Generally I’m the sort of person who needs to know a bit about a place before going. The Maldives and other paradise holiday destinations like Thailand, Singapore, Egypt, Israel, India all have various ways of disrespecting people’s human rights. Dubai is built on slave labour; France has issues with how women from ethnic minorities dress on the beach. The further you delve into a country’s politics, often the more problematic they are, as my recent trip to China illustrates. We are required to give a full set of fingerprints before we enter Chinese immigration control: my front door in DB is opened by fingerprint and I do wonder whether the two items of data are linked, whether those data could be used against me by any unscrupulous authority. Call this paranoia, give me a tin hat but these are the times in which we live. I refuse to visit the USA while Trump is President and I’m certainly not giving them my social media passwords.  Our own sad mess of a country: where does it all stop? I’ve gone off at an extreme tangent here but if not here, where? Made you look.

You, dear Reader, will know how I feel about disaster tourism, poverty tourism, genocide tourism. Call it what you will, it’s all linked. On the one hand, we’re on holiday for a break as well as to experience a different place and culture but I don’t think it’s right to ignore awful things that have happened or are still happening there. Local inhabitants, hotel staff, guides are, after all, shaped by their experiences and cannot forget them. Some might approach this subject with a white saviour complex or as a sneering, rubbernecking gawker. I try to be respectful and report the truth as I see it in a dispassionate way, but that is difficult with Cambodia which I found heart-rending at times. To gain insights into the culture and people of a place you have to look at its history. Cambodia has been through such trauma in the last 100 years or so but, rather than reinvent the wheel, here’s a link to a good précis from Lonely Planet.

Tl;dr: Cambodia in the last 150 years has been a colony of France, of Japan and, drawn into yet another superpower conflict its citizens were caught up in the bombing and land mine campaign of the Vietnam war. Around an estimated 750,000 Cambodians were killed in the US-backed bombing during the Vietnam War and use of chemical defoliation of Cambodian forests with “rainbow herbicides” including Agent Orange and white phosphorus, though it has been impossible to verify this figure because of lack of physical remains.

After the USA/ Vietnam War came the murderous regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge backed by China, where an estimated 2 million people, a quarter of the Cambodian population at the time, were killed for their ethnicity; their intellectualism; suspicions that they were enemies of the state. Another 2.25 million, according to UN and Red Cross estimates in 1979 faced starvation because of the complete destruction of Cambodian social infrastructure. Cambodia still has an estimated 4 to 6 million land mines, planted by all aggressors, and one of the highest rates of land mine amputees in the world. Hun Sen of the residual Khmer Rouge has been Prime Minsister since 1993 and, still strongly backed by China, has suppressed opposition parties and leased almost half of Cambodian land to foreign investors, threatening hundreds of thousands of Cambodians with eviction. The EU’s application of tariffs on Cambodia clothing exports that resulted hurt the Cambodian economy and strengthened China’s position still further, as if it could ever be weakened.

It was against this background that we taken by our driver to see the war museum, a collection of rusting tanks and weaponry captured from the war. There were no displays of skulls here, thank goodness. We didn’t manage to see any of the Killing Fields exhibits in our time there, but we do not need to see the grim evidence of what happened for ourselves to know how profoundly these people are scarred by decades of war.

So many of the Cambodians we spoke to were resentful of the economic power of the Chinese who, it seems, buy up the land for construction projects, employing only Chinese workers, and push land prices up to levels unaffordable for locals. Of course, we should be wary of popular received wisdom and antagonism against foreign encroachment – we see how it distorts the truth in other countries including our own – and it seems that massive Chinese investment has fuelled much economic growth – but Cambodia scores low in international rankings for corruption (161th out of 180 countries surveyed by transparency.org) and it would seem that most wealth appears to be held by s small proportion of Cambodian elite and does not trickle down. People we spoke to reported opposition to the PM Hun Sen’s Government being brutally quashed and told us that they were taking risking “being disappeared” by talking to us but that they needed the world to know about what had happened to their country.

For the second part of our afternoon, we were taken to visit the floating village community at the northern end of Tonle Sap lake, where the water level rises and falls hugely with the season, according to the flow of the Mekong river, far downstream. The water is currently low, as the rainy season hasn’t come to much yet, and we had to transfer to a smaller boat in order visit the village.

As luck would have it, our boat guide for the first part of this journey took us to visit the actual community rather than the shopping, drinking and viewing platform that offers a 30% commission to guides and is favoured by most tourists here. You can drink beer and watch the sun go down just a stone’s throw away from some of the poorest people in the country. How quaint. Our guide, however, described himself as a community worker and, in our tiny motor boat, took the opportunity to explain about daily life here. People here raise livestock, including crocodiles for fancy maroquinerie, in floating pens; there are shops and a church; a Buddhist temple and what appeared to be a waste recycling facility. It looks like the locals might eke out a living from selling the tin cans to scrap dealers.

Here, the school doubles as an orphanage; but some parents take their children to beg in nearby towns so they don’t ever get to go to school.

Inhabitants of the village use the water from the lake for 80% of their water needs. Life expectancy is not great here and it’s common for people to die of water-borne illnesses. Our own guide explained that his wife had drunk the water and died at the age of 29, leaving two young children. Women marry around 14 and have four or five children with no access to maternity care: the nearest hospital is an arduous boat journey away for a woman in labour. It made me think of my complication-riddled birth experiences: if not for geographical accident of my own birth, I might not have survived them.

What an irony that we have the means to travel to a place which, for its inhabitants is their world. There is no internet connection here so villagers are unable to learn anything of the world beyond their noses. Poor Cambodia, its friendly, welcoming culture so long the pawns in yet another superpower game. I was silent as we drank our $1 can of beer with a German name unfamiliar to any German visitors. It’s all so grim.

*Our guide told me that I had permission to photograph these villagers because they want their story known to people in the outside world.

** Cambodia promotes its beautiful, high quality textiles and desireable handicrafts at Artisans Angkor. You might find it worth a click.