List of Good Things About Cambodia
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Sure, this place attracts a lot of fukcups, and a lot of expats complain, but if you were to send them back to Sydney, or, God fore sakes, the U.S. or the U.K., or whatever, they would scream and tear out your eyes, and scream blind loyalty to the gods of the Ton le Sap.
So, that said, I hereby start a list of damn good things about Cambodia, and or, living in Cambodia:
1. Very low taxes, for example, I was in another SE Asian country, and bought a bottle of a certain brand of wine, and it was US $42, when I got back here, I chased up the same bottle folks, and it was (and is still), a mere US $12
well we could stop at the cheap booze but how about
2. Cheap dope
3. Elephants in the street
4. Monks at the gate
5. No income tax
6. No Nazi Cops with speed or booze guns ( yet ! )
7. Ability to ride a dirt bike around on the road
8. $15 Jeans and $2 t-shirts
9. Super Cheap rent
10. Beautiful bloody women everywhere. No fatties in our supermarkets !!!!
Nearly all your points mention 'cheap', except 10, did you omit something?
Of course I wouldn't know anything about that.
Bar all the constantly-complaining booze-heads, and weed-choffing paranoid fcku ups who believe that Tuk Tuk drivers are recording expat's conversations in the back of their rattling cages, and then feeding the data to covert CIIIIA offices under the Ton le Sap, and the $40 per month security guards who are collecting information, in order to launch a sophisticated robbery.
I could say that, if we were to focus on the better aspects of life here, we'd conclude that this is (or foreigners anyway) ... the freest country on earth.
I think that is my humble point ... this is not a bad thing at all.
I mean, back in my home city, you can't fart, for filling out some form to get a licence.
The amount of red tape strangles you.
I must go.
Snakehead Pussylips
No McDonalds
Very few obese people
Not much cosmetic surgery
Great hiking, camping, and mountain biking (and you can actually camp in the woods without worrying that someone will come and make you move to a camp site with all the trailers and campers and RV’s and people pretending like they are camping)
Great weather
great location (easy and inexpensive to get to places like Hong Kong, Bangkok, Bali, etc..)
easy to get work visas
a cheap workforce
No Fox News
friendly people
no school shootings
no crazy protesters
inexpensive medical and dental (compared to the USA)
no stupid non-issues saturating the TV like "is it offensive to build a mosque several blocks from ground zero" or (reaching back a bit) "what did Bill do with that cigar?"
nice variety of fruits and veggies that actually have flavor and don't look like they are coated in a layer of wax and plastic and chemicals.
Interesting stuff, in the West, the biggest enemy is living a dull, boring life, and not knowing how disgustingly boring and dull you really are.
Then, by default, you push puppies, and your kids are just as simple, dull and fcking boring as you!!!
If you don't understand, just watch Trainspotting, and for quick summary, it's all stated on the walls of Rising Sun (Trainspotting poster).
I'll take Cambodia.
I must go.
Snakehead Pussylips
@snakehead- wtfs a push puppy?
Push Puppies = having kids
Many of the above but also-lots of smiles everywhere.
Kids saying hello everywere.
Beautiful women-oh sorry we have already covered that one.
Never boring.
1. karaoke
2. beer
3. free as a bird compared to the states
4. hot chicks
5. no more racial profiling. yes i`m an American born Cambodian Ex-pat
6. no taxes
7. free market economy
8. no austerity measures
9. durian
10. no insurance
11. no social security
12. exotic cuisine
13. Buddhist temples on every corner
14. friendly tourists
15. simple life
16. massages
17.
For me there are two things that make Cambodia great. The first is the Cambodians, yes they do many things that annoy the shit out of us, but who cares because 95% of the people in this country are friendly, inviting, inquisitive and generally welcoming to foreigners (long may that last) and I wouldn't swap any of those traits for the ability to follow road rules or a greater respect for the personal space of others!
The second, which is behind many of the items listed above, is the lack of or the unwillingness to enforce laws that serve no other purpose than to protect us from ourselves. These laws are the true erosion of freedom in the West and once again I wouldn't swap those personal freedoms for abstract and far removed freedoms such as a 'perfect' democracy.
Sadly I doubt either of these things will last forever and change is inevitable. But I am sure that Cambodians will drag their feet on both issues long enough to make this one of the last countries to be fully assimilated by the hive mind.
Dude, you deserve a beer.
I sense the lack of rules and enforcement has more to do with discipline, ability and will, than any inherent respect for freedom. I also think foreigners get given a wide berth. Things aren't nearly so free for khmers.
Cambodia would be like singapore, but without the transparency, if they could be really be bothered, and had the capacity.
Don't forget, if you even fart, one-eye will know about it.
I'm not saying things were planned to be this way, but the fact of the matter is that they are this way never the less. The who, why, what & where are irrelevant as are the if's.
I think the locals enjoy exactly the same personal freedoms as the foreigners. If I get my foot stuck in a hole in the pavement and break my ankle, then that's my fault for not looking where I was going, same is true regardless of whether or not I'm a foreigner.
There's no big brother holding a safety net and an ever growing rule book to try and ensure the stagnation or decline of the human gene pool. 
I personally despise the hijacking of the word freedom in recent decades to mean state level democracy. Having your entire life controlled by a set of strict rules designed for no other purpose than to maximise the efficiency of a population to feed the machine that is consumer capitalism. Then to believe that we are free because a couple of times a decade we can vote between two parties whose policies are near identical; it's lunacy to call that freedom.
I think freedom is more like being able to report the local police chief to the press, and that they might actually run the story if there's one there, all without fear of being imprisoned, disappeared, or having an unfortunate fatal accident while tying your shoelaces. And that something might actually be done about whatever the complaint is.
Speaking truth to power and all that.
I think we get a much better deal than locals in that regard.
Yes freedom from petty bureaucracy is refreshing, but it won't last, as you say. That's what happens when everyone is really free. They start making up laws to pretect their own freedoms and preferences from each other.
I don't want to put a negative slant on this as I live in this country by choice and on balance I prefer it to living in the west. However there are some statements which are wrong:
The locals enjoy the same freedom as foreigners. Really? Land evictions anyone? Who heard of barangs being forced from their apartments/homes en masse as has taken place by the lakeside?
Lack of petty bureaucracy - perhaps you haven't had to deal with the local authorities, hospital, police etc otherwise you wouldn't say that.
Friendly tourists? When they're here for a couple of days maybe. After a week or so of getting hounded on the riverfront by tuk tuk drivers, book sellers, shoe shines, beggars (handicapped or otherwise) I suspect they're not going to be so friendly.
There are good things here. Sure.
The lack of accountability and laissez faire attitude of the authorities, (any action taken after the water festival tragedy?), sticks in your craw after a while.
I think Otres beach in Sihanoukville was a pretty good exampl of a mass eviction of foreigners. I also believe several of the businesses on the lakeside were owned by foreigners, were they given special treatment? No, they were kicked out just like everyone else.
Unfortunately, development isn't pretty and it never will be, anyone who truly believes the path to rapid development is democracy, human rights and transparency is sadly misinformed, those things come post modernisation not before and I challenge anyone to name a country that came up truly following those principles.......?
Naming the countries who didn't is easy, because it's all of them. Just a quick look at the big success stories of the last 50 years tells you which path to development works - South Korea/Taiwan/Singapore.
Cambodia is walking the well traveled fast track and when your GDP graph looks like this, it's going to be impossible to sell an alternate route:
Reading that post back I can see how some could take it the wrong way. I don't think that this path to development is a good thing, but with the lack of a credible and *proven* alternative I don't see what the point is in criticising it?
Like death and taxes it's just one of those things you have to live with. For foreigners whose own countries got rich from plundering their own natural and human resources before moving on to those of other countries to come here and suggest a different path is nothing short of epic hypocrisy.
Thank you for those submitting a bit of persective on life in Cambodia, for Cambodians
Otres Beach wasn't a mass eviction.
A few barowners, who knew that they weren't safe in terms of security/leases, being moved out hardly compares to over a thousand families being thrown out of homes, some of which they'd lived in for decades.
The lakeside is not about development. There's ample land on the outskirts of town that could be developed. The filling in of the lake is about a rapacious elite doing whatever it likes in pursuit of profit. Regardless of human rights. To suggest that nothing should be done about it or that it shouldn't even be criticized is nothing short of epic stupidity.
What it's 'about' is neither here nor there. It 'is' development, it was a lake, a backpacker ghetto, an informal dragorn farm and a slum. It will be developed into a new mixed urban development.
Regardless of our feelings about the fairness of it, I don't think any of can argue that it's former state added more to the economy than the new state upon completion or construction.
Yes it's unfair, yes the richest will become richer, yes the poorest will get ripped off but as I said before, this is what development looks like, it's what it looks like here, it's what it looks like in the rest of the developing world and it's exactly what it looked like in the developed world whilst it was developing.
And if you think this country has unfair wealth distribution, it's got nothing on the west. In the U.S for example the top 400 control the same wealth as the bottom 150 million!!
As I already said, until someone proves a better model, this is what development will continue to look like. Sadly the fact of the matter is that history shows the more cut throat the approach, the quicker that development happens South Korea and now China being cases in point.
All other poverty alleviation methods merely treat the symptoms not the route cause. For Cambodia to end extreme poverty and improve the living conditions of its population, the only answer is increased productivity and rapid economic growth. Here that means construction, manufacturing, industrial farming and to a lesser extent tourism.
The lakeside is not that different from similar land reclamation and urban renewal projects in the west where people are kicked out of their houses arbitrarily and given fixed, and often under market, prices for their troubles.
However the local authorities and the developer really made a hash of it and could have taken a different route and provided a fairer offer for the people living by the lake with some more money & better located land swaps that would have satisfied a large majority of people.
It wouldn't have cost that much more and would have saved everybody a lot of time, money and reputation but Cambodians have a way of being stubborn which I have never seen as such a national trait in any other country I have been to.
A little bit of pragmatism by the powers that be could have gone a long way to clearing up this mess. But nobody wants to lose face by admitting they screwed things up by being nasty.