So. Generally speaking, I've had apretty good time in this dusty, hot country known as Cambodia. I can't say that I loved Cambodia beyond comprehension, but I did learn to appreciate and quite like Cambodia. It's a pretty laidback place, the people are nice and friendly (but not overly so), I've loved the beaches and the seaside towns of Kampot and Kep, and am glad I braved the heat to take in Angor Wat.
The main annoyance I've encountered is the feeling of being ripped off a fair amount, mainly by tuk tuk drivers and food vendors. This makes being here feel a bit like a hassle, like you're a ripe mark just because you're clearly a Westerner. While negotiating for a tuk tuk in Kep, the driver wanted $3, which was more than the $2 I'd been spending in Kampot to drive a much greater distance. When I mentioned that, his friend chimed in, "Cambodia is a very poor country." Yeah, true, I get it. It is a poor country. But there's also that sense that you're being taken for a ride (literally) and that somehow because you're foreign it's OK to try to milk you for all they can. And yes, I get it, poverty spurns people on to hustle (which ultimately I admire, better than sitting around drinking and asking for spare change, à la San Francisco), but it makes it hard to warm up to a country where you feel like you're viewed as a walking ATM. When I tried to buy a tiny bag of potato chips near the old French Casino in Bokor National Park, I asked a kid working the stand how much they were and he said 3,000 riel ($.75). His dad immediately interruped to say, no, 5,000 riel ($1.25). Sure, it's only $.50 difference but a bag of potato chips that small is about a $1 in the U.S.! You want to be like "C'mon, this isn't NORWAY, you guys! It's a teeny tiny bag of crappy potato chips!" Instead of saying that though, I just gave up and walked away (this is right after watching a four-year-old take a final glug of water from a water bottle and chuck it on the ground).
Which brings me to my next observation: there's a lot of litter in Cambodia and a lot of active littering. On the boat back from Koh Rong, I watched a guy take his last sip of iced coffee and fling the empty container overboard. Driving down the road I saw a guy on top of a truck toss his empty water bottle into the air. Basically it seems like the entire country is just throwing their trash (and especially plastic water bottles) on to the ground (or into the ocean). Since there doesn't seem to be any cohesive refuse system, presumably eventually the litter is collected and burned (yay, burning plastic bottles) but there's tons of it lying around, clogging up little pools of water, in trenches near people's homes, on the mountainside in Bokor. And again, I get it -- it's a developing nation, and a poor country at that. But I hope for the sake of our earth, a different mentality can take hold where this kind of widespread, egregious pollution comes to an end. It's hard to see, especially when you realize there aren't a lot of alternatives. After all, it's not like clean drinking water is available from the tap -- so instead, huge volumes of bottled water are being used, for drinking, bathing, etc. A very sad and concerning thing to observe.
Another concerning tidbit I learned is that while Cambodia ranks as one of the poorest countries in the world, it also is one of the countries that receives that highest amount of aid in the form of government money (for charity as well as infrastructure projects) , NGOs, charities, and so on. But in talking with one expat who'd lived here for 5 or 6 years, she mentioned that in fact there are many wealthy people in Cambodia. But the attitude of those who are wealthy is to not bestow their money on building up the country -- they'd rather remain a poor country and rely on the foreign investment and aid money to do things like build roads and provide wells for the water. I found this an intriguing piece of information, especially given Cambodia's history with its quite failed venture into communism. While you might not agree with communism/socialism's end conclusions about how to redistribute wealth or build a nation, the one insight that is very real is the observation that the wealthy tend to hoard their money and use it to primarily serve their own interests. Today, walking through my hotel neighborhood in Phnom Penh, I passed numerous giant, flashy mansions with high gates and security guards waiting out front; I'm not making any argument for socialism here, but I will say I hope Cambodia can find a way from history repeating itself, for when you have a tiny minority controlling the wealth and power and a enormous population left to languish in poverty (and essentially ignored), you have a recipe for disaster. It might sound naïve and crazy, but what Cambodia needs is a Rockefeller or a Ford or even a Bill Gates -- it needs wealthy patrons who see investing in their own country as as indirect way of protecting their own interests, as opposed to looking to foreign investment from China, Korea, India, the U.S., and a host of other countries, to build roads and bridges and factories for them. (I'm no foreign policy or global economist here, please be gentle with me if I have completely missed the mark on something!)
All things considered, after a tour of the Killing Fields and Genocide Museum, ultimately Cambodia is impressive for its ability to perserve and rally after dealing with some very recent horror. And after arriving in Vietnam and finding the country so civilized, in a way, I do kind of miss the "wild west" feel to Cambodia -- that it's a bit rough and tumble, a bit unruly, and can have a lot of hassle, there's something inherently fun and freeing to be in a place where you have to just kick back and go with the flow.
Not sure when I'll be back, Cambodia, but thanks for the hot, fun, sweaty, eye-opening, sweltering, wild times.
During my second stint in Otres, I had the good fortune to be invited to a Khmer New Year get together thrown by the contractor/construction worker who's been building the new bungalows for the guesthouse where I stayed, Mama Clare's. Hung (ethnically Vietnamese but living in Cambodia) invited Clare and her guests to come round for some afternoon food and drinks, so I hopped on Clare's motorbike and off the small group of us went.
Hung's house lay just down the road behind the few stalls that comprise Otres Village, located in a cluster of makeshift dwellings made up mostly of wood and corrugated metal. There was an awning hanging over a concrete rectangle, where Hung and his wife and friends had unfurled a bamboo mat and had laid out dishes of a river fish smoked in fish sauce, fried eggs, and spring onions sautéed with dried shrimp and peppers. We sat around cross-legged and picked at the food with chopsticks, cheers'ing every few minutes with freshly cracked cans of Angor beer -- the Cambodian custom seems to be to open a new can and say cheers and drink about half the can before opening a new one (or polishing off the can immediately and opening a new one, perhaps I'm just a slow drinker).
All around us the children played in the dirt, threw talcum powder on each other and squirted each other with water guns, while chickens waddled by and water buffalo lazily slept in a field just beyond Hung's home. Clare had mentioned that Hung might have children with more than one woman -- it was unclear. But there were maybe 30 some children running around, and a handful of adults, the women mostly shyly out of sight, minus Hung's wife who joined us for beers and food and a bowl of her own noodles after spending most of her time in the wooden hut where the cooking is done over hot coals.