Phnom Penh - Siem Reap trip

Today we were traveling to Siem Reap.

I was lucky to sit in the front with the driver what gave me the opportunity to see everything and learn a lot of things about Cambodia. Our driver is the owner of the hotel of Siem Reap where we are staying. Mr. Khim Chamroeun, proprietor, Angkor Spirit Palace Hotel is a really great host for us and is showing us all the Cambodian traditional places, foods and habits.

 So we took the road early in the morning prepared for 6 hours of trip for only 340 km!! I will show some videos where you will understand why!!

Looking through the window we could show Cambodia in pure style the rural areas where people live and work in the farms cultivating mostly rice and selling several things in the sides of the road like for example crickets or fried tarantulas!!!

In our first stop we tried the crickets and I have to say they are quite good. It is not something I will eat everyday but it tastes good. Also we use the opportunity to buy some fried banana which is like our normal chips and it is really good and some fruits like mango that is awesome!

About half way of the trip we stopped for our first Community Services Activity. We visited the Santuk Silk Farm in Kampong Thom province.

Here a ex-soldier from Vietnam, Bud Gibbons, has build up a silk farm giving work to many Cambodians in the rural area. A really nice explanation of the process and a good meal prepared by his Cambodian wife where a excellent battery charging for continuing the trip. Bud came back to Cambodia after the war to help mainly disable people affected by the landmines. He mentioned that they trained people how to fix motorbikes. But it seems that everybody in a town who has a Moto will fix his own Moto if there is a minor problem. If there is a bigger problem they will trust in the person of the town with more experience fixing this kind of issues so it was not a good solution.

They tried several things until they found the Silk farm where as he was mentioning quite right in my opinion the development comes in. When an NGO invests in a rural area they invest money and create normally a good solution until the money doesn’t come any more. Then the important thing to continue is for local people to be able to generate money by themselves because if they are based on the NGO when the NGO leaves no project will survive.

For this reason many woman in the Silk farm where making silk scarf and we could see the laborious work and patient it takes to make one. We had the opportunity to buy some scarf and after we bought them and following a request from Bud we went to the girls as they have a competition between them about who sells more!!  They can see and recognize which were made by them and we took a picture with them! In Europe it is quite difficult if not impossible to get a photo with the actual creator of something nowadays!!