Vietnam compared to Cambodia

After biking in both countries and hearing from our local guides, it’s clear that Vietnamese people look to the future. They seem to have largely recovered from their tragic history. During the last 1080 years, they have been at war for all but 180 years. But it is now 40 years since the “American War” ended, and 64% of the population is under 40 years of age—so they don’t have any experience of war at all. Our guides (Long in Hanoi and Dat in Saigon) each spoke of the current government’s corruption, but they basically think that the government is still doing good things. It would be much worse if they were corrupt and doing nothing. Long also spoke of the period of time when the country was truly communist—with crops taken from farmers and redistributed according to families’ needs. It made people lazy, he says. Since Glasnost (around 1986-90) things changed quite a bit--people were allowed to sell their crops and capitalist approaches began to be tolerated. Cambodia, by contrast, still seems to be reeling from the effects of the Khmer Rouge, who were pushed out of power in 1978 but weren’t completely routed until 1998. Our main guide, Chak, is a lovely man who clearly cares a lot for his community and its culture, but there’s a kind of sadness about him. During the fighting—when he was young—his family took refuge in the Angkor Wat Temples at one point. And memories of friends hurt by landmines are still fresh. The country is much poorer than Vietnam, and it’s obvious—even in the Siem Reap tourist mecca where luxury hotels exist side-by-side with people who are dirt poor. We saw the poverty in the countryside, biking around, and then returned to our ridiculous hotel with its spa and “four hands” massage—which Scott and I enjoyed, though not without a sense of ridiculous privilege.