My favorite thing was the people...

I've never really understood this when I hear other travellers talk about their travels. I've been to places I really liked the people, but compared to the food, the scenery or the activities, my selfish side has always opted for the the later. Cambodia was the probably the first time I've gone anywhere that I was more interested in interacting with the locals than I was seeing the sights.

First off when you come to Cambodia, make sure you bring a lot of $1 bills. The strip clubs are fabulous! Seriously though, the primary currency here is the American dollar. When you are cruising around the temples the children come out of the woodwork to sell you things and invariably everything costs around $1. Seeing these five year olds running around in the dirt with no shoes on with big smiles on their faces and it's impossible not to want to buy whatever they are selling. However after you've got your pockets stuffed with bottles of water, little Buddah statues, postcards, etc. you can only handle so much of the same stuff.

So on day two of temple crusing, Pui and I switched tactics. We went to the market early in the morning and loaded up on bags of apples. Whenever someone would come up to you to sell you something you just smile and hand them an apple. If they keep trying to sell you something (which is second nature), you just give them another apple. Usually after the second apple, they are smiling and talking about something else entirely. Of course, after the word gets out that there is somebody handing out free apples, you've got 10 kids getting queued up. No matter what, we were continually running out of fruit. I must say though at the end of the first few days of our apple giving NGO, it felt like we could cure the injustices that have befallen Cambodia with a car full of apples.

Then came the last day of the trip. Pui and I had already gone through all of the temples, seen all the local sites and had an entire day to kill. We both agreed that our favortie thing so far had been interacting with the kids in the temples and why not take our last day and buy all the fruit we could carry (roughly $100) and visit as many places as we could to hand it out. The basic plan was to visit the smaller temples first and then hit up the mother of all temples, 'Angkor Wat'. The morning went swimingly. We saw a lot of the same faces we had seen in the previous week and everyone was incredibly friendly and grateful.

When we got to Angkor Wat though, it was a different story. Our car was immediately surrounded by 20 kids trying to sell us things. When we got out of the car with fruit it turned into utter chaos, and not in a good way. Using our previous tacticts of just handing out one apple per person didn't work here at all. These were much more seasoned street urchins, many of whom were used to taking advantage of genorosity at the detrement to others. When it became obvious that some kids were ending up with 20 apples and others with none, we trusted some of the friendlier kids to hand them out (as obviously we were ill prepared to deal with the intracies of aid distribution on a wider scale). Surely they would be more fair with each other. Not even close! The second I would turn my back to get another bag out of the car, the kid in charge of distribution would bolt over to their house, hide the entire distribution bag and then get back in another line, begging for apples. They would stealthly switch between Pui and myself. We now had roughly 50 kids surrounding us with no way to remember who got what. So then I get the bright idea of starting a line. How could that go wrong? I get the kids in a line and then have Pui keep track of who has gone through the line. After about 2 minutes of this, you had the 'trickier' kids running in the opposite direction of the line, circling around and then cutting in front of the others. Then there was the great 'baby scam'. You would have some guy come up with a baby. Of course you're going to give a baby an apple before anyone else. However 30 seconds later I would see someone new with a baby. Six babies later it dawned on us that it was the same baby getting passed around to different people. I'm pretty sure that baby never saw any of those apples.

Seeing that I've been quoted as saying "I've been quoted as saying "I absolutely loathe misbehaved children. I simply dislike well behaved ones.", it's interesting that I loved hanging out with these kids so much. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to swing it yet, but I would like to get a non-profit going that is pretty much as simple as me collecting around $1000 and going to Camodia once a year for my visa run to buy a truckload of fruit for these kids. (also make sure you check out my new cambodian photos to the right)