Rubbish. Everywhere. Plastic bags, bottles, paper plates, straws; all strewn at the side of the road for miles and miles and miles. This is the first thing I notice about Cambodia.
As the bus lurches out of the immigration checkpoint I can see the ruins of half-finished casinos; a border frontier development project that never took off. The bus pulls into a service station for a lunch stop. Immediately, young children and old women crowd the doorway with begging bowls (the same plastic bowls used to flush simple squat toilets). There's obviously an agreement that these people cannot enter under the tarpaulin roof of the canteen; as we sit down to eat they linger at the threshold watching for movement.
As the bus continues to Phnom Penh I watch long stretches of arid fields dotted with a few skinny cows, lakes clogged with weed-like lilies. The houses are on stilts - I am guessing that this flat land is prone to wet-season flooding.
The social disparity in Cambodia is obvious; there's something very suspicious about the Cambodian People's Party, whose sign is always the accompaniment to a gloriously lavish out-of-place mansion.
The bus parks up onto a ferry to take us across a lake to the capital. I get a good look at the people surrounding the gaps between the cars. In Cambodia they don't wear pointy hats like the Vietnamese; the national hat here is a wide-brimmed straw planter's hat. I can see a lady in one of these hats carrying a large platter of deep-fried beetles. A young man points at a few and she cheerfully scoops a heap of them into a plastic bag.
The other main thing that you notice is the smiling. The people here, even the begging children, are the most smiley people I've met so far in Asia.
As the bus lurches out of the immigration checkpoint I can see the ruins of half-finished casinos; a border frontier development project that never took off. The bus pulls into a service station for a lunch stop. Immediately, young children and old women crowd the doorway with begging bowls (the same plastic bowls used to flush simple squat toilets). There's obviously an agreement that these people cannot enter under the tarpaulin roof of the canteen; as we sit down to eat they linger at the threshold watching for movement.
As the bus continues to Phnom Penh I watch long stretches of arid fields dotted with a few skinny cows, lakes clogged with weed-like lilies. The houses are on stilts - I am guessing that this flat land is prone to wet-season flooding.
The social disparity in Cambodia is obvious; there's something very suspicious about the Cambodian People's Party, whose sign is always the accompaniment to a gloriously lavish out-of-place mansion.
The bus parks up onto a ferry to take us across a lake to the capital. I get a good look at the people surrounding the gaps between the cars. In Cambodia they don't wear pointy hats like the Vietnamese; the national hat here is a wide-brimmed straw planter's hat. I can see a lady in one of these hats carrying a large platter of deep-fried beetles. A young man points at a few and she cheerfully scoops a heap of them into a plastic bag.
The other main thing that you notice is the smiling. The people here, even the begging children, are the most smiley people I've met so far in Asia.
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