Packing for Cambodia

Cambodia is going to be like no vacation I’ve ever been on. Never have I flown so far with so little: One small carry-on. But I will have a laptop–highly unusual. No dance shoe bag on this vacation; very little sight-seeing and night life accoutrements. Nothing to keep warm – we'll be in 100-degree heat.

Surprisingly, I didn't need any shots – not even a malaria shot. I'm packing only the essentials–only those things I can take onboard, and some of which I'll be wearing:

Sweatband, sink & outlet plugs, etc.

• A sink plug (Can be a rarity in a Cambodian hotel).
• Evacuation insurance (in case I need hospitalization). This is provided by my time-share company even though I’m not on a time share trip, and it covers my traveling companion as well.
• UV-proof safari pants and shirts – 1 pair worn, 1 pair packed, and a safari cap.
• 2-oz jar of sun block
• Sweat bands
• 1/2-oz bottle hand sanitizer
• Diarrhea meds 
• Pepto-Bismol caplets.
• Two pair of Ex Officio undies (“17 countries, 6 weeks, one pair of undershorts”) and one Ex Officio T-shirt.  These ultra-light duds supposedly repel insects for up to 70 washings, control odor-causing bacteria, and dry in a couple hours – just what you want, when you find out you needed the diarrhea meds.
• Compression socks for the 20-hour flight.
• A fly fisherman’s vest that keeps all the little things you’re trying to keep track of right in a whole bunch of pockets. A fanny pack to complement the fashion statement.
• A “sweatkerchief” full of little beads that swell up when you soak it in water and then slowly evaporate, cooling you down.
• My U-shaped airline pillow to prop up my head in those really roomy seats we all know about.
• A Rick Steves clothesline–it's woven elastic and you hang your clothes by pinching them between the weaves.
• A $1 Rick Steves converter that connects your U.S. electrical plug to a Cambodian electrical outlet.
• A Rick Steves sweat-proof money belt that keeps your passport and greenbacks dry in that damnable heat. It hangs inside your pants from loops that your trouser belt goes through.
• A Rick Steves hemp backpack (Can I smoke it when I get homesick for Seattle?).
• A Rick Steves over-shoulder travel pouch which is absolutely the right size for my tablet/camera.
• A shaving brush (no aerosol can).
• First aid kit, Q-tips, extra bandages and tweezers.
• Zip-lock plastic bags.
• Spare eyeglasses.
• One mindless book (Tom Clansey’s “The Teeth of the Tiger.”)
• Twist ties, envelopes, business cards (Suggested by Lonely Planet), hearing aid kit.
• Three cameras: a Flip video camera (slightly larger than a cigarette pack that downloads files directly into my laptop); Canon Power Shot 35mm compact camera with image stabilization and zoom lens; droid tablet. In addition, a voice recorder, battery chargers, cables, etc.
• My Dell Laptop and three extra batteries so it won’t die on a hot day in the field. If the computer goes for a swim in the Tonle Sap river, it will be replaced due to the $50 insurance policy. (Text files will be safely floating in the cloud, uploaded daily to my Google drive and floating right next to a photo of my birth certificate and passport, retrieveable at any Internet connection. Cost of the off-lease computer: $220 via Tigerdirect.com
• Oberto Beef Jerkey and four Butterfinger bars for those between-meal times when I get cranky on the plane. The Butterfingers must be consumed before Cambodia, because they will melt in the heat.

There are a few other items I’m taking along, but this covers the bulk of them. There's space to spare in the carry-on.

Love,

Robert

Author’s note: This blog is produced independently of Sustainable Communities International. Observations, opinions, errors and omissions are solely the responsibility of the writer.

A Thumbnail History of Cambodia

In preparing for my trip to the fishing villages of Cambodia, I've tried to get a better handle on the country's history and current situation. It's turned out to be a long and complex history with some surprises. Maybe some of what follows will be new to you as well. This will be the barest of bare bones summaries, relying on Wikipedia, Lonely Planet’s Cambodia guide, and the U.S. State Department’s Web site. The tighter the summary, the fewer the details and the greater the likelihood of omitted nuances, and important qualifications. But here goes:

Click for Large Scale Map

Cambodia, is situated somewhat like a dinner plate set between two hungry neighbors--Thailand and Vietnam. Ninety percent of its nearly 15 million people are Khmer. The fact one of its neighbors didn’t just absorb Cambodia and its Khmer people is partly due to French Colonialism.

At  one time Cambodia constituted the largest empire in Southeast Asia, including within its borders what is now Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City).

The history of the Khmer people goes back at least two thousand years. In the 1st Century A.D. Khmer people had settlements along the coast that is now Southern Vietnam. Archeologists have discovered both Persian pottery and Roman coins there. The settlements lay along the sea trading route between India and China, and Indian culture flowed through key ports into Cambodia’s interior, bringing concepts of the caste system, architecture and Buddhism. For the next several centuries Cambodia likely constituted many small states characterized by strategic intermarriages and frequent wars. 

By the Sixth Century the importance of ports declined and the population concentrated along the Mekong and Tonlé Sap rivers. They engaged in wet rice farming, utilizing land that became mineral-rich by Mekong silt deposits—the same deposits which make the Tonlé Sap lake and river such a rich fishery. The U.S. State department reports that about 75 percent of the country lies at elevations of less than 100 meters above sea level, with its most salient topographical feature being the plain formed by inundations of Tonlé Sap. 

The highest elevations lie in the Cardamom Mountains, along the Southwest coast of the country, which reach 1,700 or 1,800 meters high, depending on whether you are using State Department or Wikipedia figures. 

Right up to the 20^th Century, Kings were seen at least as semi-divine, and in 802 Cambodia was unified under its first god-king, Jayavarman II. (See Wikipedia: Khmer Empire) This marked the emergence of the Angkor Empire, whose legacy includes the magnificent temple, Angkor Wat, begun in 1112 as the funery temple for Suryavarman II. During this Ankor period major public works were undertaken, including massive irrigation projects and road and temple construction. Grand projects such as these took their toll on the royal coffers, the population, and on natural resources, such as sandstone—which was all but used up. 

About this time, the Thais were migrating southward to escape pressure from Kublai Kahn's Mongol Hordes, and making incursions into Cambodia. Other factors were taking a toll – deforestation, which may have resulted in siltation of the irrigation system; drought, and conflict among religious factions. By the 1600s the empire was handicapped by a series of weak kings and dissent within the royal family, leading to reliance on support and protection by either the Thais or the Vietnamese. 

Lonely Planet suggests the main factor keeping Cambodia from disappearing entirely was that Thailand and Vietnam were distracted by other problems. In 1864 the French intimidated Cambodian King Norodom into signing a treaty of protection, which generally maintained the integrity of Cambodia’s territory. The French gradually became more involved in Cambodia's internal affairs, and remained, well into World War II, even during part of the Japanese occupation. When Cambodia gained her independence, the French endeavored to hang on to their Laotian and Vietnamese colonies, and the resulting French-Indochina war led to  the defeat of the French, and the involvement of the United States. 

Subsequent years were characterized by the age-old dance of shifting alliances, both within Cambodia and between Cambodia, her neighbors and the United States and China. For example, the Vietnamese, who attracted carpet bombing raids by using Cambodia as a sanctuary from the United States, were later seen as liberators for waging war on the Khmer Rouge, resulting in the halt of the Khmer Rouge genocide.  The United States dropped a half million tons of bombs on Cambodia, forcing Cambodians to flee the countryside for the cities and refugee camps prior to the Khmer Rouge takeover. A full generation after the Vietnam War wound down, millions of unexploded land mines planted by the Vietnamese remain. 

With its long history of shifting alliances, and due to the exhaustion of war and genocide, Cambodia faces enormous challenges. What was once the dominant Southeast Empire of splendor has–despite impressive natural resources—become one of Asia’s poorest countries.

It is the poverty that presents the greatest challenge for maintaining Cambodia’s strategic protein source – the Tonlé Sap fishery—and which raises the question: can a strategy be created that deals with the poverty?

That’s what my traveling companion, Jay Hastings, has been trying to understand the past four years as he consults with his Cambodian government colleagues, the fishing communities, and other experienced non-governmental organizations (NGOs). 

Jay Hastings

He and his government colleagues have been working on a strategy that seeks to address poverty from the bottom up by investing much needed capital into community savings groups by means of no-interest loans. A major purpose of this trip is to see how that strategy is working.  More on that in future blogs.

Author’s note: This blog is produced independently of Sustainable Communities International. Observations, opinions, errors and omissions are solely the responsibility of the writer.

Why Here?

It's a lake. It can be a really big lake.

However by American Standards, it's not much. Lake Erie, the smallest of the American Great Lakes, is 25,700 square kilometers. the Tonlé Sap lake, in the dry season, has a surface area barely one-tenth that large and it's only a meter deep. More of a pond than a lake. That NASA satellite image on the right suggests this is not a destination location for vacationers.

But Tonlé Sap is no ordinary lake/river system. Depending on the source, the very name means Great Lake or Large Fresh Water River. And when the monsoons come, things happen.

During the rainy season, the nearby Mekong River is at full flood, and the Tonlé Sap river that drains the lake reverses its direction, raising the level of the lake to nine meters. The lake's volume increases 50-fold.  Its surface area becomes six times larger or more -- 16,000 sq km (the State Department says 24,605 sq. km.)   As it swells, the Tonlé Sap lake becomes the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia. When the river reverses direction, it brings with it abundant alluvial nutrients, which makes Tonlé Sap  the strategic protein resource for the people of Cambodia.


The Tonlé Sap system is an ecological hot spot designated as a UNESCO biosphere in 1997. Among its riches are 149 species of fish, nearly extinct Siamese Crocodiles and the world's largest population of freshwater snakes.  Also present, in diminishing numbers, is the Mekong giant catfish, the largest freshwater fish in the world. It can reach 10 feet in length, and weigh more than 500 pounds. And for this river system, it is the canary in the coal mine. According to Wikipedia, it is "especially vulnerable to chemical changes, which is beneficial in alerting authorities of trouble in the river ecosystem." The resource is threatened by overfishing and ecological degradation, and that can spell problems for Cambodians who depend on Tonlé Sap for their livelihood and for food.


In March, I am visiting the Tonlé Sap River with my childhood friend, Jay Hastings. I have joined his effort to help protect that resource in a very small way. 

That's what this blog is about. If you want to follow it, you don't have to do anything. I think I'll be able to let you know every time there's a new posting. There's probably going to be plenty of Internet linkups in Phnom Penh.

If you don't want to follow it, just let me know, that's perfectly understandable. Your life is busy and you get more e-mails than you want.

But if you're curious to see how the other half lives, come along with us as we prepare for the trip and then take that 20-hour flight to a part of the world most of us have never seen.

I'll be telling a small part of the story of a people who are still recovering from one of the worst genocides in a century -- how they live, and what some of them are doing to make their lives better.

It's going to be hot -- about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but you won't be the ones sweating. Thank your lucky stars for that.

If someone has forwarded this to you and you would like to be added to the mailing list, let me know by e-mailing me at dancingpotter@gmail.com.

Love,

Robert