It can be hard to enjoy your chocolate pancake when there are kids wandering around at 9pm selling photocopied books or just begging alongside the amputee beggars who have been injured by landmines. Yet you still do and are helping the staff of the cafes keep their jobs. The economy relies a lot on the tourist industry. Yet there is something so wrong in the world when people are sleeping on the streets and not having enough to eat.

Landmines are still a major problem in Cambodia, even this many years after the war is over. About 1000 people a year are killed or maimed by landmines. Victims are a common enough sight on the streets of Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, many reduced to begging in a country where there is no such thing as social security. The dilemmas of giving to beggars and not being able to give to everyone. And the kids question. It is nice to buy the pineapple from the cute girl at the stalls, but is that encouraging child labour, or just providing income to a family?


We passed through increasingly green fields under an increasingly grey sky. The rain laden clouds built up but only ripped open after we were safely in the cafe of our new Sihanoukville guesthouse. It is interesting to see a country from the windows of a bus. The wooden stilt houses and newer brick houses on cement stilts; food stalls; children finishing school and being collected by parents on many varied motorbikes; motorbikes with a double load of pig strapped on the back seats, belly up and definitely dead; flat plains and the start of some low hills that seem large in comparison to the extensive flatness of the country. It is better travelling by land than air.


"Travel is an art, and one must practice it in a relaxed way, with passion, with love. I realised that after years of going about in aeroplanes I had unlearned that art - the only one I care about"
Terzio Terzani in 'A Fortune Teller Told Me'