Life adventure of a tour guide in Battambang, Cambodia

How can you do? When you grew up in a poor family and in a country have been in the war?

My name is Chantha I am the big brother of the family, I have two younger sisters, one older sister and one youngest brother. Actually we were nine in the family but four didn't get survived in the war. As a big brother of sister we got very big responsibility to the whole family. It means that we had to work hard to get money for support the family and also for paying to the school. I started to work since i was seven years old as a garbage collector and also went to primary school. When I became 16 years old I was a motor taxi driver and went to high-school, When I turned 18 years old my father died. I had to stop study because I had to support the whole family.

In 1999 Cambodia is safe to travel and tourists started to come to visit Cambodia and it was also a time that I could learn my English from the tourists. It took me a year until I could speak good English. I could tell them the history of a joke.

Every day many motor-bike drivers of a tour guide had to go to the boat of the bus station to find a tourist.

Afterwards when they got the customers then, they brought them to the Hotel and made an appointment for a tour tomorrow.

That's what I had to do too. My tour was always in adventure because, we went with the motor-bike through the country side and the farm on the dirty bumpy road. I like to showed them a real life of peoples in Battambang, Cambodia not only in the touristic place.

The first place that I took tourist to called Pnhom Sampov (Killing field mountain). It was a place that the Khmer Rouge torture and killed thousands of people from 1975 until 1979, but now it became a peaceful pagoda and touristic place. On the top of the mountain we can get very great view with very flat and green color of the rice field.

There are many caves and most of them, the Khmer Rouge make it like the prisons to killed peoples.

When I told the Khmer Rouge history to the customers, what did the Khmer Rouge soldiers do to my family in during the war. Most of them had to cry because it was very sad history.

There is one cave we called it the bats cave. Many tourists they like to stay until the evening because, they want to see the sunset and the millions of bats flying out from the cave.

The next trip we went to another mountain called Phnom Banann. It is a very beautiful place, there is a very nice old temple on the top of the mountain.

It was build by Soriyavaraman II and it is 12 centuries. There are 350 stairs to go up to top, most of the tourists when they came down they became very tired. We offer them some drinks, then they can do some Cambodian sport which, just relax on the hang-met for one hour to take a rest.

Then we went to see the real life of Cambodian farmers. We went through the small villages, the rice field, the fruit plantations and sometime we stop for to take the pictures.

On the way the farmers invited us to taste some fruit and rice wine that, they grew and made it by them self.

After a long day tour with the dirty road, everyone not only the drivers are dirty also the tourists. We got so much dust on our body. So the drivers of the tourists had to take a bath before we got back to the city. All of us had to wear the khmer Sarong for to take a bath not only the women also the men.

The next day trip I took tourists to eat something which just some peoples never eat before like crocodile.

Please follow me to the part 2, Life adventure of a tour guide Battambang, Cambodia.

I hope you guys like my real life story. See you soon