I can't remember the last time I saw so many tourists (besides the dodgy ones). Maybe it's because Cambodia has the Angkor historical park and even turned their sites of horror into tourist attractions. But there're crowds of them at any one attraction on any one day, and a good percentage of them seem to hail from Europe.
But I'm also a tourist, so let's start with me!
I'm the road menace. I rent a bicycle and cycle with all the other traffic. Not really the best way to travel considering the sheer number of potholes and motorcyclists raising clouds of dust on the sandy road. On one occasion, I was wearing a baseball cap, which was a bad move. Sure enough, it flew off my head just as I got over the crest of a hill. The brakes come on as a reflex action. The groovy combination of brakes, downhill slope and sand on the road accumulated into a skid. I jump off the bike as it goes crashing down, dumping everything in the basket onto the road with a clatter. I landed on my feet with nary a scratch! Instead of applause, my great escape incites laughter from watching locals in a nearby shop. They must sorely lack entertainment.
We were looking for hilltop restos Chez Claude on one of these bicycle trips, when we ran into an Englishwoman. Half of what I assume to be a fairly well-to-do middle-age couple, since we ran into them while trying to ask for directions at a high-end seaside resort that's got its own private stretch of beach and beautiful chalets over the water.
She hailed me as I rode past, wanting to know where I got the bike. So insistent was she on getting similar bikes that she got the address of the shop off us, even though it was all the way in town. The concierge was trying hard to meet her needs with various bikes, but she rejected them, as her husband looked on with a pained expression. Only bikes like ours will do! Ouch, customer service is hard!
You know what else is apparently hard? Trying to get a photograph at attractions overrun by tourists. If you are sitting in a large tree, one of those that have invaded one of the Angkor temples, just minding your own business, a group of tourists, mostly large middle-aged Caucasian women, will appear on the other side of the pond. What they're going to do is they are going to start shouting across the pond at you. They holler at you to remove yourself because they want to take a picture and you're in the shot. Their Cambodian tour guide joins in. And when you get off the tree and out of their picture, they applaud, making you wish you'd stayed where you were and gave them a finger instead.
There's another breed of photographer - the lone wolf. We caught one lurking around the countryside - or rather, he caught us as we rolled past on our remork moto - he was huffing and puffing away on a bicycle. Our driver regarded him and his straw hat with distaste and distrust - apparently they'd already met the day before, at the same pepper farm. He was apparently flirting with the two Australian girls who'd hired our driver. It might be your lucky day if you actually catch him in the act of photography.
If your luck doesn't hold up, you're bound to run in the more evolved specimen of the photographer - the videographer. He is all geared up - right up to the furry muffler for his microphone. He videos the Killing Fields, with its scraps of tattered clothing in the dirt that used to belong to people who died in mass graves. He videos the skulls all stacked up in transparent plastic boxes for the world to see, the exhumed graves now just holes in the ground, the signs instructing people not to walk across the grave, the rows and rows of pictures of those murdered by the Khmer Rouge. God help you if you stand in front of him.
One might think there's an escape from all this in the quiet of a spa. That works until a clueless French couple arrives and starts talking loudly to each other through the walls after being placed in separate rooms. I suppose it's easy not to realise that there're other people in the neighbouring rooms too. But that bit of entertainment quickly ends when the spa staff run to shush them. And then the tinkling zen music reigns again.
