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SCAM ALERT: Tonle Sap Floating Village Tour Departing From Chong Kneas 1/3

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• published: 22 Mar 2013
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My "guide" and my driver took me out to the lake and provided a running commentary about the the floating village, its people, and commercial activity in the area. Half-way thru the boat ride, the guide started talking about the floating orphanage-school and the floating market that sells groceries. To keep a long story short, I bought a 50 kilo bag of rice for 65 USD with the guide's encouragement. I did not need much encouragement because I'm a sucker for little kids and seeing skinny kids upsets me. I felt good about my purchase. When we dropped off the bag of rice to the "orphanage," the first thing my guide said, "Come, you can take pictures of the kids." Instantly, I had a bad feeling. My government-approved free tour guide had an ad for an NGO that said: CHILDREN ARE NOT TOURIST ATTRACTIONS. I've also read about the milk scams, in which a poor woman approaches tourists asking them to buy milk for her baby. After the tourists buy the milk at an inflated price, the woman sells the milk back to the store and splits the profits with the shop keeper. Once I entered the "school" and the kids started waving and smiling at me, I forgot all about the ad. I found it odd, however, that the kids were just sitting there. There was a sentence written on a dry erase board. The teacher was just sitting there. No paper or writing utensils on desks. I could not figure out whether it was a sham orphanage-school and I had just been scammed into buying a 50 kilo bag of rice or a typical underfunded Cambodian school. When I got back to my hostel, I looked up Tonle Sap on TripAdvisor and found out that I had been scammed. Several tourists have been suckered into the Tonle Sap cartel's scam: paying 25 USD for a short boat ride, emotionally blackmailed into purchasing rice and other other goods at hyper-inflated prices to donate to an "orphanage-school," and taken to tourist-trap souvenir shop. Avoid this tourist trap. If you want to see a floating village, watch this video. Don't enable the cartel that has a monopoly on the boat tours. They claim that the money they make--and they make a lot with tours from 10-5 PM every day-- goes back to the people, but you cannot see that. http://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g293939-d324854-Reviews-Tonle_Sap_Lake-Cambodia.html