22-11-08

Dear all,

Surprisingly enough we actually had an excellent day today, but it has nothing to do with the beach resort accommodating us. As our Dutch tour guide just confirmed as well, it is quite disgusting to see all those fat Western tourists hanging around with those tiny pretty Cambodian girls... On top of that, there are at the beach a lot of beggars and sales people, something you hardly see elsewhere.
We exactly spent 5 minutes yesterday on the beach and that was already too much for me ...

Happily the NGO's are spending quite some efforts to make clear that the sexual abuse by foreign paedophiles - a serious problem in Cambodia - is forbidden, one sees quite some billboards all over Cambodia inciting people to report abusers. The child abuse is slowly but surely being combated, although in a country as poor as Cambodia, money can tempt people into selling babies for adoption and children for sex. Once in the trade, it is difficult to escape a life of violence and abuse. Drugs are also being used to keep children dependent on their pimps, with bosses giving out yama (a dirty meta-amphetamine) or heroin to dull their sentences. Even more problematic is the domestic industry of virgin-buying in Cambodia, founded on the superstition that taking a virgin will enhance one's power.
In Phnom Penh we saw some suspicious couples as well, though it is difficult to estimate the age of girls; they all seems pretty young till a certain age and then all in the sudden they take in age very rapidly.
I read in a book, that a Western woman in Cambodia (or in Laos, I do not remember exactly anymore) battling prostitution has been threatened so much by powerful people (authorities?), that she had to stop her activities, very sad.

Anyway, the 4 of us decided this morning to escape the beach life, and hired a tuk-tuk for only $ 16 to get us to the other side of Sihanoukville, to the harbour. Named in honour of the then-king, Sihanoukville was hacked out of the jungle in the late 1950s to create Cambodia's first and only deep-water port, considered vital so the country's international trade would no longer have to pass through Vietnam. Well, do not expect a harbour like Rotterdam; again, we are in Cambodia. Though we saw some containers like Marsk, K-line, NedLloyd, it was rather a dirty polluted fishing harbour with wooden fishing boats and people living in miserable circumstances, but ever smiling and friendly. Seeing a child learning with her little brother some English, I sat down next to her to help her with the pronounciation: Cambodians - like many Asians - have difficulties to pronounce the last part of word, so they say ... if they mean ... "
ri - rice
lun - lunch
Khmer Rou - Khmer Rouge
etc. Once you are getting used to it, you manage to understand, but still it remains difficult to understand for instance our Khmer local guides.
On the way back we made a coffee stop at a snake/crocodile farm; Arjan & Hans were making a tour, we the girls do not like too much to see snakes in too small cages; so we assisted to the sitting together of an ugly Western fat man sitting with 3 pretty looking young Cambodian girls.... The place was also owned by Russians, and seeing 3 Hummers, we were wondering what kind of place it actually was in reality ...

Getting back around lunchtime at our hotel, we had a simple, not as good as yesterday's evening diner, lunch at the same place as the day before. Then Arjan & I decided to let us spoil ourselves by a 1 hour Head & neck massage + 1 hour Coconut scrub (Arjan) and a 1 hour Traditional Khmer (= Cambodian) + 1 hour Mango scrub (Ingrid) in the hotel: wonderful!!!!
And all in the sudden it is already evening time! The Dutch tour guide met us tonight with the excellent news that most probably he found a sateh place, owned by a Dutch guy, near to our hotel, that sounds good.

Tomorrow a very, very long 11 hours drive (mainly because of the bad roads) back to Phnom Penh and then further to Battambang.

I like to relate you something about the landmines one unfortunately still can find in Cambodia. Although peace treaties were signed a decade ago, Cambodia's civil war is still claiming new victims: civilians who have stepped on a mine or been injured by unexploded ordnance (UXO). Today, Cambodia has one of the world's worst landmine problems and the highest number of amputees per capita of any country - over 25.000 Cambodians have lost limbs due to mines and other military explosives. Despite extensive mine awareness campaigns, an average of 30 victims are injured or killed every month. This is a vast improvement on the mid-1990s, when the figure was more like 300, but it is still wartime carnage in a country officially at peace.
To make matters more complicated, areas that seem safe in the dry season can become dangerous in the wet season as the earth softens. It's not uncommon for Cambodian farmers to settle on land during the dry season, only to have their dreams of a new life shattered a few months later when a family member has a leg blown off.
A number of groups are working to clear mines, whacking through the undergrowth square metre after laborious square metre.
We have seen some of these amputees begging at Wats (= temples), extremely sad.
I have read a even more sad story about Laos 'receiving' more bombs than Germany and Japan together during World War II since the Americans dropped their bombs on their way back to their bases in Thailand during the Vietnam war; not being authorised to fly them back to Thailand if they did not succeed to drop them in Vietnam.
Since 1997 more than 150 countries have signed the Ottawa Convention banning the production, stockpiling, use and sale of land mines; let us hope that such will erase this unacceptable use of weapons causing so many problems many years after a war.

A&I - Sihanoukville, 22-11-08 - evening time, so temperature is getting acceptable

**
PS: read Arjan's comment published with our yesterday's report!

2e PS voor Trijnie: Compeed is een wondermiddel: alle 3 wonden zijn definitief geHEELd!