Small gecko, big dragon

This is a report from Cambodia, a country where geckos seem to be crawling up every wall, and their call can be heard during every evening. It begins with a winding sound, as if our funny reptile of choice is charging up, followed by the discharge, where it screams its name: krrrrrrrr, krrrrrrr, geck-ow, geck-ow! Small, feeble, and eating its way through life with such arthropods as seem to cross its path (or rather, wall), the gecko could well stand symbol for the average inhabitant of this country.

However, every so often, the ways in which this society works permit one out of thousands of geckos to grow into something more noteworthy: a dragon. These "ways in which this society works" are complex. They show similarities with China, because Cambodia is part of the Sinosphere: business is run by families, not by people. Families that form networks. Networks that distribute the wealth of the country. Most of the geckos are working on the fringe of these networks and get a penny or two for their jobs. However, the vast majority of the wealth is reserved for the dragons, a disproportionally very small part of society. In this, Cambodia is not different from China or Thailand. Unlike Thailand, there are also similarities with post-communistic societies in Eastern Europe or Central Asia. In both cases, the collapse of communism seems to have caused an absence of law. Or, when there are laws, they can be broken easily if one has the resources to bribe corrupt officials. That means that, if one has the resources of a dragon, one has power to do anything.

(Here I have to admit that I consider myself in some things to be a Marxist in my thinking - like my father. What I call geckos and dragons would be the 'periphery of the periphery' and the 'core of the periphery' in the World-Systems Theory and Dependency Theory of Marxist sociologists like Immanuel Wallerstein.)

A sad example of the power of the dragon are the national parks I found in the south of the country. Cambodia was until recently an ecologist's dream. Logging companies destroyed most of the primeval forests of Vietnam and Thailand during the second part of the 20th century. In Cambodia though, the guerilla war of the Khmer Rouge made such commercial activities unsafe. As a result Cambodia had an amazing ecological array of tropical mangrove and monsoon forests along its coast, and subtropical and temperate rainforests on the slopes of the Cardamom Hills in the inland, right until the 90s. Rare ecosystems that had been destroyed elsewhere still existed in Cambodia. Unfortunately, they will not last.

I spent a week in the small town of Kampot. This former fishermen's settlement will not remain a sleepy backwater: it is central to the government's plans of economic development. An oil terminal is being built, and a neat new highway connects Kampot with the capital, Phnom Penh. One of the things I wanted to do is visit the nearby Bokor National Park. I tried to arrange a guided trek through the jungle with different tour operators, but none could organize it. As always in southern Asia, they would not tell me why not. Maybe because discussing refusal is a way of loosing face - at least that is my best guess. Only after asking on for a couple of days did I discover why visits to the national park on foot have become impossible. Apparently the park has been bought by businessman Sokha, CEO of Sokha Group and one of only two people in Cambodia who has the privilege of a private helicopter (the other is the prime minister, in power for almost 30 years, the man who sold the park).

What was possible though, was a tour with a car into the national park, with a set number of stops at major 'attractions'. These included Sokha Group's information centre, a concrete structure halfway up the mountain, where a maquette shows you the dragon's plans to make the entire park into a giant resort filled with bungalows (no kidding - not a square acre will be left undeveloped); a waterfall where, in the dry season, an empty stream bed is made into a busy picknick spot by weekend tourists from Phnom Penh; and a stop at the mountain top, where Sokha is constructing two giant casinos and a number of ten-storied five star hotels. This is unfortunately no exception. A similar fate has befallen Botum Sakor national park further west, where Sokha's activities are joined by a competing project run by a Chinese businessman.


This blog report is about the ethics of travelling. It is a direct response to comments you made about my last blog (Siem Reap off). Although most of the messages I received have always been positive, this report got one particularly negative reaction too. I was perceived to be arrogant, to feel myself superior to poor locals, who try to earn a little money off someone who makes journeys they can themselves never dream of. I think such critique deserves a reply, or rather, a repudiation, because it touches something essential. Essential to travelling, essential to life and especially essential to the ethics of a modern globalized world.

First of all, my blog is not intended to criticise or make fun of people. Basically I write about what I see and do in the places I visit. I remain as objective as possible - this often has the effect of irony, perhaps because my observations deal with people and their behaviour. Sometimes I also tell you the feelings these things give me. Excuse me, but I do in some situations develop feelings yes. Last time I wrote how the bus driver who tried to make people pay $20 extra made me feel disgust. I think that was a totally normal emotion to feel in reaction to a morally unsound action. 'But', you may say, 'this is not Europe. The man has to earn money to support his family.' I have four points in reply to that.

(1) This occurred in Thailand, a country with a GDP per capita similar to, say, Spain. Would you try to excuse immoral behaviour on financial grounds if it occurred in Spain? I expect you would not. But let's assume it would have happened somewhere in the Third World, I would still feel disgust...

(2) ...because, just because somebody is poor, does that mean that lying and cheating is suddenly OK? I think not...

(3) ...and because, there is no connection between poverty and bad morals. The one is just no valid excuse for the other. For example read Theodore Dalrymple's excellent essay "What is Poverty?" - it argues that bad morals are caused by abundance, not by poverty. Actually, if you had been reading my blog consistently, you would find that I have reflected on this theme myself a couple of times. Some of the most wonderful people I met were some of the poorest. Some of the worst people in this world are among its richest. Like that bus driver (he has a good job), or to take the extreme, like mr. Sokha, who destroys the natural heritage of an entire country with the help of corrupt political friends. Often, the more people have, the less moral their behaviour. Which leads me to my third and most important point:...

(4) ...the gecko and the dragon. And the way the network works. Any money put into the network will largely go to the dragons, leaving only crumbles for the geckos. Yes, I do pity the poor. But I know from experience that they have to give away most of their revenue. The tucktuck driver needs to pay the tucktuck gang boss. The bus driver has to pay the bus company. The beggar will have to pay the local gangs who control the street and determine who begs where. All of them have to bribe the corrupt police to remain in business. The money you give to a local NGO will largely disappear into the pockets of its board members. Yes, people who run NGO's drive BMW's. Actually there are more BMW's in Phnom Penh than in most European capitals.


As a traveller in developing countries, poverty can be one of the most touching and shocking ethical questions you encounter. Poverty is an economic phenomenon though. It is caused by inadequate government, corruption, lack of education and overpopulation due to absence of family planning. All of these factors are the responsibility of the society at large. As a visitor, an outsider, you have little influence over it, let alone guilt in it. If the question of moral guilt is raised, I would rather accuse a dragon than a foreign visitor who happens to have more money, because his (m/f) society is better organized, or has more equal ways to distribute wealth.

However, if a certain thing has a certain price, the foreign visitor usually pays a little more than the locals do. I have no problem with that. I see it as a way of helping the many nice and honest people I meet on my way. But when somebody tries to trick me, I do resist. And I see no reason to feed the dragon more than necessary, even through its gecko pawns.

In fact I think the visitor is less guilty than his compatriots back in Europe or the US. You guys back there profit from the cheap products the Third World makes, but your money goes largely to the dragons. A dragon ensures that he pays only the bare minimum to the geckos slaving in his factories. On the other hand, as a visitor I have the chance to eliminate the money flow to a couple of dragons by purchasing directly from the locals, in the local market, from local tailors.

It is easy to criticise a visitor like me for wanting to pay only little more than the local price, but do not forget you pay even less when you purchase your next pair of shoes, T-shirt, or Tupperware. As a result of globalization, you are much tighter connected to the geckos than you realise. I think you owe me an apology.



*Theodore Dalrymple (1999). "What is Poverty". In: City Journal (http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_2_oh_to_be.html)