Wonder and befuddlement at Cambodia’s World Heritage site

By TESS BACALLA

SIEM REAP, Cambodia.—This northern Cambodian province and its namesake city evince none of the country’s sordid past, particularly under the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s, dubbed one of the darkest periods in mankind’s history, having claimed the lives of about two million Cambodians.

Every year, an estimated 2.5 million tourists flock here, gateway to the world’s eighth wonder, the ancient Angkor temples. Hotels, many of them boasting palatial architecture and ornate facades, line both sides of the well-paved road while guesthouses dot the streets and alleys.

One will easily find a four-star hotel room for 30 dollars—the de facto currency in Cambodia—a night, says Arnel Jotiz, a Filipino missionary based in Siem Reap along with his wife and two children. The resulting competition is a definite boon to tourists.

Shops and stalls selling all kinds of merchandise—from local delicacies, clothing, textiles, artwork and handicrafts to silverware and gemstones—abound in city markets. The Pub Street, packed with bars and restaurants, is frequented mostly by tourists.

Siem Reap is indeed making a windfall from tourism. But the booming tourism has not lifted this province of 903,000 people, comprising 6.3 percent of the country’s 14 million-plus population, out of poverty. Corruption also lurks amid its charming landscapes and breathtaking views, and among exceptionally warm and friendly people, as Jotiz and his wife Christine describe them.

Siem Reap is not just poor—it remains one of the poorest provinces in Cambodia. That this is happening “is a bit weird seeing the number of tourists going there,” said Philippe Delanghe, who heads the United Nations’s Culture Unit in Cambodia, in an interview with the British daily, The Guardian.

“Unbelievable grinding poverty is a brutal fact of life for many people,” says the nongovernmental organization ConCERT (Connecting Communities, Environment and Responsible Tourism) based in Siem Reap city. “In Siem Reap province over half of the population live(s) below the official poverty line, existing on less than 40 cents per day.”

Siem Reap’s poverty incidence is even higher than the national percentage—pegged at one-third of Cambodians wallowing in poverty, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Roth Phally, First Secretary at the Cambodian Embassy in the Philippines, concedes that poverty persists in Siem Reap province. But he is confident that in 10 years its economy will vastly improve, saying tourism-driven development is ongoing.

The people are “just learning about tourism” and how to make a living out of it, he says.

Out of the mouths of babes

Until then, the people, particularly children, will have to bear the brunt of poverty. Infant mortality rates in Cambodia are among the highest in Asia. Malnutrition is widespread.

Cambodian children did not witness the horrors of Cambodia’s dark past, but they are fighting another war nonetheless: poverty. How else does one explain the gaggles of children chasing tourists in and around the Angkor complex and surrounding commercial establishments, selling all kinds of stuff instead of being in school?

Tourists who have spent at least a day in this part of Cambodia know it is not easy fending them off. Caught in the throes of poverty, these children use all the charm they could muster in pursuit of the mighty dollar.

“Some sweet potatoes for you, Mr. Handsome sir?” one tourist, writing on his blog, remembers being asked by one such child during a recent trip to Siem Reap.

“Poverty drives children onto the streets in an effort to support their families,” says Michael Horton, ConCERT chairman and founder.

Whether these children have conveniently skipped school in exchange for making a living by selling goods to tourists is a question foremost on the minds of many concerned visitors.

“The Cambodian government encourages children to go to school,” Roth assures, without going into details as to how exactly it is doing that.

On one scorching afternoon, a bevy of children suddenly walk into a restaurant near the Old Market in downtown Siem Reap, their collective sights trained on the dining tourists. Sounding like pros, they offer their wares—postcards of the Angkor World Heritage Site—to a group of white women seated at one of the tables.

Within seconds, the children are chatting up the women—and answering their queries in English, possessed of unmistakable charm and wit. Asked by one of the female tourists if he goes to school, one boy, who’s about seven, says, “I go in the morning.”

“Many of the children are extremely smart and streetwise, and motivated enough to have taught themselves English from the tourists,” says Horton.

Corruption in tourism?

The extent of poverty gripping Siem Reap and other parts of Cambodia is perhaps matched only by the scale of corruption afflicting this poor Southeast Asian nation.

Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Index ranks Cambodia 154^th among 178 countries covered. Both petty and grand forms of corruption are widespread, says the Berlin-based anti-corruption civil society body.

A motorist who figures in an accident had better think twice before seeking police assistance or intervention, says Jotiz. Chances are he or she would have to cough up some amount for the responding police officer. To civil servants living on meager salaries, this is extraneous service, plain and simple.

Allegations of corruption hound even the sale of tickets to the legendary Angkor sites.

Ticket sales from the Angkor temples, totaling roughly $31 million a year, are split between the central government based in Phnom Penh and a petrol company called Sokimex, according to a report of The Guardian. Some of the proceeds are redirected to the Angkor management authority.

Sokimex is the business conglomerate with which the government entered—“quietly” it is alleged—into an agreement in 1999 to run the Angkor ticket concession. Its founder and chairman, Sok Kong, is widely perceived as a crony of Prime Minister Hun Sen.

“Our government is corrupt,” says Nhol (not his real name), a former government soldier who fought the Khmer Rouge rebels, echoing widespread allegations that a substantial amount of tourism revenues, especially those generated from ticket sales, goes into the pockets of corrupt public officials.

But Roth, the Philippine-based consular officer, does not believe there is corruption in the management of Angkor archeological sites and considers government’s decision to cede control of the ticket concession to Sokimex a wise move. It effectively weeded out the practice of selling fraudulent tickets by unscrupulous individuals, he says.

Yet a look in and around the temples seems to yield evidence of mismanagement, if not corruption—heaps of empty plastic bottles and other wastes littering some parts of the temple ruins, graffiti on temple walls, vendors peddling their stuff and stalking tourists in every direction in and around the temples. Tourists can even venture beyond some restricted areas of the Angkor ruins.

All this begs some fundamental questions: How much of what goes to APSARA Authority, tasked with the protection and preservation of the Angkor temples, is really used for this government agency’s vaunted mission? Given the millions of dollars being generated from tourists, would the government even have to rely on international organizations for “the preservation and restoration efforts at Angkor?” asked one thoughtful blogger.

Then, too, how much of Angkor profits go, if at all, to improving the lives of the surrounding local communities? “Tourism benefits the people indirectly,” says Roth. “It generates livelihood.”

The entrance fee to the Angkor temples is no pittance by any average tourist’s standards. A day tour commands $20 per person. A boat ride around the famous Tonlé Sap, Asia’s largest freshwater lake located about 15 kilometers south of Siem Reap town, fetches another $20.

Coastal exploitation

Every day floating villages, notably ethnic Vietnamese, living off the lake eagerly await the arrival of tourists aboard what one Cambodian driver, Ta, describes as government-owned motor boats, which are evidently suffering from poor upkeep.

A small Vietnamese boy—his feet firmly planted in an old banca being paddled by a male figure that looks like his father—quickly jumps onto one of these boats ferrying tourists. Perched on his small arms is a round plastic basket containing cans of sodas and beer costing a dollar each. He sprints back to his boat after successfully making a sale.

As if on cue, another banca approaches the same tourist boat, this time with two small children, a boy and a girl, selling bananas and sodas, plus an elderly man, on board. The girl gestures toward the big snake coiled beside her left foot. Ta, the youthful motorboat driver, tells his tourist passengers that she can hold the snake around her arm for a dollar. The tourists opt to buy bananas instead.

Steering his motor boat toward a floating school for poor and orphaned Vietnamese children, Ta tells his passengers, in halting English and in a commanding tone, that they should buy some “noodles” from a nearby floating store as “donations” to the children.

“We already have bananas for them,” says one tourist.

Bananas are “not good” for children, he argues, sounding upset and muttering words in his native Khmer language.

Ta later says, when discreetly asked by another tourist, that there are three floating restaurants-cum-souvenir shops on the lake, which also sell food items—yes, including packed noodles—that foreign visitors can buy and give to those children. Their collective patronage obviously drives theses businesses, two of which, according to Ta, are run by Cambodians and one by Koreans.

A quick scan of the lake shows families living in extremely unsanitary conditions. Women going about their normal household routines are wantonly disposing of their household wastes into the lake such as vegetable peelings and who-knows-what.

“If you touched the water, the stench would stay with you for the whole day,” says blogger Timothy Chhim.

“While the floating villages are a picturesque tourist sideshow for visitors to the nearby temples, for the people who live on the boats and the peripatetic houses, this is a harsh existence. But it is one they have tolerated because of the livelihood they derive from fishing,” says the Asian Development Bank. There are no sanitation and waste disposal facilities, electricity, or drinking water connections, adds the multilateral organization in a report posted on its website.

On the way back from Tonlé Sap, after more than two hours of sauntering around the famous lake, tourists are taken in a different direction—away from the waterfront where they bought their boat tickets. The returning vessels dock right behind a big and impressive-looking souvenir shop selling Cambodian mementos. Disembarking tourists are led toward the only exit leading right smack into the souvenir store. Hardly anyone buys.

Tourists do not need any of these souvenir items to remember Cambodia by. Awe-inspiring Angkor temples. Warm, friendly and genteel people. Children boldly hawking goods in the streets and on board speeding boats. Floating Vietnamese villages in their sordid and exploitative conditions. These sights—eliciting a mix of wonder, delight and befuddlement in equal measure—will be indelibly stamped in their minds long after they leave Siem Reap.