Cambodia today, country & travel information

Most beaches are in the south around Sihanoukville and every years more and more tourists, holidaymaker and traveler are coming into the country. One of the reason for the fast grow is Cambodia opened the doors to foreigners and allowed them to open businesses owned by foreigners, this is in strong contrast to Thailand where no foreigner is allowed to hold a majority stake in a business houses and other real estate.

Another real problem to overcome is the unbalanced population since the mad Khmer Rouge killed mostly men now there are much more women in the country than men. Which on the other hand is also a positive point since women are usually working harder than the guys and they are the real driving force to pull up the country from the bloody swamp of the past.

Ancient Khmer created the cultural

achievements which culminated in the temple cities of Angkor and some other places. The episode with some lunatic communists and active help of Chinese communists to kill a large part of the population for ideological purpose have thrown the country back but in recent years a lot of energy and western help brings the country to new, modern destinations.

Cambodia tourism is the medium to propel the country into new heights, its the most important foreign currency earner and behind agriculture the most important industry. With the great cultural background of ancient Khmer, great beaches in the south, especially around Sihanoukville and Koh Kong plus the active help of "the West" there are amazing advancements already visible.

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.

Airport, Siem Reap Airport and crossing at Koh Kong and near Trat in Thailand in thesouth. There are some more crossings on the eastern border with Vietnam, usually with buses and ships. Buses are usually in good condition and are at the same standard as in Thailand, Malaysia or Singapore. Siem Reap is the gateway to Angkor Cambodia and all Angkor Hotels are actually Siem Reap Hotels. The city has a good infrastructure and there is always something

with an almost constant temperature around 30 degrees Celsius. Only in the nights during December and in January the temperature might fall to around 20 degrees but this is rather seldom, April and May are the hottest. Cambodia is although affected by the monsoons, but not so much thanks to the coastal mountains of the south ranging from 1000 to 1500 meters in height in particular the Elephant mountains, where the Bokor hill station at the

Bokor National Park

underground mud during the dry months to reemerge with the first rains. On the Tonle Sap River in Cambodia, during the dry season, entire villages are established on the open lake on stilts. Thin agricultural resources are complemented with fishing with the racks of drying fish.

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 and Vietnam. Compared to Laos one must say Cambodia is much more dynamic, this dynamic is mainly driven by the booming tourist business which brings in 

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

greatest economic hope. Hotels are being constructed at a furious ratein the expectation of a million visitors annually to Angkor within a year or two. The visa fee and airport departure tax alone will add 1 percent to the country's GDP, and all in U.S. dollars. Never has a country been so dependent upon the visible remains of its ancestral civilization. It is as if Italy depended upon visitors to Pompeii for its prosperity. But the temples at Angkor, spread over 30 square miles, are so spectacular that familiarity cannot stale them, nor will they ever disappoint those lucky enough to see them for the first time. Even a million tourists a year will not vitiate their overwhelming effect, though perhaps it will be difficult henceforth to visit them in the kind of solitude necessary to enjoy any ruins to the full.

It is difficult, though, even in solitude, to completely exclude reflections about Cambodia's recent past from one's romantic reaction to the temples. At the entrance to each of them, hopeful young salesmen tout books in English, mainly pirated editions, about the Khmer Rouge regime. "You want Pol Pot book, mister?" is a common refrain. It was as if Pol Pot had become a tourist attraction too.

There is indeed a connection between Pol Pot and Angkor: The grandeur of the site (first appreciated by the French colonialists) fed Pol Pot's megalomania. He once said, and meant, that the people who built Angkor could do anything, a kind of racial-nationalist version of Mao's thesis about people as blank sheets of paper upon whom the most beautiful characters could be written. People who can do anything have no need to take stark reality, either human or physical, into account. They can decree how much rice is to be produced by forcibly collectivized 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.

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.

Cambodia trip

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 

The fact is that China supported Saroth Sar

(as Pol Pot was first called) from his earliest days. That support helped the Khmer Rouge win the long war against Lon Nol in 1975 and as a matter of fact the lunatic Pol Pot (until the 19th. Century the people in Europe used a pot to deposit the shit where no WC was available) was educated in France and everyone who ever had something to do with French education know that its full of extremely stupids and excessive philosophy and we know where this lunatic ideas came from, the difference is in Europe they only talk about when they are drunk, Pol Pot did it, he didn't have enough brain to distinguish the fantasy from the reality.