Every now and then it would hit me. “Holy cats, we’re building a school!” I’d email Beth and Debbie and Michelle (the Passports with Purpose cofounders) and they’d say, in reply, something like, “OH MY GOD, I KNOW! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?”

Sometime this summer, the Passports school opens in Preah Vihear, Cambodia. I hope that we can be there to see the opening, not just so we can see it with our own eyes and meet the kids who are going to attend, but because I really want to share the reality of what we did with everyone who helped make it happen. I would like to be be able to share photos and stories and say to everyone who gave money — the bloggers and sponsors and organizations that gave prizes — I would like to be able to say to them, “LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID! LOOK AT THE GOOD YOU MADE IN THE WORLD!”

Taking a break from selling knock off guidebooks at Angkor Wat.
This little guy should have been in school.

We used a tagline in our efforts: We believe in the power of travel to create change. And everyone who participated in Passports with Purpose this year made that true. You believe in the power of travel to create change, too, we have seen it made real. Our school, where kids in recovering war ravaged Cambodia, will learn and eat and get their scrapes bandaged and grow up with hope for something better is real because of you.

So, thank you. Thank you to everyone that pitched in. As we come to the end of 2009, I hope you all feel as amazed and excited and optimistic about the future as I do. What better way to end the year than to do something that builds a better future? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

• Platinum Sponsor: Virtuoso
• Silver Sponsors: Got Passport: Will Travel, We’ll Serve, Best Travel Deals, BootsnAll, HomeAway, Raveable, Travelfish, Traveller’s Point, Uptake, and Hostel Bookers.
• Supporting Cast: Meg Paynor, PR, Anna Brones, Undersolen Media, Matt Knannlein, Intergalactic Design Studio
• Bloggers, far and wide — the complete list is here.

I think it’s also nearly impossible to create any kind of real picture of the young woman who’s making your coffee, to imagine where her family is from and how maybe, this is a really good job for her or hey, maybe not. And maybe a little too much cable TV has made it possible for people who have no idea what California looks like to aspire to a life that has no rice paddies or water buffalo or arranged marriages. I think it’s easy to be annoyed by the culture clash we perceive as outsiders, but there’s no way we can get inside the head of the guy who built my Nikon so he could send a kid to college, for example.

This rambling mess of thoughts is what I took away from reading Tea and Other Ayama Na Tales by Eleanor Bluestein. Yup, I got a review copy and I really enjoyed it. It’s a collection of short stories about the people of Ayama Na, an imaginary country that’s maybe Cambodia, maybe somewhere else, maybe cobbled together out of bits of Southeast Asia. Though I had the opportunity to ask the author about this imaginary place, I passed on that intentionally, I didn’t want reality to color my vision of what Ayama Na looks like, though I did patch it together in my own head, using pieces of Vietnam and Cambodia.

The characters in the stories are all wrapped in the culture clash of Southeast Asia’s modernity — the would be monk who works construction, a fast food restaurant worker protecting her family’s honor, the artist railing against caring for her dying father, the aspiring actor who knows The Godfather by heart… they’re all walking the razor sharp line between their historic culture and the roles assigned to them by that society, and the pull of modern life. Even the American artist, bugged out, gone crazy, and maybe even worse, gone local, in the underground society of beggars and whores, embodies the collision, head on, of two models of living that seem incompatible and yet, coexist.

I couldn’t read this book from a distance. I kept thinking about the kid in the cafe in Hanoi. I complimented his English and when he thanked me, he told me he’d studied it for a few years now in university. “What are you studying?” I asked. “IT,” he responded, “you know, computer science.”

Why not? Just because I was in the middle of a city that looked nothing like anywhere I’d been, where the noise and the sights and the smell were so overwhelming that I could not take it for more than a few hours at a time, why couldn’t this kid be a future computer nerd? There’s no good reason at all. The only reason I was flustered was that he did not fit my narrow imagined view of what his life could be like.

Eleanor Bluestein’s characters remind me of that kid. They carry all the weight of their imaginary history, but also, they face forward, into whatever modern life is going to bring them, be it french fries or computerized toys or a husband hand picked by the family. The book is a great read, I enjoyed it tremendously.

Get yours on Amazon here or hey, you can have mine. Leave a comment, bonus points if you tell me about a culture clash character you’ve met on your travels. I’ll pull a name and send some lucky person the book.

Photo: Cambodian land mine victims making music to raise money outside Angkor Wat

Nothing has quite cracked me open the way our trip to Cambodia earlier this year did. It wasn’t just the history, it was the present, too – the combination of such intense damage and such warm spirits.

Imagine this. We walk into a shop selling beautiful hand beaded crafts and are greeting with a hello that’s like singing and radiant smiles. But the song and the light aren’t at eye level. It’s from the women who sit on the floor surrounded by glowing piles of glass beads. They’re all missing limbs, a foot, part of a leg, both legs from the knees down… and their work, making these pretty little souvenirs, keeps them alive. You are acutely aware, as you stand there from your towering height of 5 feet and change, that they are not standing because they CAN’T. They are delighted to see us, and not in that pushy “buy something” way – they seem genuinely happy to show off their work and to have us in the shop.  My heart breaks again for the thousandth time.

I could write more about Cambodia for Blog Action Day and with this year’s theme being poverty, it seems fitting. But instead of writing something new, I’m going to send you to a few other places that cover this topic better than I can – though I am also going to include to older NEV posts.

• Kids Causes in Cambodia on NEV: Includes links to Are We There Yet, a blogger that also felt the heartbreak and wonder that the kids of Cambodia bring.
• Cambodia’s Land Mine Victims: on NEV: Includes links to land mine removal causes and groups that support land mine victims.
• Kiva, Cambodia: Micro-loans that make a difference.
• Beth Kanter: Beth uses blogging to make amazing things happen – not just in Cambodia, but she’s done incredible work there.
• Journeys Within Our Community: This non profit travel organization won recognition for their good work in Cambodia – and other places – at the World Savers Congress..

You should go to Cambodia. It will fill you with wonder and break your heart.

I somehow ended up in Metblogs Seattle‘s “Blarch Bladness Tournament of Blogs” and though I was crushed in the first round, I pretended there were no hard feelings and went to the awards ceremony at Skylark, a place just off the West Seattle Bridge on Delridge. The nice folks from Metblogs provided snacks and conversation, we bought beer and ate some adequate bar food. To Monica@ The Big Blog, Mona @ Kirida, Tracy @ the unstoppable West Seattle Blog, Beth @ Glacier Holder (?), Carolyn @ Poke the Kitty, Dylan @ The Client and Server, and anyone else whose name I’ve forgotten, hey, it was nice to meet you all in person. Metblogs, thanks for hosting! (Exit, shaking fist. “I coulda been a contenda!”)

(Sidenote about the Skylark: Many years back I went to Skylark to see some live music, a friend of Mindy‘s was playing, I remember a fantastic acoustic version of Little Red Corvette. The opening act was a willowy blond with a guitar and an Angry History That Required Release in Song. When she launched into her first phrase, the very first one, Mindy and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. It wasn’t very nice of us, but we couldn’t help it. This woman was like an SNL version of an angry folk singer.)

A bunch of my posts about our trip to Southeast Asia are featured in Travel on a Shoestring’s Carnival of Asia. Don’t go there to read my stuff, go there to read travel writings by other bloggers about places that are on the opposite side of the planet from Seattle.

To my stunned (redundant. ed.) surprise, I made the Saturday Uke Tube – a collection of uke related video links posted by Woodshed on the indispensable-to-the-uke-crazed site, Uke Hunt. Don’t say it out loud. You can see my video here, but there are much better and more interesting things to see in Woodshed’s collection. I rather liked “Road Trip” but I had network issues before I got all the way through it. To everyone who watched my performance, I apologize.

Whoa, that’s a lotta outbound links. I’ll get out of your way now.

Early morning traffic, Angkor gate

In 1993, after Angkor was added to Unesco’s World Heritage List, just 7,650 intrepid visitors ventured to the site. Last year Sokimex, the oil company controversially granted the entrance concession on behalf of the government’s Apsara Angkor management, sold almost 900,000 tickets worth $25m (£12.8m), with British travellers making up the fourth biggest contingent behind South Koreans, Japanese and North Americans. Three million visitors are expected in 2010. –Guardian

Three million visitors! Imagine three million visitors tromping through your home. It’s not built for three million visitors to start with, right, there’s no plumbing for that, and the couch can’t take it, plus, everyone’s going to be touching stuff they’re not supposed to be touching, and standing on that one step that you know is rickety but no one else does, and dropping stuff accidentally and leaning on things and just generally exerting massive wear and tear on the place.

Your place is built for, say, a family of four, and the occasional house full of 20-30 friends, most of whom are hanging out in the yard and being really thoughtful and considerate of your possessions. Not for three million stomping visitors. But that’s what it’s like at Angkor Wat. Everyone runs roughshod over the place, breaking stuff, touching things, going where they’re not supposed to go, just trouncing all over everything in a massive, human impact causing herd. It’s depressing and angering and yes, I was part of the giant cloud of locusts descending on the cultural crop of Cambodia, chowing down and buzzing off, leaving my sweaty fingerprints everywhere.

I know I’m not supposed to project my fuzzy western values on far away nations. I’m not supposed to do one to one comparisons that pit the management of, say, North America’s national parks against the World Heritage sites of Southeast Asia. But I’m going to do it anyway. Because comparing those things proves that the knowledge of how to manage the tremendous environmental impact of all those humans on a precious resource exists, it’s not an unknown thing. And we’re a global citizenry, we no longer live in a vacuum where it’s impossible to find out, while you’re in, oh, Cambodia, how resources are managed in, let’s say, Yosemite National Park. Okay, okay, I’ll step away from doing it on a broad, management level basis.

But that’s not going to stop me from saying that you, individual visitor to precious site, could STOP BEING SUCH A FREAKING JERK, ALREADY! A-hem. Please indulge my bossy side while I present Five Ways Not To Be A High Impact Tourist:

High impact tourists

1. For the love of god, read something about appropriate attire and then, observe the guidelines. You wouldn’t go to your cousin’s bar mitzvah in a tube top and short shorts, would you? How on earth do you get to thinking it’s okay dress like that for sacred sites in other cultures? Save it for the backpacker’s bar later, okay, hot stuff?
2. Read the freakin’ signs. If it says don’t enter, just don’t. There are about nine million other scenic spots for you to take a photo, do you have to do it right where it says you absolutely should not? No. No you do not.
3. Pack it in, pack it out. What, you can’t wait until you get back to the hotel or into town or, hey, to a garbage can, even, to throw away that candy bar wrapper/empty water bottle/etc? Give me a break.
4. Say “No thank you” politely and firmly, but don’t make a federal case out of it. Yeah, the touts are annoying and from time to time, yes, they are trying to rip you off. Keep your head, Rambo. Ultimately, they’re trying to relieve you of some of your hard earned dollars so they can do stuff like, oh, feed a family. It’s okay not to buy, it’s not okay to be obnoxious about it. Walk away.
5. Move your ass, already. Yeah, it’s crowded and yeah, you’re trying to look, but so are three million other people. If you think you’re going to get some unspoiled perfect moment without that one guy in the tank top wrecking it, oh, you are in for a long wait, and you are not the only one. Take your pictures and move along. If you want the empty sites, you’re going to have pay the bucks for a specialized tour, otherwise, you’re stuck with the Disneyland crowds with the rest of us. Sorry.

Yeah, I’m superior and obnoxious, already. Yeah, I have about a million unsubstantiated ideas about how tourism to Angkor could be improved and yeah, it’s easy for me to say stuff like, whoa, someone needs to restrict the numbers already, because heh heh, I just got my eyeprints all over it, so it’s fine for them to lock it down now so you can’t get in until May, 2018. And yeah, that’s totally unfair. But rather than focusing on that stuff, maybe you could just not be such a high impact jerk, okay. Not you, I mean…you know who I’m talking to. Right?

Organizations you could help by not being such a dork

Our pictures of Angkor Wat are posted here. There is no way they can do it justice.

[tags]Angkor Wat, tourism, sustainable travel[/tags]