Today I decide to brave the red, dusty, bumpy road in a tuk tuk to pop into town for a bit of wiffy. But of course to get free wiffy you need to pay for a why why.... and good on the French, their legacy here is a half decent glass of it for a change! I settle into the Cafe Laurent in the late afternoon, with tables set on a series of interconnected decks over the river, in the shadow of a huge rusting tanker, gradually sinking - the tanker that is, not the cafe!
I guess it hasn't been that long since my visa run here last year, but nothing has really changed. Still the old dusty streets, the rubbish along the riverfront. The big signs promising the riverfront development have so far come to nought, and the Cafe Laurent is the only speck of civilisation amongst a few hundred metres of riverside dirt, food stalls, mangy dogs, rubbish and tuk tuk drivers desperate for a dollar fare. My tuk tuk driver didn't have enough cash to give me $18 change from a $20 bill, we had to go via the money changer to break down the note into smaller, extremely grubby ones. And like all of Cambodia anything over a dollar is paid for in US currency, any less and as part of your change, it's in Cambodian riels, at least it keeps the brain active as you mentally calculate pounds to dollars to riels, oh and here in Koh Kong, as it's so close to Thailand, bahts are also part of the local economy. The town is the administrative centre for Koh Kong province and as such has a number of run down looking Government Departments dotted about. I particularly liked the "Department for Cult and Religion", and the "Department of Finance" which was falling down and empty, reflecting the state of their budget I guess...
And after my wiffy fix, another bone jarring journey back. There's no way you could go into town to eat, the journey back would see most of your food back up!
The hotel, the Oasis Resort, is really pretty, set on a spacious lot with the bungalows tucked behind all sorts of tropical plants with orchids everywhere. The pool is huge for a place of this size and the infinity edge looks over to the mountains in the distance. What is especially nice is that there are lots of little nooks and crannies with hammocks and seating areas around, all with palm roofs. And they even provide a bbq if you decide to go into town and buy your own fish.
It's owned by Jason, a Brit who has a great no nonsense, no compromise approach to sex tourism, he just won't put up with it. Even if a guy is adamant that a Khmer girl is a real girlfriend, he won't let them stay. He's quite a maverick in a town where most of the hotels are the proverbial knockin' shop! He has quite a jaded view of Cambodian society after eight years here. He speaks Khmer and understands the derogatory comments often made through the Cambodian smiles about foreigners as they walk through the market. He talks of the number of children sold even here, the child and female abuse in Cambodian society and about the general lawlessness of the place, the police and judicial bribery, the scams by the tour people around the town. And how Westerners' can buy their way out of trouble if money changes into the right hands and how locals can get away with heinous crimes. He also says they have become so lazy as a result of the huge number of NGO's throwing rice at them. An interesting view of real life behind the smiles. I think it's a face of Cambodia no one really wants to see, it's easier to believe the smiles. But it's not just his view. This summing up of their society is by a Cambodian woman called Somaly Mam who wrote a book "The Road Of Lost Innocence" (really worth a read) about her experience of child prostitution here and the setting up of her charity to try and improve things.
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"During the Khmer Rouge regime people detached themselves from any kind of human feeling, because feeling meant pain. They learnt not to trust their neighbours, their family, their own children. To avoid going mad they shrank to the smallest part of a human, which is "me". After the regime fell they were silent, either because they had helped cause the suffering or because this is what they had learnt to do in order to survive.
The Khmer Rouge eliminated everything that mattered to Cambodians. And after they fell people no longer cared for anything except money. I suppose they want to give themselves some insurance in case of another catastrophe, even though the lesson of Pol Pot, if there is one, is that there can be no insurance against catastrophe.
More than half the people of Cambodia today were born after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Things should be improving. But the country is in a state of chaos where the only rule is every man for himself. The people in power don't always work for the common good. When I was young we were poorer, but school was free in those days. Today school has to be paid for and you can buy a diploma - or get one for free if you show your teacher a gun. The justice system is for sale and mafias are close to power: the prostitution business is worth $500 million a year, almost as much as the annual budget of the Government.
Cambodian people have always been trained to be obedient, and they have always been poor. In Cambodia one child in eight dies before the age of five. The streets are full of rubbish and flies and shit, and the rain churns it into muck. More than a third of the population live on less than one dollar a day, and you have to pay the hospital if you get sick.
Men have the power. Not all the time: in front of their parents they keep quiet. With the powerful, they too must stay silent and perhaps prostrate themselves. But once those encounters are over they go home to assume the upper hand and give orders. If their wife resists, they hit her.
There is one law for women: silence before rape and silence after. We're taught when we're little to be like the silk cotton tree: dam kor. Deaf and dumb. Blind too, if possible. It's normal to beat girls. To many people, they're a kind of cattle. Your daughters will look after you because that's their duty. Other than that, they're not worth much.
One third of the prostitutes in Phnom Penh are young children. These girls are sold, and beaten and abused for some kind of pleasure. In the end I don't think there is any way you can explain or justify that, or the homeless children scrounging through rubbish, inhaling glue from little cans you can buy for 500 riel from every hardware stall, or the stolen children who are trucked into Thailand for the modern slave trade."
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Perhaps a jaded view, but poverty is obviously not as picturesque as it may sometimes seem....
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