Back to the Nature

So far, the most important lesson from my traveling in Southeast Asia has been: "Never eat bananas in Europe again". They just wouldn't taste like the delicious little bananas found in here. The other day, when I was motorbiking through Cambodian countryside around Battambang with my local guide Thaa, I got a rather more sophisticated though (following Rousseau's thinking, I guess).

Seeing smiling people everywhere in the small villages, I couldn't help thinking that the Western people's depression or both mental and physical ill-health are to some extent due to our alienation from the nature. Seeing people living by the seasons, according to the natural cycle of life, understanding (but not controlling!) the immediate environment around them felt so right; the way it should be.

Probably this sounds, to say the least, hypocrite, as I am in a very poor and underdeveloped country, but I truly felt a bit jealous seeing these people in villages (lying in hammocks, carrying wood or gathering their skinny cows from the field). Not that I want to be a peasant or anything close to it but I would like to have this tight contact with the nature. I'm fine with settling for a good-sized vegetable garden, a few hens and a goat, but growing herbs on the balcony just isn't enough. (Read from my previous blogging a year ago about the great book: "Animal, vegetable, miracle")

I remember being criticized by two friends of mine about traveling in poor countries, how it is some sort of voyerism and unethical. "You just want to see poor people and think how exotic it is..." This was the line of thinking. Having now travelled in Laos, a country among the 20 poorest countries in the world, and Cambodia, another very poor country where the majority of people still live with less than 2 dollars per day, I still can't agree with them. From the point of view of my studies about human well-being, inequality and poverty, it has been enlightening for me but at the same time I feel that tourism is one of the greatest ways for these countries to escape poverty (rather than illegal logging or growing coffee, tea, tobacco or opium for the rich countries). In fact, local people working with tourists are better off than the average. For example, I gave Thaa, my guide in Battambang, a day's job that he was greatly thankful of as there are not so many opportunities for work in the region.

I waved at around three hundred children during my nine hour boat ride from Siem Reap to Battambang, they were all very excited about seeing our boat and our blond hair and fair skin, and I can't understand how my being in a tourist in Cambodia would somehow be unethical (for god sake, child prostitution and sex tourism are unethical!) as I'm trying my best to be friendly, teach locals some English, buy more expensive fair-trade local products and give people a work. I asked a man in Siem Reap (the city next to Angkor temples that see more than 1 million tourists a year) how the city had changed during the last decade when the tourism started to take off. He replied that the change was immense, but for the better, he had a work now, they could build new roads and schools, he didn't consider the flow of tourists as degrading the quality of life in the city, so the situation was not comparable to Florence for example, the city of Siem Reap wouldn't flourish without the tourists.

Of course, as in Vang Vieng in Laos, tourism can bring some bad side-effects (drugs, stupidity, noise pollution). But for example the case of prostitution, in Cambodia (with hiv) it became a greater problem with the UN coming to the country with its mission after the Khmer Rouge years and the civil war, only later the toursits started "benefiting" from these facilities (child prostitution being a real problem in the country, Cambodia being the new Thailand in this sense). But this deserves another blog entry altogether, coming soon, maybe when I'm back home to reflect upon these issues more carefully. After all, I only have one more week in the continent.