::A Geek in Korea::

We traveled to Tonlé Sap after touring temples instead of eating lunch. We didn’t know how far away this place happened to be when we told the tuk tuk driver, but he just smiled and got ready to go. We headed south, and kept going. He refilled his tank once, and then pulled over at a government building about a boating tax.

We asked a few questions about the tour. It was a 90 minutes. We wouldn’t have to wait for a boat. We’d get our own boat, with an English speaking guide and someone to steer the boat. We paid $15 dollars apiece to go on the tour, got back in the tuk tuk, and continued on the paved road.

Tonlé Sap is 11 km to the south of Siem Reap. Currently in Cambodia, they are nearing the end of the dry period when the lake is only a meter deep. During the rainy season, the river swells to four times the size we saw, and was ten times deeper. The small boats move near a mountain during the wet season, but were currently enjoying the best period of time for fishing.

As we approached to the lake area, the road went from paved to rough packed ground. The people on the outskirts of Siem Reap were poor. The people on the unpaved area of this road were much worse off. There were stray dogs and chickens roaming around under the small bamboo “houses” The “houses” weren’t much more that shelters from the sun with a few cooking utensils and some clothes drying on the bamboo ladders leading up to them out front. This was the squalor of extreme poverty like I had never seen. I’ve been to South Africa and seen some ghettos, and some of the poorer areas of South Korea, but nothing was close to this.

These people lived lives in the boiling hot heat, literally surviving on the fish they caught from day to day. Naked children sat outside on the “porch” to escape the sun, while the elderly rested in hammocks in the shade. However, they smiled to us as we drove past them. Even with the hardships they faced from day to day, the children still waved.

We left out tuk tuk driver behind and went out on a long boat like the one we took in Thailand to tour Bangkok. The guide, Reyal, was a really interesting person. He spoke English he learned from being on the boat and meeting tourist with an accent, but he knew what to say to get his point across. He was very friendly, and asked us about our “story” as two independent travelers.

(They are moving the school.)

He explained about life in the village as he took us to Tonlé Sap lake. On the way to the lake, we passed various buildings donated and built with foreign investment. There was a Korean school and church. There was a Japanese school barge that had an fenced in soccer field and classes downstairs. There was a floating hospital and a market. We trolled through this area slowly, as school was in session, and we didn’t want to disturb the classes with the waves.

The lake itself, while low, was still tremendously large. We visited an alligator and fish farm that operates for tourists to visit and eat on in the middle of the lake. We went to their aquarium to see the different kinds of fish in the lake. Reyal told us about the dangerous, the most delicious, and the most expensive fish. It was interesting, but since we weren’t going fishing ourselves, and had already been to an alligator farm in Thailand, it wasn’t very earth shattering.

Instead of touring the poor “areas” where Vietnamese and Cambodians huddled their boats together to make communities, he pulled up a few chairs and suggested we sit down and talk for a few minutes to get out of the hot sun. This was one of the highlights of our trip, as it turned out.

Reyal was a very interesting person. He was orphaned at age 4 when his family was killed by people loyal to Pol Pot. He worked as a garment maker, then later got a job working in a market hauling things to different vendors. He used to live near Battambang, but moved to the floating village to be an unlicensed tour guide and survive on tips.

He went to school in Siem Reap, which was a 25 km journey each day. He would walk three hours to school because he didn’t have money for a bicycle or tuk tuk. He would study for six hours, then walk back home. He wanted to continue to get a high school education, but he didn’t have enough money. He only got six years of formal education, and scrapped the rest of his English from listening to tourists on the boat. He said that he loved studying English, but that he couldn’t afford the $80 dollar a month lessons.

He said his salary was enough that he could live on two or three dollars a day for food, but otherwise had very little. He slept in the tour boat, but we didn’t even see a place for his things, if he owned anything other than the clothes on his back.

He wanted to know two things about Korea.

1. Why did young children know more English than their parents?

2. Why were Korean tour guides such dicks?

We told him the answer to the first question. We were involved in the industry to educate those children. He was completely amazed that Korean high school students only sleep 3 or 4 hours to study for a single test. He also was jealous that children not only attended school, but also went to three or four other expensive private academies as well.

He thought Korean tour guides were rude and very impatient. He said that the tour guides wanted the boat to go as fast as possible at all times, even if it disrupted the local schools and hospitals, but he couldn’t understand why. He also resented the fact that tour companies visited Korean restaurants in towns, and stayed at Korean owned hotels.

(We talked about this with him for a while, but I’ll split it off into another post for later to maintain the flow of this post better.)

Reyal was an unlicensed tour guide because of the cost involved. He said that being a tour guide in Cambodia was probably one of the best jobs available, but for someone without a family it was basically an unreachable goal. He said that if you went to a university and studied two languages, you could get the fee for becoming a tour guide cut in half. Without a college education, it would cost him $4,000 dollars to become a guide. Being licensed meant he would get a salary every week of $30-40 dollars, and basic medical benefits.Reyal said if he saved for 20 years, he might be able to afford to get a license. He said that this was his dream, and that he’d work hard until he could do it. He was really a positive person, talking about how people that traveled independently in Cambodia had a direct impact on the poor people’s lives in the neighborhoods they touched.

He said that he loved the Cambodian government because they improved the road leading to the floating village. The road to the floating village before government intervention was simply an impassable mud pass, but now people can visit much more easily. The road still isn’t paved, and it was till rough, but it didn’t wash away when it rained anymore. This has brought more tourists visits. More tourists means more taxes paid to the locals in charge of the boats, which means more improvements for the poor in the area.

This sort of “direct action” was easy to witness. There were buildings all over the countryside that said, “Donated by this party” and then showed the Cambodian political party responsible for this improvement. This lets the poor have a stake in the governmental process and lets them see the benefits directly.

There was optimism as he spoke. Even though his country had a horrible past, things were getting better. Things were improving and affecting everyone’s life in a positive way, even down to the very poor that lived on a remote lake.

We said goodbye to Reyal after our tour and slipped him a nice tip for his insights into Cambodian culture. We hope he continues on his way to realizing his dream of being a guide as he was very entertaining. We got back into the tuk tuk and rode back to Siem Reap to eat lunch, and to take another mid-afternoon heat break nap.