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Angkor still |
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(later)
I
am all “templed-out”. I don’t want to see another Cambodian temple,
even if it is from the earliest Angkor period. We have now had two
and a half days of temple tours, and our otherwise
*** All the temples are surrounded by booths and stalls, selling everything from cold drinks to postcards, to scarves and t-shirts. David is much more patient and polite, but it appears I have a low tolerance level for all the hawkers beseeching tourists to buy postcards and souvenirs. I realize they often have no other means of making a living – and poverty is endemic in Cambodian society. But I wish they would take “No” for an answer. And the children are the most persistent. If we bought something every time we were latched on to, we would have spent $US1000 in a few days, no trouble. The other deserving cases are the land-mine victims, still paying the price of the civil war; they sit there, minus an arm or a leg, with a begging plate. Some of the more enterprising band together as buskers, hoping for a few more dollars for their “musical” performances at the entrance to some temples. We have to remind ourselves that there is no social welfare system in this country, and that tourist donations may be all that is between them and total poverty. Guilt feelings inevitably come to the surface here, most often when we spend the sort of money locals can only dream about. When we order a (cheap) bottle of wine for dinner, I can’t help thinking that its price is roughly the monthly wage of the waiter serving us. Pay rates are a hot topic at the moment. The average worker receives about $US15 a month, teachers $25 and senior civil servants $30. On those figures, I don’t know how the country keeps a Civil Service staffed. Our driver was himself a teacher, but gave it away to take up the much more lucrative tourist trade, where he grosses $US10 a day when he’s hired by people such as us. We think he’s a bargain; he thinks he’s making heaps. The iniquities of the government which fails to provide any kind of a safety net for its people is a common grievance. Two drivers we have had have both mentioned “corruption” as the number one problem facing Cambodia. Our driver today, when he saw a police roadblock stopping vehicles, muttered “police corruption”. He said that while we wouldn’t be stopped, because we were foreigners in a tuk tuk, money would be demanded from all local drivers unfortunate enough to be caught in the net. One newspaper report here dealing with the low wage structure mentioned in passing the unofficially sanctioned practice of police officers skimming off a proportion of traffic fines they collect. A different form of the “on-the-spot” fines paid in Oz. Another political issue that arouses strong feelings is the tide of Vietnamese people coming into the country (sound familiar?). After Vietnam’s invasion brought down Pol Pot back in 1979, the puppet government installed by Hanoi negotiated free access in future for all Vietnamese into Cambodia. Despite Vietnam’s role in ending the “Dark Times”, Cambodians today appear to resent this.
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delightful tuk
tuk driver seems to regard it as his duty to ensure we see every
single temple within a 20km radius of Siem Reap (and there are
dozens of them), most of them with horror steps up to the top.
These climbs are really intriguing (right). The tread is
often very shallow, and suitable only for children’s size feet, but
the risers are very high – and for anyone with short legs like
mine, it’s a big problem levering up to the next level.