drawn with a compass. Eight hundred metres across, fifty metres deep, ringed by unbroken forest. Both versions arrive at the same object, five kilometres from the provincial capital at Banlung.

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Image: Jensre | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Yeak Laom: The Shape of an Explosion

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chamnanmuon, CC BY-SA 4.0. Explosive craters tend toward roundness, but few hold the line as neatly as this one. The shoreline of Yeak Laom closes an almost perfect circle around a surface of about 0.44 square kilometres, and the walls drop steeply enough that the lake reaches fifty metres in the middle wi...

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Image: Chamnanmuon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lake Yeak Laom: Standing Water, Standing Forest

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Crowley, of Ethan Crowley Productions, CC BY-SA 3.0. The forest around the rim survives because the lake is not treated as scenery. Yeak Laom and the woods that enclose it hold spiritual significance for the Tampuan, who make ritual offerings here at planting and at harvest, and when someone in a family falls ill. The Tampuan numbe...

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Image: Ethan Crowley, of Ethan Crowley Productions | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Yeak Laom: Ten Elders and a Gate

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Crowley, of Ethan Crowley Productions, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the early 1990s the pressure was showing: litter accumulating, farmland pushing at the rim. In 1995 the provincial authority and the International Development Research Centre began conservation and environmental education work alongside the Tampuan communities living around th...

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Image: Ethan Crowley, of Ethan Crowley Productions | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Yeak Laom: Three Kilometres Around

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jensre, CC BY-SA 3.0. It is a ten-minute run from Banlung by car or tuktuk, and the entrance fee is deliberately tiered — a quarter of a dollar for Cambodians, two dollars for foreign visitors. A three-kilometre footpath circles the whole lake beneath the canopy, and wooden platforms let you drop stra...

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Image: Jensre | CC BY-SA 3.0