Bayon & Tonle Sap lake

Busy day today, off with Mr Hen to Bayon another temple, but another style of architecture again. This one has huge stone faces on every tower and is smaller than the first two temples we saw. A bit precarious to wander round but we had a good look and then headed back to the hotel to get ready for our trip to Tonle Sap lake.
My sister had organised this one, a trip to the floating village of Chong Kneas, a trip on a boat to watch the sunset over Tonle Sap lake, then dinner on a larger boat looking over the lake.
We got collected from the hotel and went on a mini bus with 4 others, driving through the residential parts of Siem Reap where we first got to see exactly how the Khmer people live and how little they have. We arrived at Chong Kneas and visited an environmental centre where we learned about the lake and the people that live on it. Chong Kneas is an amazing collection of floating buildings, mainly made up of houses, but there are also floating schools, shops, a petrol station, a basketball court and 3 karaoke bars! The village moves with the rise and fall of the lake depending on the seasons. Now is wet season so the village is nearer to Siem Reap and this means that the children can go to school in town and benefit from a better education than they can have in the dry season where they attend the floating school.
It's a really fascinating way to live though we never did work out how the people know where the petrol station and shops are when they move!

We moved on to the wee boat that would take us the rest of our trip. Sis managed to bang her head and cut it getting on the boat then, as she sat down she ripped a huge hole in her top on the boat seat - not the best of starts!
The group stopped at a floating souvenir shop, but I was saddened to see a pit of crocodiles here who were being bred for their skins.
Back on the lake we headed out to watch the sunset. The lake at this time of year can be nearly 100 miles wide and the water is very deep. The 'bush' you can see in the pic above is actually a tree!

It wasn't the clearest night for the sunset, but it was still beautiful and peaceful on the lake.
Back at the boat for dinner we sat with Fran and Vicky two women from Australia who had been volunteering at a centre for street children. The Cambodia project is aimed kids who would normally be selling sovenirs at the temples. The parents of these children have to sign an agreement that they will not send their children to work. In return the children are allowed to attend the centre where they get washed and fed, their clothes are cleaned and they receive an education. It's an invaluable project and will help these children to have an opportunity to be educated but most of all allows them to be children, to learn, play and just act their age instead of having to work the temples.

Fran and Vicky had been very touched by their time at the centre and had done some amazing work. They'd also donated a television and school uniforms for the children. Speaking to them really made me see what a mixed up country Cambodia is.
It seems so very wrong that there is such a wide gap between the Cambodia that tourists see and the reality of a country still trying to recover from a horrific dictatorship that wiped out a whole generation of Cambodian people. Siem Reap in particular has a strip of international standard 5 star+ hotels for tourists, interspersed with wooden huts, shacks and rickety old buildings, some with no running water and electricity only being supplied by unreliable generators.
The Cambodian government tells the world that these hotels are bringing prosperity to Cambodia and helping it to establish a sound economy, but I just don't think these hotels are doing much to help at all other than compound to the Cambodian people how little they have. Yes, the hotels provide jobs, but only to the select few who are deemed to be of a good enough class and with enough language skill. This means that the majority of the Khmer people are ruled out of ever working in these hotels and instead have to rely on finding other ways to earn money - tuk tuk drivers are clambering for fares, children and adults at temples are barging each other out of the way to make sales. It just all seems very wrong and while I started this trip thinking that visiting Cambodia would go a wee way to contribute to the economy, I now see that the real people who need this money never get to see any benefit at all.
It's been a very thought provoking holiday and has left me feeling confused as to whether I should ever have visited at all. Maybe I'm looking too deeply at things but I just feel there must be a better way to solve the country's economic problems than to throw up yet another OTT hotel or shopping mall.