Catching a Shout in the Street: Kor Keh

The most interesting day of our trip to Cambodia was the one that took us furthest from the paved roads and slick guides that dominate the tourist zones. Our professor arranged for us to take a day trip to Kor Keh to see what site looks like before the tourists arrive. Kor Keh is a region about 2.5 hours from Siem Reap (the city that's the tourist base for Angkor Wat and the other temples), the last hour and a half of which is on dirt roads. There is a large temple complex, which everyone desperately wants to open up to tourists. The only only stopping them right now is the unfinished road. By crossing that, we were able to see parts of Cambodia not many others do.

The ride there gave a fascinating view into the lives of rural Cambodians. Beautiful rice fields and palm trees, bits of forest, and houses raised up the traditional way on 4 to 8 foot stilts. There were a lot of cows, too. Here's a video from the window of the van:

If rice farmers are part of the quintessential Cambodian landscape, so are minefields. Which we did see a lot of. For miles, both sides of the road would be undeveloped forest, with red signs warning in Khmer "Minefield." When the roads are built, the mines are cleared for 10 meters on both sides, and the rest is just left to be cleaned up later. When we got to the Kor Keh area (home to the temples and some villages) there were many signs like this:

The French, the Japanese, and the US sponsored many of the land mine clean ups.

Can you see all the dangers in this mock mine field? (from the Cambodian Landmine Museum)

We visited first the site of a daycare center and a school that were built by an NGO and the government, respectively, for the 150 families living in the surrounding villages. The school teaches students up through fourth grade in three classrooms. But there is only one teacher, and there are so many students that school is only two hours a day.

Part of our professors "program" was to dump 20 Singaporeans college students into a classroom with 60 Cambodian 7 year olds with no exposure to the world outside of their village. "Cultural Disconnect" doesn't even start to cover it.

We (some of us) sang songs like "twinkle twinkle little star" and "chicken dance" to which they reacted with stunned silence or boredom, it was hard to tell which. Our professor, out of pity for the children, ordered the distribution o fhte notebooks and colored pencils we'd brought for "Arts and Crafts" time. Not being much of an artists myself, I made a paper airplane for some little boy. The idea was unanimously accepted by Singaporeans and Cambodians, so soon the classroom was looking like a proper classroom:

Paper airplanes: my contribution to the westernization of rural Cambodia.

After lunch, we visited the temple complex. It was the same thousand year old temple ruin, blah blah. The cool part was the 40 meter high step pyramid with a ladder to the top. Amazing views of (mined so not developed) beautiful Cambodian forest. Spending a week in Yosemite earlier this summer meant the the climb up the ladder didn't even register as a "high" climb, so that was cool.