80 km

We see countless farms each day, but we’ve seen only a handful of motorized tractors working the land. Instead, more and more, we see large white cattle hooked up to ox carts and plows. If they’re not working, they’re usually tied by a rope through a ring on their nose to a stake in the ground where they munch on any remaining green they can find. Other times we see them moved, two at a time, by a lean man encouraging their pace with a light tap of the whip from behind, holding their ropes like leashes. These are the tamest cows I’ve seen.

A farmer leads his cows out to the fields in the early morning mist.

Today the road goes from pavement, to dirt, to mud, and back to pavement again. It rained this morning, and we are on a lesser road now, so we are prepared to see anything. But as we choose smaller, less maintained roads, we also see less traffic and that is a relief.

What is not a relief is the constant frustration of knowing we are being charged a special “tourist price” for many things here in Cambodia. We can sometimes see that we’re being charged more than other people, other times we just know it because we might have paid half the price for the same thing earlier in the day (like a simple can of Coke or a bottle of tea). It can happen in restaurants, fruit stands and markets, and probably sometimes at hotels although it’s harder to know. We understand that Cambodia is coming through the other side of a long tragedy and that tourism is a great infusion of money into their economy. But does it have to be infused so quickly and so much by us? We are spending more per day here than we spent per day in Malaysia and Thailand. Guidebooks tell us we have to bargain for everything, but so far we have found no one willing to bargain except for a woman who was selling us warm cans of soda and the illegally-copied guide book I bought from a young girl at Angkor Wat. (“This is a copy,” I said. “Yes,” she said, “but it is a good one.”)

Tonight we rode across a hand-made bamboo bridge to an island in the middle of the Mekong river. Once we got to the other side we saw it was a toll-bridge. That’s fine, we thought, it’s a pretty neat thing to see. We rode up to pay our way, and saw two people on a moto pay 1/4 of what we each were charged. Each of these incidents are small examples, but when you consider how many times we stop and spend money every day, it adds up. Where do we draw the line? We want to see Cambodia rebuild and prosper. When we’re bugged enough we just walk away. But we have to eat. And we are glad to be seeing the things we’re seeing.

This handmade bamboo bridge, re-built every year for the dry season, leads out to an island where people live and farm. Even a car came down this thing while we were riding on it! We had to balance on the edge and I nearly got my toe run over.