Day 71, in which we drive south

Knotted gun statue in the centre of Phnom Penh

Knowing we were due to travel 300km south to Phnom Penh today, I bunged my digestive tract up with Immodium and we had a thankfully uneventful journey. You can take a bus to Phnom Penh for less than £10, but we paid rather more for a private car which we figured would be quicker, more comfortable and contain fewer idiots. Even still, the driver took a few liberties – taking an elderly Cambodian man as a third passenger, pulling into cafés and roadside stalls trying to get us to buy things, and making claims about five minutes before we were due to arrive that his wife had recently given birth to a baby boy. Our previous driver also had this habit of becoming a father just before we were due to pay and it didn't particularly warm me to him.

Being sick, I spent most of the five hour journey with my eyes closed, but when I did look at the countryside strolling by I was not impressed by what I saw. Huge drifts of litter line the roads, and while no one seemed to be making any effort to clean it up, plenty of locals were throwing cans into the road, emptying rubbish out and even in one case pouring a bucket of what appeared to be raw sewage into the street. We later saw a herd of cows wandering around their field trying to get at the grass hidden beneath a thick carpet of litter, with one particularly enterprising cow chewing at a blue plastic carrier bag in the apparent hope it might contain hay. I tell myself not to be too shocked, to remember that this is a developing country and they're despertately poor, but then recall from my archaeological training that even in the bronze age Britons were burying their refuse in deep middens behind their homes. The feeling seems to be more that the locals have just given up. It is really no surprise the flat and filthy landscape has not inspired a Cambodian Wordsworth.

Personal hygiene also seems to be a major issue, and I read in the newspaper that several villages have been decimated from dysentry and their solution has been to erect scarecrows to scare away the evil spirits. It seems to me that boiling drinking water and thoroughly washing hands after going to the toilet might be a better start. Our driver would appear to be an educated man, but when I mentioned to him how odd it is that there is never a sink to wash your hands in the public (non Western) restrooms he just grinned indulgently as though washing the hands was a Western decadence. I wonder whether the locals are even aware of the correlation between their poor hygiene and the high infant mortality rate. A development priority should probably be a non-scarecrow based programme of hygiene awareness.

In Phnom Penh we checked into the Pacific Hotel, a clean and air conditioned bolt-hole for the night while we wait for the second leg of our journey to Sihanoukville tomorrow. Having napped the whole way in the car, I fell asleep at 8pm, slept straight through into morning and woke feeling fresh as a whistle.