Intro to Cambodia - Blogabond

I think you can forget any blogging for the next 3 weeks. Connection speed in the big towns of Cambodia has been nearly impossibly slow and I've just take 50 minutes to get to the stage where I can start writing this. We are in a smallish town now (actually it's the regional capitol), and it's only going to get worse until Thailand. At $1 an hour we can't afford it with these speeds either, not to mention wasting whole days just to upload a few photos.

It's too late to write anything substantive now as we have to catch the bus. Cambodia is a big rip-off! Tourists are just cash-cows and the money only goes to line the already well-lined pockets of the bratty elite VIP crowd. The wealth gap here is shocking after Vietnam and China, where we never saw any sign of poverty. Here there are loads of huge Hummers and other massive black 4x4s with no number plates and "VIP" in the windscreen; there are lots of expensive clubs, restaurants, and bars full of swaggering spoiled youths (with guns apparently); yet here there are lots of people begging; people in dirty raggy clothes; children up to the age of about 10 walking around the capitol city naked. The government is ostensibly socialist, but nothing we've seen suggests that it is anything other than extreme right wing (maybe it's following the nu-lab socialism), and nothing any of the Cambodians have told us about how politics works suggests otherwise: without money you have no education, no health, no pension, no unemployment benefit etc. By all accounts the government exists only to keep the elite in the money.

And the food is terrible (and expensive of course) after Vietnam.

Monument at the Killing Fields

I've just come back to this and I am being a little unfair on Cambodia, my anger at being exploited forthe last two weeks being focussed by the terrible internet speed I was enduring before I changed place to a slightly faster one.

We just expected Cambodia, being a poorer country than Vietnam or China, to be cheaper; in fact we've blown our budget time and time again here, using up all 4 "free days" that we didn't use in Vietnam. I mentioned the expense here on the couchsurfing website and go some angry responses. Yes it is a lot cheaper than Euorope, but it's still much moire expensive than the neighbouring countries.

written by

The Happy Couple on February 23, 2009 from Phnom Penh, Cambodia

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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So why don't you move on sooner?

written by Rosalyn Faulds on March 11, 2009

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