Category: Daily Life in Cambodia

In this picture, I’m on a motorcycle taxi in the curb lane and you can see how the typical little shop and its workers just take over the sidewalk. They do all their work outside. This man is welding a part for a motorcycle repair.

This is something almost never seen in Cambodia: almost every single vehicle stopped for a red light is behind the crosswalk, the accepted norm in western countries. Normally traffic in Phnom Penh does not halt for a light until the front wheel is intruding into the lane of moving cars, causing them to swerve. Cambodians drivers are like others, though, often creatures of habit and copiers of others, and by some strange circumstance the first one to stop for the light must have stopped behind the crosswalk and the others just followed suit without thinking.

There must be a story behind this mother-and-son(?) duo riding down a main Phnom Penh street. Is that everything they own on that bicycle? Where are they from? Where are they going?

The newspapers are reporting large numbers of migrant workers (Cambodians, working legally or illegally in Thailand) who are now daily streaming across the Thai-Cambodian border, legally or illegally. They earn about $10 or $11 a day in Thailand (which gives you a clue how low their pay would be if they were in Cambodia because they’re going to Thailand to get more money than here) but now there is a spike in coronavirus infections in Thailand and the workers are afraid for their personal safety and also many of the businesses that employed them have closed so there are no jobs.

This presents quite a problem for Cambodia because more than 80 of the returnees have tested positive. That’s one sixth of all the cases in the kingdom. And those are the ones who crossed at the legal checkpoints and were tested. Others sneak in through the jungle because they don’t want to be quarantined. It could be a perfect setup for a major infection in Cambodia.