My last day in Cambodia

How to describe Cambodia? It has such an undiscovered feel to it.

Cambodia seems to me to be a country with many faces. There is the booming economy, and the bright lights of Phnom Penh, where speculation makes inner city property prices higher per square meter than central London.

There is the urban lower class, running street stalls by day and sleeping beside them on the pavement at night.

There are the rice famers of the country side, that work hard all day, often do without clean drinking water, and live in houses akin to the tree huts and 'tree forts' I built with friends during my primary school years.

There are the child labourers, with NGO sponsored English skills, working in all aspects of the tourism industry, selling food, souvenirs, and negotiating nightly rates for non English speaking street prostitutes ($5 a night so the 8 year old girl said) in Siem Reap.

There are the homeless, with all to obvious landmine injuries. Cambodia is the most land mined country on earth, but the rural poor continue to farm the land anyway.

There is the corruption, visa over-charging, fraudulent money exchange, and mis-representation of services, all but one of I found out about the hard way.

There are mothers that walk the streets at night with their babies, asking tourists to buy baby formula for $20 USD so they can refund it again at the 7/11 to split the proceeds with the clerk.

Yet despite all the scams, more often there is an NGO clearing landmines, running an orphanage, providing clean drinking water, protecting a historical site, providing a new sewerage system, building a new bridge, running free computing classes (I spent a day volunteering in one), providing free health care, upgrading a road, the list goes on.

There are also Cambodians helping other Cambodians and helping tourists too, and I met a few amazingly generous and gifted people in Cambodia during my time there. Doctors, Optometrists, English Teachers, Physical Education Teachers, Engineers, even tourists staying another day, all there simply to put something back into the country.

Yesterday I caught the boat from Battangbang to Siem Reap along the Sangkae River. It was quite a journey and I would recommend it to anyone. The journey took about 8 hours, and the river was very narrow, to the point where the driver hit the bank a couple of times and we ran aground once.

I will never forget the villages we saw on the river bank, which were interspersed with miles and miles of rice paddies. The villages had no power, no TV, no Internet, sometimes no clean water, no roads. Their only contact with the outside world was the river and all their outside supplies came in by boat. As we neared each village, the boat driver would honk his horn, and a couple of people (usually young boys) would get in a long boat and race out to pick up / drop off whatever the days cargo for each village was.

The floating villages on the river banks were interesting. They weren't all maintained and touristy like the floating village I stayed in at Khao Sok. They were just enough to get by, and it would have been debatable whether they kept out the rain out or not.

The children obviously didn't see too many outsiders. There is only one sailing of the boat per day (with white tourists) and sailings had only just resumed for the year. Any children we saw were always excited to see us. We would be invariably cruising down the river, when we'd here "ay ay ay ay ay ay" coming from somewhere on the river bank. Looking around there would always be a group of cute kids on one side or the other, waving at us from as we sailed on past.

I'll post the photos I took on the river journey later.

That night, following the journey, I met one of those Cambodians helping Cambodians, who runs a massage business staffed by blind people. So for the grand price of $1 US I got pummelled for an hour by a large blind man before shopping around the market. I had been meaning to buy a traditional Cambodian flute before leaving the country, so after trying plenty, I found one which I liked and am now the proud owner, and that was my last day in Cambodia.

After a full days travelling, I am now in Bangkok Thailand, and tomorrow before lunch time, I will be in the political and cultural capital of China, Beijing.