Kurt Johnson

Buddha statue at Bayon in Angor Thom.  See more of our temple photos

The first headline on our Cambodia notes is that, like 80% of tourists who visit the country, we didn’t get much beyond the Angkor temples and Siem Reap. This city in north central Cambodia is home to the airport, hotels, and restaurants that allow over a million people per year to see Angkor Wat, and consequently it gave us about as valid a picture of the rest of the country as if we had just stayed in the airport the whole time.

Obviously the Angkor temples were the start of the show; my head almost collapsed thinking about the workplan required to coordinate the building and maintenance of such massive monuments. Something like 50-60 major temples exist in a radius of only a few miles, each with thousands of enormous stones transported 20-40 miles and engraved with incredible detail. The manpower required is mind boggling, not least because of the supply chain to feed so many workers and elephants living in a dense area. The empire eventually collapsed in part due to the cost of maintaining the monuments – a classic guns-or-butter problem except in this case it was rocks-or-butter.

Beyond visiting temples we managed a few quick detours to local homes and markets. We found an excellent guide, Sam, who speaks great English, knows volumes about every corner of every monument in the area, and thoughtfully answered all of our questions about how Cambodians live and work (email me if you want his contact info). Amongst other things Sam showed us:

Basic living

• People harvest the juice from Sugar Palms and boil it down to make palm sugar cubes (sold wrapped in palm leaf like a candy bar - yum!) and molasses-like syrup to ferment into booze
• Many families can afford a small black and white TV but have no electricity so they power the TV with a car battery, then take the battery into town occasionally for a charge
• On the banks of Ton Le Sap Lake (the “great lake”) families have small, way-overcrowded houses floating on the lake that are broken down, moved up the shores, and reassembled during the rainy season when the lake expands to roughly 10x its size in the dry season
• Mobile phones in Cambodia are everywhere, with a 40 day/500 minute SIM card costing about $10. Satellite TV costs ~$5 per month. Seeing prices like this in countries with bad infrastructure and scarce technical skills always makes me that much more annoyed about how US and European telecoms have managed to keep prices high via a regulatory process that nominally protects consumers; e.g. East Africa and India both have vibrant cell phone economies with average monthly revenue per user of <$10

Homebuilding

• Building a house is an all-prepaid enterprise as interest rates on personal loans are 60%+ APR. Because of the weak financial infrastructure families generally put their savings into gold bullion which is then hidden somewhere until they have enough to build what they want to build
• Most houses are still built on stilts between 6’ and 12’ tall; although the irrigation infrastructure goes back over a thousand years and has solved the problem of floods families still like to have a place to keep their bikes/mopeds/other property under cover and potentially add more indoor space if they eventually decide to finish out the ground level
• Outside the city, even brand new homes generally don’t have conventional electricity or running water; affluent families might have a small generator behind the house. Electricity in town on the grid costs 80 cents per kwh, probably at least 5x what most people in the US pay

International assistance

• I asked about programs where individuals can contribute to building a schoolhouse but Sam said that there is generally enough hard infrastructure for education (buildings); instead the problem is teacher qualifications and performance. Schoolteachers make roughly $40 per month for working 9 months a year, half days (students have one teacher in the morning, another in the afternoon). Construction workers coming in from the farms around Siem Reap make $5-$10 per day
• Sam believes that the most effective international aid programs around Siem Reap have been well and water related – either providing new wells so families have easier access to water or providing household filters to sanitize water.

Tourism

• Most registered tour guides charge $25 per day; there’s a shortage of Spanish and Italian speaking guides so these folks charge double. The huge volumes of tourists from Korea and lack of Khmer guides who speak the language means that 200 Korean expats have been brought to Siem Reap to give tours to their countrymen. 90% of tour guides are men because, according to Sam, Khmer women want to work out of the sun to keep their complexion fair (as in India, Vietnam, etc)
• The government is planning a new, larger airport near Siem Reap once the number of tourists reaches 3 million per year, but the size of the runways combined with the density of temples and sacred sites means it will be difficult to site the airport

Finally, Cambodia’s most notorious bit of history is probably the Khmer Rouge regime that killed between 1-2 million people due to starvation, political purges, and military action. Although most of the country’s current population was not alive during the troubles of the 1970s and 1980s there still seems to be a somberness in Cambodia that is not present in neighboring countries.

Cambodia tends to suffer a bit from comparison with Vietnam or Thailand since the majority of English speaking visitors include it as a side trip from these countries and both are richer in activities. Having said that we’re glad we made the trip and are looking forward to spending more time outside the tourist areas of Angkor and Siem Reap on our next visit.

The first of two albums from Cambodia is here. We are now in Hoi An, Vietnam after visiting Susanne's family near Nha Trang and spending a week decompressing in Saigon.

Kids on Cambodia's Ton Le Sap Lake rowing over to sell us bananas; they are part of a community of ethnic Vietnamese who live on the water.  See EXIF data and an aerial view of the village

Luang Prabang is my favorite place on the trip so far; an extremely chill small town with a rich history and friendly people.  There really aren’t any must-see sights; the temples are small, not well preserved, and not particularly engaging while the elephants, rivers, and caves are all surpassed by similar attractions in Vietnam or Thailand.  Instead the attraction is just walking around town and enjoying the gestalt of the place.  The lack of must-see attractions is actually relaxing per se since there’s no implicit obligation to spend the day sweating, burning, and swatting at insects to avoid the guilt of blowing off an attraction.  The appeal of Luang Prabang is tough to express in writing but it comes down to really friendly people, a lower level of touting than Bangkok or the tourist trail in Vietnam, and enough amenities to be very comfortable without over-the-top conspicuous consumption that you’d find a 5 star hotels in Asian cities.  More than a few foreigners have moved to Luang Prabang to set up western-style restaurants, giving you the option of enjoying bargain priced local food or escaping to a Starbucks-like enclave of cold A/C, recreated French colonial décor, and $4 coffees.  The town wasn’t just a hit with us; accessible poverty + good hotels and restaurants = the highest concentration of new white Land Cruisers we’ve seen anywhere.  These expensive fuel- and resource-sucking SUVs are the vehicle of choice for foreign donor agencies when assisting the locals with sustainable growth and development.

Although Luang Prabang’s rich tourism industry and status as a UNESCO world heritage site makes it far from the poorest place in Lao it was still clear off the bat that Lao is about the poorest place I’ve been (next contender? Maybe Sapa, Vietnam); the World Bank estimates that in 2004 71% of the population lived on less than $2 per day.   Anywhere beyond the tourist center of old city the norm is no electricity, no shoes, no running water, and only a few years of school before dropping out to work.  Family sizes are large and a majority of farmers are growing for subsistence rather than because it makes any kind of economic sense.

The obstacles to economic development Lao are reminiscent of sub-saharan Africa.  The population lacks critical mass (only 6 million) and is isolated in low density rural towns, unconnected by roads or decent communication infrastructure.  As far as replicating the export-led “Asian economic miracle” that has driven prosperity in the rest of the region, Lao is landlocked by four countries with their own underemployment problems amongst the rural poor, making exports difficult.  Lao’s basic infrastructure and education are very poor; it’s hard to see why anyone would invest in Lao when its neighbors offer similar opportunities with lesser hurdles.  Tourism, while not the only driver of growth, is a significant earner and would likely lose its draw if the country was no longer poor and somewhat backwards (i.e., it would be a victim of its own success).

On a tangent, Lao is kind of a worst case scenario for the impact of indiscriminate greenhouse gas controls as virtually any development will require deforestation for roads, farming, mining, or an industrialized timber industry.  Any growth in these areas or even overall wealth levels will create new emissions from transportation fuels, air conditioning, computers, and other things people around the world crave once they have satisfied their basic needs for food and shelter.

I loved Luang Prabang, especially when paired with the urban frenzy of Saigon or Bangkok.  While I expect it will not change as fast as Vietnam or Thailand I’d still urge anyone coming to this part of the world to tack on a visit to Luang Prabang before all the charm is gone.

Kids spending a school day on the bank of the Mekong

In addition to Susanne's notes below I will post some commentary on Lao later.  In the meantime I've put together a couple of photo albums from our time in the country:

1. River stuff
2. Off the river 

One of the Hmong night markets in Luang Prabang (full album) 

Susanne has kindly contributed some writing below:

It only took us a few short hours of walking around Luang Prabang before we absolutely fell in love with it! The city is filled with wonderful examples of French colonial architecture dotted with distinctly Asian décor and style. I felt as if we were walking through what I imagine was old world Indochina. Even though this town has become a popular tourist destination due to its distinction as a World Heritage Site the town doesn’t feel spoiled or overrun by big buses and tour groups arriving en masse.

At first glance Luang Prabang is a sleepy town, however, just beneath the surface is a charming bustle of activity supporting the people who live there. Amongst a relatively small population of 30,000 people we saw numerous artisans at work. In the old city we found woodcarvers working away at an intricate wall hanging and silversmiths creating jewelry in the style worn by Hmong villagers. On a short boat trip up the Mekong River we went to a tiny speck of a village where we watched a woman make paper. She was whisking a wet pulp of paper fibers onto a screen submerged in a shallow tub of water. Later she’ll leave that screen in the sun to dry where the fibers come together leaving (tada!) paper. There were a variety of colors and designs - some were further elaborated by adding flattened leaves or flowers within the fibers (which make for nice gift bags or photo album covers).  In this same town we found a handful of homes with big looms either on the porch or inside where women were weaving all varieties of textiles that could be used as scarves, table runners, or wall tapestries. Textiles can be easily found all over Lao but we only saw women actually weaving in one small village on the Mekong River.

One of the highlights of our trip was a morning elephant ride combined with an afternoon kayaking on the Nam Khan River - a very enjoyable day for a mere $30 per person. Unfortunately we were tricked by a gloomy cloudy morning that turned into a hot and bright afternoon so we both got pretty sunburned. Besides this and chartering a boat to see the Pak Ou cave we had no other organized activity in our 5 day stay. We spent most of our time walking around town, trying to stay cool during the afternoon and having leisurely meals together. Almost every night we were there we went to one of the numerous open air riverside restaurants along the Mekong serving up tasty Lao food.

Prior to our trip I didn’t give much thought to what Lao would be like and I never expected to enjoy it so much. Even though I didn’t blaze any trails to Luang Prabang it’s still a happy day when you discover a gem for yourself. 

Our 5 days in Koh Tao [Wikitravel, map] was dominated by diving and an uneasy relationship with the great outdoors.  Despite gorgeous beaches and a location in the Gulf of Thailand our beach time was foiled by nearly constant rain .  Fortunately we had previously committed to spending much of the week either in the classroom or underwater to get certified to scuba dive, so the weather didn’t impact us much.

Koh Tao is a strange island; it’s not very big and the expats and tourists probably outnumber the Thai.  Despite claiming that it’s not just a place for divers I imagine we’d get bored pretty fast if it wasn’t for the diving we did; the attractions consist of a couple of spas, one paintball shop, and ATV rentals.  Almost everything is open air, streets aren’t paved, and the soundtrack at every business in town is all Jack Johnson, all the time (seriously).  Food options basically consist of backpacker/diver hangouts with international menus (fly 8,000 miles to Thailand and eat spaghetti!) or the fly-saturated food stalls which cooked up some amazing Thai noodle dishes for us.

Diving ended up being much more technical and cognitive than I had expected, not that I had spent any time anticipating it.  In particular buoyancy control requires a fair amount of thought and took me a few dives to get accustomed to before I could really pay attention to the great stuff going on around me in the reefs.  While the rain over the island created a lot of runoff that compromised visibility the reefs in Koh Tao are amazing – full of sea critters and, less romantically, other divers like us.  We don’t have any plans to dive again on this trip (maybe Nha Trang?) but Susanne is already plotting another trip to the cayes of Belize….However I will say that learning to dive made me appreciate snorkeling more; as you are closer to the surface the lighting and colors are much more enjoyable and you can just focus on looking around rather than being “task loaded” with buoyancy control, managing ascent/descent speeds, what your dive buddy is doing, etc.

A funny thing happened on the way to the dive shop…Because I checked “Asthma” on the enrollment form the dive shop asked me to get a medical consult in town for clearance to dive.  Despite the prestigious beachfront office next to 7-Eleven the actual doctor looked about 13 years old and charged us $5 to listen to my lungs for 10 seconds before giving me the all-clear. 

As for the uneasy relationship with the outdoors, Koh Tao is very jungle-like with all the critters to match.  We stayed at a little individual bungalow at “Koh Tao Cabana” with a great view of the bay and exotic outdoor bathroom.  It quickly became clear that our bathroom hosted enough nature that if it were somewhere it Manhattan we could call it a jungle preserve and charge people admission.  Full grown Tokay geckos, spiders, millipedes, ants, and a bunch of insects I don’t even have names for were all sighted in the 15 square feet of the outdoor shower. 

My photos from Koh Tao are here.

Next up: Luang Prabang, Laos

Two more albums of Bangkok photos are up:

• Wat Pho
• Bangkok (other than temples)

My album from the Grand Palace and co-located Wat Phra Kaew is here.  This was the highlight of our visits to temples in Bangkok, despite the fact that it was about 900 million degrees in the sun; at least one visitor fainted from the heat while we were there.

Link to album 

I just finished Philip Short’s book Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare.  I bought the book because I wanted to learn something about Cambodian history and culture before we visited and this appeared to be the best balance of my goals and reviewer opinions on Amazon.  For my purposes it ended up being too wordy and filled with minutiae about specific interactions between party members, but there were some interesting points of general interest:

Page 25 discusses historical cultural relations with the Vietnamese which eventually precipitated a purge by the Khmer Rouges:

Vietnam was the Cambodian bogeyman…They seemed to be everything the Khmers were not; a disciplined, vigorous, virile people, whose relentless, centuries-long southward migration had swallowed up Kampuchea Krom, or Lower Cambodia, in the area  of what would become South Vietnam, and now threatened a creeping takeover of Cambodia itself, aided and abetted by the French authorities, who encouraged large-scale Vietnamese immigration to staff the lower echelons of the colonial civil service and furnish the skilled manual labor which the Cambodians were judged incapable of providing.  The result was more than mere racial antipathy.  It was a massive national inferiority complex, which took refuge in dreams of ancient grandeur.  At a personal level, Khmers and Vietnamese might befriend each other…But the cultural fracture between the two peoples - between Confucianism and Theravada Buddhism, between the Chinese world and the Indian - was one of mutual incomprehension and distrust, which periodically exploded into racial massacres and pogroms.

Page 43 hints at French colonial policy:

Under the protectorate, the French had so neglected higher education in Cambodia that in the late 1940s, fewer than a hundred students a year left secondary school with the requisite qualifications [for a university scholarship]…This was especially true in the technical fields where even the humblest posts were filled by Vietnamese because of the lack of trained Cambodians…Although the numbers were rising, fewer than 250 Cambodians had been trained abroad since the beginning of the century [almost 50 years], including those sent by their families without government support.

Page 295 discusses backward bending labor supply curves:

Even Khieu Samphan estimated that on average Khmer peasants worked only six months of the year, and sometimes much less.  Theravada Buddhism has never placed much value on the acquisition and consumption of wealth.  Sihanouk has recounted the experience of an American aid expert in the 1950s who convinced a group of villagers to use chemical fertilizer, promising that it would enable them to double rice production.  ‘Sure enough, at harvest time, the yield was doubled.  Everyone was delighted…[but] when the official came back the following year he was horrified to find that each peasant had cultivated only half his land.  “Why” said the peasants, “cultivate the entire area when you can get just as much by cultivating half?”  Fifty years later, a Khmer businessman, seeking a regular supply of palm sugar for sweetmeat manufacture encountered exactly the same problem.  Once the peasant farmers he employed had earned enough for the year they stopped work, and neither blandishments nor the promise of more money could make them start again.  “From their point of view it was logical”, he acknowledged.  “Once they had paid their family’s expenses – seed for the next planting; fertilizer; clothes; offerings to the monks; school fees for the children – what would they spend it on?  There was nothing more they wanted.”…To Pol it was a roadblock obstructing his ambition to make Cambodia prosperous and strong…the Khmers Rouges had deliberately adopted policies of extremism to move “the inert peasant mass.

To be fair I read a similar characterization of the Vietnamese in The Last Valley except in that case it was used to explain how the Vietnamese could muster hundreds of thousands of rebel fighters since their primary jobs (growing rice) only took about 3 months per year, leaving them lots of free time.  There seems to be a "Vietnam is to Cambodia/Lao as China is to Vietnam" theme in the history I'm reading.

 The last part of the book (see page 420) is interesting; Vietnam eventually invaded Cambodia and the US subsequently elected to support the Khmer Rouges (in the midst of their governance killing something like 20% of everyone in Cambodia) because it was a way to punish the Soviets via the Vietnamese – very much the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” school of foreign affairs.

After an overnight layover in Bangkok last night at the Plaza Athenee (7,000 Starwood points well spent for ice-cold AC and hot showers) we are now in Luang Prabang, Lao.  This is my favorite place on the trip so far – a very chill place that oozes history and is friendly and very foreign at the same time.  Somewhat shockingly we have a wireless internet connection at our hotel that is better than anything we ever had in Thailand.  The country is clearly very poor – significantly behind Vietnam, let alone Thailand in terms of visible affluence.

Above: Street vendors on the bank of the Mekong selling enormous piles of tangerines by candlelight

Contrast: The view from last night’s hotel room in Bangkok