Tourist town hits back at ‘disrespectful’ party culture
As the neon lights of Yolo club flash brightly and the chestpulsing beats of Rihanna blare from Temple Bar, a young man is on his knees in the road, chugging beer poured through a funnel. He chokes, spraying warm beer over the road, known as Pub Street. The passing tourists and five busking landmine survivors playing traditional Cambodian music nearby barely look up.
‘‘When the foreigners come to Siem Reap and wear these clothes and act like this, it is looking down on the culture of Cambodia,’’ says Keov Leakna, wringing her hands as she sits on the steps of the massage parlour she has run for 11 years. ‘‘I find it very difficult to see every day.’’
It is not just occasional drunken antics she despairs of but a ‘‘disrespectful’’ partying culture that has taken over some quarters of Siem Reap, home to Angkor Wat, the most scared site in Cambodia. But this week 10 tourists, including a New Zealander, have found themselves the target of a crackdown on the pub crawls and booze-fuelled pool parties.
A raid on a weekly pool party, called Let’s Get Wet, last week saw the arrests. The tourists were accused of taking sexually explicit photos and publishing them online.
‘‘These photos and videos are against our culture. They were publicly putting them up on the internet, and making it look like Cambodia has these kinds of parties here. It is very disrespectful and gives the wrong idea of our country,’’ said Duong Thavry, head of the anti-human-trafficking and juvenile protection department in Siem Reap.
Several of those in jail say that the ‘‘pornographic’’ images released by Cambodian police were not from Let’s Get Wet but a separate pub crawl a few years ago.
Some tourists feel the response has been excessive – and possibly self-defeating.
Sitting on the terrace outside the Blue Pumpkin restaurant, Georgie Eccles, from New Zealand, said: ‘‘People come here because of Angkor Wat, but also because it’s a fun place to go out and meet people and the bars are good. If they shut all that down or made it scary to go out, I think they would get way less visitors.’’
Many businesses and travel agencies in the town echo that fear. Siem Reap depends on the thousands of tourists who visit in the few months of high season, and it has already been a quiet year, with hotels slashing prices by up to 80 per cent.
For many living in the town, though, the arrests signal a muchneeded clampdown.
Sophoan Dam, a language teacher who grew up in a rural village near Angkor Wat, expresses a distaste for the pub crawls and parties, which she says promote ‘‘behaviour that is disrespectful to our culture’’.
‘‘When tourists come here, of course we understand they want to relax, they want to enjoy their time, but to walk down the street in just a bikini or without a shirt is very offensive to Cambodian people.’’
The arrests of the 10 did not come out of the blue. One of them, Briton Dan Jones, had been warned not to host Let’s Get Wet after the organisers of another event, Siem Reap Pub Crawl, were arrested two weeks previously, after police sent an undercover officer who witnessed games such as ‘‘sex twister’’.
They were released but given a fine and a caution and made to sign a piece of paper saying they would leave the country. Two of them did not, and chose instead to work for Jones at Let’s Get Wet.
The authorities are also said to have been enraged that last week’s Let’s Get Wet party was held in a private villa, even though the organisers had been told to cancel and had not paid police the usual sum – described by many as a bribe – for an event licence. Those now in jail were fined by the police even before being charged.
Siem Reap’s governor, So Platong, plans to invite managers and owners of all the bars, clubs, hostels and hotels in the town to a seminar about the laws and customs of Cambodia. If any continued to flout the rules, he said, they would be shut down immediately.