I know exactly that three years ago Baby Jesus – who brings the presents in Czechia – left nothing under the tree for me. Because I didn't have a tree. True, we could have sung carols under the big artificial spruce, which here in the 35-degree heat – together with a plastic snowman – stuck out like a sore thumb. But when we decided to spend Christmas in Cambodia, it definitely wasn't to show off on social media with annoying pictures from our exotic holiday, during which the only things we'd get to know about the whole country would be the resort staff, deep-fried squid and the fact that Coca-Cola is just as sweet here as anywhere else in the world.
So on 23 December I was sitting with my laptop in a café where the staff behind the bar were bopping around in funny Santa hats, the speakers were blasting the chart-topper of the day by One Direction, and on the surface of the dirty Mekong – barely 50 metres from me – members of the local lower middle class were trying to catch something to eat from their floating home measuring four metres by one.
You're sitting over a cappuccino in surroundings that even a Prague café wouldn't turn its nose up at. Leather armchairs, a Nuova Simonelli espresso machine, air conditioning set to the perfect temperature. And over the screen of your MacBook you're watching people who have nothing in life but that four-metre junk with a ragged sheet of plastic stretched over it against the rain. And on the bank, their cow is grazing – so skinny it would give you goosebumps back home.
On the one hand, mobile data here is more affordable than in Czechia, the Cambodian king studied in the Czech Republic, and even Brno could envy Phnom Penh its Vattanac Capital Tower skyscraper. On the other hand, meat is dried in the dust on the street, rubbish lies everywhere and people live in shacks made of corrugated iron. Granted, if you stay somewhere nice and out of the way – in a pretty resort – you don't have to see any of it. But we wanted to. That's why we stayed in Phnom Penh – the capital of Cambodia – for a good 10 days.
We stayed in an apartment booked through booking.com. With a family who spoke French. Our landlord wore a waistcoat and polished leather shoes. And for lunch we went to a nearby street where rice was served from an enormous pot, the daily menu was kept warm behind a glass display and dished straight onto your plate, and the locals were seeing a white man for the second time in their lives. The first time was Lionel Messi with a can of Pepsi on a billboard by the bridge over the Mekong. We saw children playing in the dust by the road with old plastic straws, a cow grazing at a roundabout under the watchful eye of a police officer, and we saw a man die on the street.
Cambodia gives the greatest Christmas present of all. Humility.
But we wanted to see more. So the day after our Christmas Eve dinner at the local night market – rice with prawns – we moved on a bit further.
Also read our article on how travelling changes your values and the way you see the world.
The temples of Angkor are on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and as a classic Czech film line goes: "Compared with that trip to Kokořín, I was downright disappointed with this tour." Wall-to-wall people. American pensioners, Japanese documentary makers, European influencers. The whole world. Only about Cambodia itself you'll learn absolutely nothing here. Unless all those people give you a headache and you get the runs from a pineapple bought by the roadside. And I mean fast. So I only saw the biggest and most famous temple, Angkor Wat, from the other side of a canal, where the toilet was within sprinting distance. Apparently it was really beautiful. I don't know, I don't regret it.
After two days, when my guts had nothing left to give the toilet bowl, we got back on the pedals of our hired bikes. This time heading south of the town of Siem Reap. To Tonlé Sap lake, where tourists don't go.
A few kilometres out of town, the road stopped meeting the criteria for that name and turned into a dusty track full of potholes. And then it suddenly ended among shacks of corrugated iron. "Are we in the right place? A woman is plucking a chicken, a dad with a stone in his hand is staring at two pale figures who've suddenly appeared, and a gang of kids is charging towards us." We didn't manage to get away. And for our audacity we were "punished" with half an hour of messing about with the local youngsters. At one point I had two little Cambodians on my rear rack, another standing on the top tube between my legs and a fourth pushing us.
If a grubby little Asian man in flip-flops walked through a Czech suburb of villas and started playing with your kids... They probably wouldn't play for long. More likely he'd get hit with that stone. Nothing bad happened to us. If anything, we got another present. Another dose of humility.
True, there are people in Cambodia who live pretty well. Like Reth, who after a week of us staying at his house invited us to breakfast with the whole family. He showed us how to eat a typical Cambodian soup properly and let us taste bananas that those stunted, tasteless Czech ones can't hold a candle to. And he also explained that to live this well, he works in Phnom Penh during the week, his wife on the other side of the country in Battambang, and they only see each other and their two little girls at weekends, here in Siem Reap.
That was our Reth. And then there are plenty of people in Cambodia with nothing over their heads but that corrugated iron. And at least one phone in the family with YouTube, where they watch us in the West throwing away a third of our food and buying all sorts of rubbish we'll soon cast aside. In the name of sustained economic growth, we also exported Coca-Cola, Lay's, canned Heineken and plastic bags to them. Sadly, we didn't pack instructions saying they can't just toss them in the ditch like a banana leaf. And so the place is a mess. Partly also thanks to the factories that make those nice "Outdoor is my passion" T-shirts for under our Czech Christmas trees.
We wrote about how to deal with your own waste on the road in the article Don't Destroy, Don't Litter and... Don't Travel at All?
After New Year we left Cambodia and headed for Vietnam. To keep exploring. By the way, the beaches there... also quite a rubbish dump. And a year later, on the morning of 24 December 2018, in a gale of the kind only the Jeseníky Mountains can produce, I'm skinning up Praděd with my parents and other great people. Every single one of us has the left half of our face frostbitten. Judging by that, I'd guess it's blowing from the north-east. It's foul. And we're having a great time. Up at the transmitter, Dalibor's bottle of slivovice passes from hand to hand, the bottom of the Christmas biscuit tin is slowly coming into view, and every now and then you have to lean in to hear the person next to you. But better than leaning off the sofa for the remote.
Will there be presents this evening? Probably. But since coming back from Cambodia, I'm more than happy to find one soft parcel with socks under the tree. Whatever that green grump in the striped scarf might say.
