Waterworld

Cambodia's Tonle Sap lake is South East Asia's biggest, and during the wet season it expands enormously as water backs up from the mighty Mekong near Phnom Penh, and covers a large proportion of central Cambodia. During the dry season the water drains out again and the lake shrinks to a fraction of the size. So the Tonle Sap river, which flows down to the Mekong, reverses its flow twice a year.

A lot of transport in Cambodia has traditionally been up and down the Tonle Sap river or across the Lake. If you want to go from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap or vice versa, you can do it by boat, but I gather it's slower, more crowded and less comfortable than the bus these days (the roads have been greatly improved of late). Lonely Planet still recommends the boat trip across the lake as a good way to travel between Siem Reap and Battambang.

I actually stuck with buses for all my Cambodia travel, and they all worked well. But I did visit the Lake on a day trip from Siem Reap, and got a feel for this Cambodian Waterworld. There's a floating village, called Chong Kneas, where they're all set up to show tourists around. It was towards the start of the dry season, and the lake was contracting, so the floating houses were in the process of being moved. They need to move them several times a year, many kilometres in fact, as the shoreline contracts and expands. 

So you see all this, and you see the floating markets in operation, and the crocodile farm, and you even get to visit a Catholic church and private Catholic school-orphanage. First though, they take you to a grocery store and tell you you need to take a gift of some food, as the school depends totally on such donations. It's probably legit, but how can you tell at the time? A 50kg bag of flour for $50 is suggested, then when you prevaricate, it comes down and down, till we settle for a $12 box of instant noodles. Off we go again on our boat ride, the gift is given, I'm introduced to the teacher and the class.

It turns out they're absorbed in a TV show though. It is Sunday, after all. No lessons today. No need for me to provide an English lesson. After a quick "Hello", they don't really want to know me!

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Cambodia's Lexus junketeers

I read that there are 50,000 Lexus cars in Phnom Penh alone, and I could see that this was probably about right. Yet Cambodia is dirt poor, so how could this be?

I saw a log jam of Lexuses outside the Central Markets. It was being shuffled around by a parking attendant to enable one of them to get out. A motor bike parked behind one was skittled when it got shuffled backwards into it. The worried looking motor bike owner came running over, but said nothing as he picked up his machine. You don't tangle with Lexus owners.

There are lots of stories about how luxury vehicle drivers, with all the right connexions, get off scott free when they are responsible for fatal accidents even, and they never get tickets for parking or any other traffic infringement.

I had another encounter with the Lexus army in the town of Kompong Thom, when I tried to book into the main hotel there (rooms with ensuite, TV & AC for $8). The nice receptionist kindly warned me that all the quiet rooms away from the karaoke room were taken, and suggested that if I didn't like loud music until 3am I might want to try their guesthouse next door (rooms with ensuite, TV & fan for $5). I took the guesthouse option and it was fine.

I saw later that the hotel was being used for a World Food Programme meeting of some sort, and was surrounded by Lexus and other big 4-wheel drives. I was told that the international aid machine in Cambodia had pretty well become a giant circus of junketeers, funnelling money into the country, but really just going to endless meetings and karaoke sessions, and providing well paid cushy jobs for members of the ruling party and their cronies. Nobody I spoke to thought any of the aid effort was doing a lot for ordinary Cambodians.

Cambodia is a multi-party democracy these days. The problem is that government hasn't changed hands for 30 years. The Cambodian Peoples Party has successfully used all the tricks in the book to hold onto power. The majority of the populace are uneducated rural folk, and their support is easily bought. Very little is actually done for the poor, while those with the connexions play karaoke and ride around in the Lexuses.

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Welcome to Phnom Penh 2

People often tell me they're not interested in politics. My standard response these days is that they may not be interested in politics, but politics is still interested in them (so watch out)!

Nowhere is this this illustrated better than in Cambodia. You visit the temples of Angkor to marvel at them, but also you visit the other must-see sights: the genocide memorials.

Cambodia put on one of the great all-time genocides in the late 1970s. Technically, there's some argument that it wan't a genocide, as it was aimed at political and economic classes, rather than ethnic or religious groups. But that doesn't help the 2 million or so who were butchered or who died following the forceable evacuation of the cities. Or those who endured chaos and poverty for many years afterwards.

Failed intellectual and psychopath Pol Pot, and his Khmer Rouge colleagues, decided in 1975 that Cambodia needed to go back to Year Zero. Teachers, intellectuals, and artists had to be got rid of. Zero sounds like a good place to start from, but without teachers, intellectuals and artists, you don't actually go anywhere useful. And Cambodia went nowhere for quite a while, except to yet more internal strife and suffering. (And amazingly, the western world, Australia included, continued to support the Khmer Rouge as the rightful holders of the country's UN seat, for many years after their forceful removal in 1979 by Vietnam.)

So in Phnom Penh you visit (mostly in stunned and respectful silence) the former torture prison of Tuol Sleng (S-21), with its meticulous photographic records of the victims, its torture equipment, and its wire mesh barriers to stop inmates jumping prematurely to their death. You go out to the nearby Killing Fields site at Choeung Ek, to see the remains of the mass graves, the piles of skulls and other bones, the bone fragments and items of clothing still protruding through the ground in places. You see the reminders of the cost-cutting technologies used to kill many - the tree against which children and babies were swung and smashed to death, and the palm trees with tough jagged leaf edges, which were used to cut people's throats.

Nobody has yet been brought to justice for any of this. Pol Pot died in 1988. 'Case 002' is the case currently being held by a joint Cambodian / international tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, against four of his leading henchpersons. One has been let off the hook because of declining mental capacity, and there are fears the other three will get to die before anything much happens with the case. 

Still not interested in politics?

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Welcome to Phnom Penh 1

 The Royal Palace, late afternoon and the Tonle Sap river, and monks paying their respects to the dead former king.

 Crowded roads around the Central Market

Crowded roads around the Royal Palace






Crowded motor bikes (I saw several with five aboard, but never when the camera was handy!)

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