Guilty consciences
Tourism and travelling has become a serious business, of late.
You can’t go anywhere without being expected to volunteer for a charity, visit an orphanage, look after sick elephants, donate your services to a soup kitchen, vaccinaterabid dogs or give money to war victims.
You just can’t go anywhere without a guilty conscience.
Five star hotels in third world countries beg you to leave money for their local charity or do something to help.
Airlines ask for even more money on top of the taxes, fees and charges so they can offset their carbon by planting a tree in the middle of nowhere. Would you trust that person asking for that extra money? Even with that smile on their face? Would they be planting the right sort of tree for the environment anyway?
Call me cynical, but I don’t trust any of them. And yet we all want to give back to the places we’re taken a lot from. A few cents for victims of land mines in Cambodia is not too much to ask. Visiting an orphanage and collecting some money for the kids there isn’t going to kill you.
But today many have been bitten by the volunteer bug and often they have more volunteers than they can adequately deal with you. And you have to put your name on a waiting list, especially in the more exotic places.
Cambodia is especially popular. The South-East Asian country has one of the saddest histories of any country on earth. Because of the Khmer Rouge's fundamentalist Marxist polices pursuing increased rice productivity almost everybody was displaced and between one and two million people died in the period 1975 to 1979 and hundreds of thousands more died during a severe famine in the late 1970s after Vietnam invaded in 1978.
But since UN-sponsored elections in 1993 and the surrender of elements of the Khmer Rouge in the mid-1990s and the remaining forces in 1998 there has been some semblance of normality.
Today there seems to be almost as many NGOs in Cambodia as there are tourists, helping to get the country back on its feet. And it's impossible as a visitor - and as anybody involved in tourism including hotels - not to be aware of the fundamental dilemmas of heritage and cultural protection and the financial benefits that tourism brings.
And how can you not have your breath taken away by the enchanting children?
At what could loosely be described as an orphanage in Siem Reap right next to the amazing Angkor Wat I meet children, some of whom have been brought here by their parents because of poverty.
No, I'm not doing an Angelina Jolie or even a Madonna (more my type), but I can't help but cuddle them.
One little boy, freshly showered and hair combed, grabs my hand. "I have no mother, father. You be mother, him father," he points to the general manager of the hotel where I'm staying, who has been donating materials to the orphanage.
Well, I wasn’t going to go that far. I explain I have children back home.
Meanwhile, one child after another comes out with a drawing to give me to take back to Australia.
As I climb to the 10th century Bakheng temple to see Angkor Wat bathed in late afternoon sunlight, I pass a group of musicians maimed by landmines performing traditional music.
On the way back, one of the musicians hands me a pamphlet explaining that they are members of the Angkor Association for the Disabled. It says they are pursuing funding for an ecological farm in the Siem Reap area, where they can live and grow organic products.
Their main aim is to transition members from a life of begging on the streets into safe, adequate housing.
They say - despite campaigns to clear them - landmines continue to maim and kill thousands of Cambodians every year.
As well as money, people are urged to donate their time and skills, from everything from small business and funding proposals to promotional activities, to teaching and training.
Even at the airport, the proceeds of cards sold at the giftshop are said to go to NGOs.
Conscience tourism is alive and well here. But this is one place where my hard-core cynicism melts.