Annual figures are that more than 1 million people visit Siem Seap, so as to see the amazing Angkor Wat Temples. That’s a lotta bods, I think to myself, again. Spread out unevenly across 12 months of low and high season, surely that’s still a lot of people. I look in wonder at empty streets and cafe. I never guessed low season would be so quiet.I never guessed exactly how low a ‘global financial crisis’ can get. I suspect I am viewing the evidence of that crisis? A total of 50 people at most in ‘Pub St’, usually the busiest part of an incredibly busy tourist town. Its all too weird to grasp from Phnom Penh where I live in a very Khmer neighbourhood. The basic market on the street below my apartment, in Phnom Penh, through to the fancy mall two blocks away, are always busy to my eyes. ‘Country cousin’ that I am, at times, coming from a remote province I forget that Phnom Penh also is in low season. The locals’ food market not likely to alter but of course other tourist areas in the city will get busier once into high season. Hard to imagine the city even busier? Which is why I know I am bit of a ‘country cousin’ in the ‘big smoke’, when assessing what is busy. Come September as high season begins its tourists will fill certain areas of the city and then I will remember that I moved to the city in the off season.
Back to Siem Reap, what I am seeing is the low season plus something else. I knew and lived in Siem Reap in the high season back in 2005/06. I can’t believe that this stillness and lack of people is only due to low season.
Speaking to the long-time staff and owner of the café where I am the sole diner, they assure me they have never ever seen this lowest ‘low season’. Maybe there is no ‘high season’ in September they query rhetorically.
Will I see an impact of this financial crisis once I visit Australia in a few months? I always was aware of the depth of people’s impossibility to understand the poverty, lawlessness and optimism of Cambodia’s economics; I myself not sure I know the depth of these contradictions. Now I realise being based in a developing country, I not understand much more than the superficial, of this global crisis. Cambodia’s tourism industry is its biggest industry and the garment factory is the second. The garment factory has lost a third of all contracts so there are many unemployed. Now I see for myself, the almost complete shut down of tourism. How many people in Cambodia are currently impacted by the global crisis?
