Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow.
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.
—William Blake, from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

It’s taken me a long time to get my head around our experience in Cambodia, and I have not yet accomplished even that comprehensively. I’ve never had an experience traveling that produced so many contrary emotions, that held so much beauty and so much confusion. The whole week we spent there, just a fraction of time, I was constantly pulled in extreme directions: appall and wonder, awe and horror, anger and contentment. I clarify this because what I have written may sound negative, embittered. But I don’t mean it that way. And if I was a more skillful writer, I would be able to convey all that happened without announcing these strange subtleties as a form of prologue. And maybe someday, when the experience has been further digested and incorporated into my memory, I will be able to write about it with more grace. But not wanting to forget the details, as they are already more than a week and a half old, I’ll write them as they come to me now.

We had one full day in Phnom Penh to see what there was to see. When you’re working with that kind of time frame, it’s easiest to simply be carried along the current of tourism. To that end we hired a tuk-tuk driver to take us to see what we wanted to see, foregoing the adventure of navigating Phnom Penh as pedestrians, which we’d learned the day before has its own set of challenges, and there’s no public transportation to speak of.

Our tuk-tuk driver’s name was a confusion of sibilants that our American mouths couldn’t get around, and I felt like and ass for having this man whose name I did not know drive us all over the place, wait for us patiently as we touristed and snapped pictures and read faded informational placards in front of various implements of Buddhism and towering golden temples and blank spots of grass with signs that said “Do not walk through the mass grave.” We talked a lot about the strangeness of the arrangement—from our seat in the back of the tuk-tuk—as we weaved through the chaotic traffic and dust, conspicuous among the impoverished surroundings, and feeling increasingly egregious for it.

We started with the Killing Fields. It’s a strange thing: genocide as a tourist attraction. I can’t say why I wanted to go. It seemed important to witness the site of such atrocities as those Pol Pot inflicted upon the Cambodian population. As if somehow recognizing the order of events and the players involved, the set of circumstances that made it possible for one man to exterminate his fellow citizens so systematically, would aid in some greater historical understanding. Also, it’s just one of the things you do when you’re in Phnom Penh. It was an informative audio guided tour, only occasionally leaning a bit too hard on the macabre, manipulating the horror of what happened there for dramatic effect. But I suppose that’s to be expected.

Back in the city we made efficient work of Wat Phnom and the National Museum, still feeling strange that we were keeping our driver waiting for us, even though that’s what we were paying him to do. It was the equivalent of telling a taxi to keep the meter running while you ran into a store to grab something. It was the first of a strange conflict of feelings that was soon revealed to be the norm in Cambodia.

We followed that with a ferry tour of the Ton Le Sap river, just the two of us on a big boat that cruised us downstream then back up, past a floating village where naked kids chased each other along the booms and docks, diving into and crawling out of the brown water. There were a couple of dozen identically shaped fishing boats that people lived in and worked from—all along side a small island that was being visibly developed with a couple of high-rise buildings and tall new houses. Across the way there was a knot of casino resorts and a Ferris wheel and loud pop music echoing across the water. But it was also a remarkable view of the Riverfront of Phnom Penh, where you could see from a distance the French colonial architecture, the gilded roofs of the Royal Palace and Independence monument and the green dripping trees that lined the streets. It was then that I realized that though the city was chaotic and dusty and full of desperation and poverty, it was also beautiful and colorful and full of life and lives. This is obvious. This is true in many places in the world. This is true even of first-world cities the world over, the only difference being the poverty is better hidden from the tourists. And I felt small and shallow for having somehow neglected to acknowledge that truth more immediately, to be so cowed, so completely disoriented by Phnom Penh’s unfamiliarity.

The next day we left by bus for Siem Reap, staring at the gorgeous countryside, watching chickens scratch on the side of the road and flatbed tuk-tuks go by with two huge pigs in a cage on the back, mixed in with late-model pickup trucks, here and there, kids standing on the roadside waving.

Siem Reap is the town nearest Angkor Wat, Asia’s number-one tourist destination, according to TK’s prolific research. For this reason, Siem Reap has taken pains to make us tourists feel welcome and comfortable. There is the comfortable name Pub Street given to a few square blocks of city full of approachable restaurants and bars and huge TVs showing soccer matches and offering karaoke. There are open-air patios and street-side fish pedicures and reflexology massages and travel offices offering tickets and tours to all that Siem Reap and environs has to offer. This was all surrounded by the usual sidewalk hawker food, where the locals ate from carts full of strange looking mushrooms, chickens hanging in the glass, delicious and unidentifiable smells, with a halo of plastic tables and chairs serving as the seating.

Along with this, like in Phnom Penh, there are the children, barefoot, grubby, selling you knock off Lonely Planet books, bracelets made from yarn and other things you don’t want or need. And as an informed traveler, you know not to buy the things from the children as to not vindicate their adult overlords in their exploitation. But the children are well coached to manipulate and press—they give you a hard sell like no used car salesman working on a commission could every dream of accomplishing. As we walked down the street we watched a little girl, maybe five years old, trying to talk a western couple into a store. The girl was barefoot, carrying a baby, and she said she couldn’t afford shoes, that’s why she had to make people come to buy things in this particular shop. When this tactic did not work, she gently took the woman’s hand and pulled her into the store. When you tell them you don’t want what they’re selling they ask you why. Then they suggest you buy it for your friend. Then when that doesn’t work, they begin to describe their starving brothers and sisters and parents who your purchase will help feed.

Conversational exchanges like this are not for the soft of heart.

But that is to say nothing of the orphans.

If you don’t know this already, it’s important that you do: Cambodia is full of orphanage-based scams. This is not to say there are not actual orphans in Cambodia who are desperately in need of all sorts of essential supplies. And if you research the proper channels you can do a measure of good for those in need. But this knowledge is useless when you’re out in the backwater, two lone travelers surrounded by guileful smiles, being pressed to spend $70 on a sack of rice for the orphans.

The boat tour of the floating village sounded quaint and harmless and fully legit. The $40 cost per person for the boat ride, though princely, seemed a small price to pay for what was rumored to be a look at the “real” Cambodia. It was, after all, the same price we’d paid for our two days of exploring Angkor Wat and the other temples, which had been a singular and beautiful experience. Watching the sun rise over those ancient spires and stupas, watching the morning light illuminate the beautiful grounds and forest around it will be something I will never forget. $40 was nothing for that.

And it was good to see the Ton Le Sap from a boat. But if genocide makes an uncomfortable tourist attraction, so does poverty. And that was what was on display. Our guide all but said, “look how poor they are.” But it was also a fully functional community. There was a floating school. A floating church. Even a casino and a bar. There was a flotilla of three boats tied together having a raucous dance party in the middle of the afternoon. Meanwhile, our boat-operating guide was telling us about the orphans. Their need of rice and pencils and water. It was strange they needed water, because not ten minutes earlier, he’d pointed out the water purification boat, from which everyone in the floating community could acquire clean water for free. But that subtle inconsistency didn’t occur to us in that moment.

We were told we would be given the chance to buy something for the orphans, either rice or study supplies or water. TK and I are both generous people, and we’d both been painfully aware of the vast chasm between our resources and lifestyle and that of the majority of people in our host country. We were easy marks, for sure.

As soon as we disembarked from our boat into the little floating warehouse, it didn’t feel right. We knew there was something amiss with the whole situation. But what were we going to do? Say no to the orphans? Our choices were all bad: call the scam, say no and feel like greedy bastards; or ignore the feeling that it is a scam, buy the rice and feel like gullible shills who just contributed to god-knows-what sort of shadowy enterprise. The situation was further complicated by the fact that we were miles out in a Cambodian backwater; there was no place we could walk out to. We were dependent on the good graces of our boat driver to get us back to the dock.

So we bought the $70 sack of rice and a case of bottled water. The efficiency of the transaction only increased my sense of misgiving and suspicion.

Then we “delivered” the rice to the floating orphanage that was conveniently right across the way. This was clearly the part where our doubts were to be put to rest. Where we got to see the sweet little kids we’d helped and see how they lived and the organization we contributed to. We were given a tour of the classrooms, where the kids, in perfectly rehearsed unison, looked up at us with grubby, disinterested little faces and said “TANK YOOO!!” But they didn’t have pencils or pens to go with the old, creased workbooks on their desks, that were, upon closer inspection, Angry Birds comic books. And the adults playing the part of teacher? In two instances I recognized them from the warehouse, lurking in sunglasses in a far corner. Now they stood in front of the class, sans sunglasses, admonishing the kids and pointing at a dry erase board that had half-rubbed-off lessons on it. We were repeatedly invited to “make a picture.” We declined, wanting nothing more than to get away from this floating grift.

Later, at the Cambodian airport, waiting for a flight back to Phnom Penh, a single Google search revealed quickly and numerously the variety of orphanage-based scams. We had gotten off easy. Other travelers told tales of being threatened with stranding, or being told to swim back if they refused to buy anything. There were more alarming stories of desperate Cambodian parents selling their children to “orphanages” in order to get a cut of the money that was taken from well-meaning tourists, and stories of fake orphanages that kept the children deliberately underfed and badly clothed in order to increase the sense of destitution and thereby the contributions.

TK and I took comfort in that the kids we saw were hale and rambunctious and wore intact, clean clothing. We held out hope for a while that maybe we had stumbled on a legitimate orphanage, and we actually made a meaningful contribution. But further research showed that, sadly, we did not. It was just a less insipid version of the scam, for all of its elaborateness.

But don’t mistake me: The people of Cambodia are individually smiling and kind and helpful and always greet you with a huge smile. The country is beautiful, and I feel like I’m a wiser, more traveled person for having gone there. It’s the seemingly institutionalized, ingrained way in which travelers are manipulated that sits badly with me. There seems to be some shadowy, semi-organized effort to divest westerners of more of their money, which we are believed to possess bottomless pits of, and comparatively, we do. And there’s a part of me that wants to not care, that wants to believe that someone who needed my money more than I did has it now and that’s fine. But it’s the manipulation and dishonesty of it that twists my stomach. More than that, though, it’s knowing that more than likely, a small few have fattened their wallets, and the orphans are still left with naught.

Overall, it’s far more complicated than my money, who has it, and how I feel about it all. That is all merely coincidental, ancillary. Cambodia is a developing country with a difficult past and it’s still in the process of becoming whatever it’s going to evolve into. One can only observe and experience it—and as much as that is, it is not enough to draw any hard and fast conclusions.