Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
long. Sitting in the cramped hut she then shared with her husband and nine remaining
children, Lai Han pulled out the photograph of Chantha amid her background of flowers.
Her eyes moistened at the memory. “I'd prefer to live without food than to have food and
lose a family member,” she said. Not long after my visit, newspapers reported that Ch-
antha's family had gone. The military had made life difficult for them in Broma, so they
of poor rural families uprooted by the great Scramble for Cambodia.
More than anything, one is struck by the emptiness. After an hour bumping along narrow
tracks through dark forest undergrowth, the lack of trees comes as a shock. Suddenly
there's blue sky above. Suddenly, the hot beating glare of the Cambodian sun. This is
where Ba Heak works, in the midst of a shadeless expanse. His work begins when the
trees are already gone, felled and trucked to unknown destinations. It's then that he gets
to work bulldozing the earth, pushing the remaining roots and branches into piles to be
burnt. Heak's job is to make the land
sa'aht
, “clean,” a term used by people here to refer
to land that's been flattened and prepared for agriculture. “First they cut all the trees
down, and then I come to scrape the land clean. After that maybe I'll get sent to another
area,” the 31-year old told me, standing in the shadow of his bulldozer, a hulking grey
beast bearing a sticker from Phnom Penh's United Mercury Group, along with its slogan:
“The Relentless Pursuit of Excellence.”
Heak receives $9 for every hectare he clears, which is pretty good money considering
he can manage three or four per day. He sends most of his earnings to his wife and child
in Kampong Speu, some 270 kilometers away. Heak's days are long. With nothing to
protect him from the sun, he spends his downtime snoozing in a hole he has dug in the
shade between the bulldozer's two large caterpillar tracks. A creased brown moonscape
stretches all around, littered with burnt tree stumps and piles of smoldering wood that
give off a fragrant silver-blue smoke. Fringes of forest tickle the horizon.
This clearing lies at the heart of one of Cambodia's most significant forests. Prey Lang,
as it is known locally, is the largest primary lowland evergreen forest remaining in main-
land Southeast Asia—a zone of 3,600 square kilometers sprawling across four provinces
in the country's north. Prey Lang is a crucial biodiversity area that is home to dozens
of endangered plant and animal species. Its role in regulating the flow of water and sed-
iment south to the Tonlé Sap lake basin is so vital that Cambodian environmentalists
sometimes describe it as a “second Amazon.” The forest also supports some 10,000 fam-
ilies—mostly of the Kuy indigenous minority—who practice rotating slash-and-burn ag-
riculture and harvest forest products like vines, rattan, and liquid tree resin, a special
product used for waterproofing wooden boats and making paints and varnishes.
