Kampong Cham Bamboo Bridge Festival

Kampong Cham's bamboo bridge to Koh Paen island is rebuilt by hand every dry season and taken apart again before the Mekong floods, a cycle documented since at least the 1940s and revived after the civil war. Cambodian news has reported a Bamboo Bridge Festival marking an anniversary of the crossing, though its current scheduling and program are not independently confirmed beyond that reporting.

Each dry season, once the Mekong drops low enough at Kampong Cham, villagers on Koh Paen island drive tall bamboo poles into the riverbed and lay split-bamboo matting across them to rebuild, by hand, a pedestrian bridge that can run several hundred meters across the river to the mainland, a structure taken down again, plank by plank, before the rains return and the current would tear it apart.