How to help while you visit Siem Reap…

We recently collaborated with Two Can Travel to write a post for travellers to Siem Reap. It’s full of useful tips on what to pack, how to avoid single-use plastic and which restaurants and cafes to support. We’ve also discovered some other awesome blogs on this topic, including this great post on responsible travel from Small Footprints Big Adventures. If it’s one thing we notice about tourism these days it’s that our footprint is quite large, and it’s actually quite simple to minimise that footprint. We can all endeavour to leave the places we visit better, or at least the same, as we found them.

We worked closely with Two Can Travel to produce this articles too, read it here on the Two Can Travel website. Jen and Stevo also spent some time living in Cambodia, so it’s with the extra insights that living in a place can unveil that we can help you take a short cut to travelling sustainably in Cambodia and Southeast Asia.

Whenever we’re chatting with travellers to Siem Reap there is always a lot of talk about the rubbish on the roadside and why it’s so messy. With millions of tourists visiting every year this is having a huge affect on Siem Reap and Cambodia. Tourism has grown dramatically in a very short amount of time, and local awareness and infrastructure is unable to cope with such rapid change. Each and every person can help be part of the solution by avoiding single-use plastic while travelling.

Things you can do when you travel; come prepared, look for alternatives, ask for bottle-free water and avoid free things you don’t need. These simple steps will help avoid a cumulative problem for the locals of the place you visit.

It’s easy to think that it doesn’t matter when you’re visiting a place for just a few days, that it’s just a plastic bottle here and there, a plastic bag that you wouldn’t normally take at home. But the reality stays with the residents of Cambodia, the Cambodian people whom we all adore while we’re visiting because of their kindness, generosity and beautiful smiles, then we leave them with so much rubbish from our visit and there isn’t the infrastructure to handle it.
Rubbish in Cambodia goes to 4 main places; the streets, canals and rivers, landfill and being burned. Rubbish going in the river ends up in the ocean, where it pollutes the environment and gets eaten by fish and into our food chain. Read more about that on the National Geographic blog.

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