I spend the week after Thanksgiving traveling through Cambodia with the other Languagecorps students. We entered the country on foot, which I would not recommend. They call the border towns "border towns" for a reason. Going from Thailand at Aranya Prathet into Poipet on the Cambodian side of customs was like getting punched in the face. All of a sudden the pavement, which had formerly graced the road, was now piled in clumps by gutters and in the back of rickshaws. The streets were made of red dusty clay with potholes big enough to hide a child. All kinds of adaptive rickshaws were there, each individually tailored to a victim of landmines with a specific combination of missing limbs. We walked over a dried up river bed that was almost flowing again with plastic bottles.
The facemasks that Thais wear to protect from the street pollution had seemed sensible, if a little quaint. The Cambodians wearing facemasks looked as if they were about to pull out a gun.
We went to a bus station but were told that no buses were running from the border to Siem Reab, the city near the Angkor temples. I knew that the map had said this road was a national highway, and this was the only way from the border to the interior. I was pretty sure they were pulling a fast one on us, because the only other option was a private taxi driven by the bus driver. I watched as four backpackers pooled their money to buy a ride to Siem Reab. They piled into a car without a licence plate and shutters on all the windows. The back windshield was cracked, and I watched the car almost get in an accident right out of the front gate. Only when I ran into these backpackers again by chance in Angkor Wat was I totally certain they had not been simply driven around the corner and shot.
We ended up taking two taxis over three hours of the most bumpy roads imaginable. The entire trip went by grass huts built up on stilts with farm animals underneath and the family out working the rice fields. I saw many many children not in school, fishing with nets around the edges of the rice paddies. Occasionally we would pass a coconut plantation or a lotus pond, choked with pink and white lotus flowers. The scene repeated itself over and over.
Cambodia was an exhausting country to travel through, in large part because of the extreme poverty I saw. Everywhere I went people approached me as a source of money. I could see it in their eyes and in the way they asked for my money first, and then spoke to me second. Just navigating through the streets filled with trash and bad drivers in Phnom Penh was a task, and then coming to terms with the wild extremes of the country- the horror the country's legacy of genocide and the cities' stark poverty contrasted with the beauty of the country side and the beaches.
It's hard for me to figure out the most appropriate way to travel through a country like that. I don't want to feel guilty for the money I have, but I also want to know that I have spent my time and money in a way that not only benefits me but helps the people I interact with too. Because of these thoughts, there were a few rules I held myself to there. I never bought anything from a kid. I didn't like the idea of them working rather than being from school, and I had no idea of the circumstances of their business. They were most likely brought to the tourist areas by human traffickers, the same people who collected the money they made. So I traded things like bracelets with them, something that they would be more likely to keep and that would have a different value for them than money. I also never gave beggars money, which was hard because so many of them really looked like they needed it. But I decided that I was not in that country just to give away my money. And so I felt fine paying the people who performed services for me, like cooked my food and provided transportation and shelter. But the ones who did nothing but beg, I did not want to reward them. Besides, I think donation to a cause would be more helpful and more fair than money to just one person on the street.
I'm looking forward to settling down in one place, as I've said before because I've spent enough time leaving traces on other places while travelling- financially, culturally, etc. I want to stay still long enough for Thailand to leave its traces on me- with some language, cultural competency, maybe even some new friends.
