Cambodia Info Today

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-Cambodia today is a different country as it was still a couple of years ago.

Today Cambodia is dedicated to tourism with the a great cultural background, the ancient Khmer and the remains of that culture at Angkor and other pagodas and temples elsewhere.

Travelers from all over of the world come to Cambodia to have a look for the grandiose monuments at Angkor. The beautiful beaches around Sihanoukville with cheap accommodation, hotels, beach resorts and cottages.

All Cambodia information tell that aside of the tourism business, other business is also booming, just road are not a very good condition especially off the main routes. Unfortunately it is also virtually impossible to come in from Thailand with the car since the permission to drive the after entering Cambodia is always limited to that province. If one wants to drive to the next proving a lot of paperwork and permissions are needed. I guess not even the ancient Khmer lets say about 1000 years ago had such strange bureaucracy, ok there were no cars at that time, they used oxcart and other means of Cambodian transportation.

Actually for most of the Cambodian people the daily life hasn't changed much since that time. They have seen invaders from France, US, Vietnam and sometimes from Thailand, but the Khmer are invaded Thailand several times.

Today its a other invasion into Cambodia, its business and tourism plus UN and NGO's who can work very freely. Sometimes this people don't understand that Cambodia is still more or less a third world country with a totally other pace as foreigners are used on.  

-Thin agricultural resources are complemented with fishing

with the racks of drying fish. Fish are plentiful - even in the paddy fields where they hibernate in the underground mud during the dry months to reemerge with the first rains.

-The rural Cambodian lives a rudimentary existence,

by the water if possible, in straw huts or in wooden houses raised from the ground on posts of two meters in height. Its a agriculture

based living, the Cambodian farmer are sheltered from the animals and the floods and keeps his meager livestock under his home.

Cambodians just doing enough work to be able to pay his taxes and support his family he lives preferably in the middle of his small-holding, and, without much of a taste for business, is content to let the Chinese or Vietnamese deal with the surplus produce from his paddy or sugar palm, pigs, chickens or the fruits of his garden.

Naturally the city life in Phnom Penh an other bigger city is somehow different but not much different to any other city in the countries around like Thailand  

Cambodia is a darling of the UN, the NGO's etc. since after the Pol Pot madness a quick help from the international community was very welcomed without a lot of ideological and nationalistic conditions.

-In Pol Pot Land: Ruins of varying types

When I arrived in Siem Reap Cambodia, the town next door to Angkor Wat, one of the many new hotels that have sprung up there recently and that look like pagodas crossed with mirrored sunglasses, was draped with a banner announcing a conference: Gender Analysis in Farmers' Water Management. This was strong evidence, I think, that the aid agencies were in town, for the conference (it seemed to me) was unlikely to have been arranged on purely Cambodian initiative.

The aid agencies are one means by which our current fads, fancies, and obsessions are transmitted to, or should I say imposed upon, small and poor countries, usually with disastrous results. The last thing Cambodia needs, after all, is more deconstruction.

But aid to Cambodia is not the only means of transmission of our obsessions. It is curious how tourism, the constant search for exotic destinations by people disillusioned with their daily lives, always ends up by reducing the difference between the exotic destinations and the places from which tourists seek to escape. A brochure in my luxurious, French-run hotel informed me that Siem Reap was no longer the sleepy little place it once was (when, of course, it wasn't in the throes of massacre and civil war). It was developing quite a night life:

When it comes to Cambodia partying in bars or downing drinks, the old favorites are holding their own . . . Among the most popular [is] . . . le Tigre de Papier, a sophisticated little spot in the up-and-coming bar strip of Siem Reap Cambodia. Granddaddy of this strip is the Angkor What? and it is still going strong after four years.

Four whole years! If a week is a long time in politics, four years is an eon in popular culture. As for the temples, built between 800 and 1400 -- well, they're history.

"Le Tigre de Papier "rages into the early hours of the morning." Again, it seems rather curious that, in a multiculturalists age when everyone is supposed to be alive to everyone else's sensitivities, a bar's name should make light reference to the words of Mao Tse-tung, who not only caused one of the greatest famines in world history, but was the chief ally and inspiration of the mad Khmer Rouge ideologues responsible for the deaths of between a fifth and a quarter of the entire Cambodian population.

Whatever the destructive cultural effects of tourism, it is Cambodia's greatest economic hope. Hotels are being constructed at a furious rate, in the expectation of a million visitors annually to Angkor within a year or two.

workers, whether farmers or not, a failure to meet the target therefore indicating counter-revolutionary sabotage rather than physical impossibility. People who can do anything can attack much stronger neighbors, such as Vietnam, and prevail. This Angkor-induced voluntarism led to the overthrow of Pol Pot's regime.

You can't help wondering what kind of labor produced the exquisite monuments of Angkor, with their serene and sublime sculptures. Were the armies of laborers necessary for the erection of the temples so devout that they were happy to toil for the glory of the Hindu gods and their avatars on earth, the Cambodian kings? Or were they wretched slaves? No one knows, but one ancient stone inscription in Cambodia describes how a worker called Viruna tried to escape from his temple and had his eyes gouged out and his nose cut off: not exactly a testament to labor's freedom of movement.

The contrast between the captivating charm and physical grace of the Cambodians, and the inhuman cruelty of the Khmer Rouge, is a source of puzzlement to all visitors to the country. I caught a glimpse of the less attractive side of the Cambodian character at one of the temples. A deaf and dumb Cambodian girl approached me when I reached the top of the temple and offered me a ring she had woven of palm leaf, obviously in the hope of a tip. One of the female temple guards, guards are necessary, to prevent people from taking carvings home, a tradition joined if not started by Andre Malraux in the 1920s. When he tried to steal several carved Apsara shouted at the girl to go away and then used a switch to beat her, which she did with evident sadistic relish. My wife and I intervened to protect the girl from further beating, which was horrible in its heartlessness. If the guard was prepared to do this in front of foreigners, what would she have been prepared to do when not observed? We took the girl, crying, away. But had we done the right thing? The girl, after all, was local and would have to stay where she was. Perhaps the guard, also local, would take her revenge upon her for being thus humiliated by our intervention. When you don't know the culture, when you can't read the script or speak a single word of the language, it isn't easy to know whether you're doing good or harm.

Apsara carved

It isn't easy to understand a country in which Sihanouk could still be head of state. He has had more incarnations than a Hindu god. He has been a playboy prince, a colonial front-man/king, a Japanese puppet, a fighter for independence, a populist prime minister with elitist tastes, a persecutor of Communists, a neutralist with anti-American and pro-Communist leanings, an exile in Peking, a head of state under palace arrest of a mass-murdering regime, a deposed head of state once more, a leader of an exiled opposition coalition including the party of the mass murderers who deposed him, and finally a figurehead king. But it seems to me probable that he is still widely revered. I think I could study Cambodia for many years, and still not understand. Author Mr. Daniels is the author of, among other books, Utopias Elsewhere: Journeys in a Vanishing World. COPYRIGHT National Review, Inc. - &  Gale Group.

The majority of people who travel to Cambodia has Angkor Wat and the temples around on their travel agenda. But there are other things to do in Cambodia, like cycling through the bamboo jungle, drive to and in Bokor National Park with the dirt bike, do some hiking and trekking.

At Angkor you can also do something for your fitness, rent a cycle and explore the environ of the Angkor Archaeological Park with Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom as center. There are other interesting temples and ruins hidden in the surrounding jungle.

Follow the tracks along the Mekong River north of Phnom Penh via Kratie to