Goodbye to South East Asia

Eights hours at Bangkok airport is pretty boring. The connections from Phnom Penh to Sydney on our Star Alliance ticket are not as slick as one would like and we are spending the day here in the Royal Silk Lounge. No wine has appeared so far although there is some beer and spirits. I am sticking to water anyway thanks to some refried beans and hummus last night.
I have probably been on holiday more times to SEA than any other part of the world. Apart from the fact that I am exceedingly lucky to be able to say this, there are also clearly lots of obvious reasons : the food is great, the weather warm, the people of the countries that lie in this part of the world are universally welcoming.
The whole area has a real energy now and this means it is losing perhaps a bit of its charm. But that is first world wealth regret rather than what Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians want. They want to be in the first world and many of their inhabitants now are with large cars, homes, expensive clothes etc. The wealth disparity is enormous, particularly in Cambodia. While I sat smiling at the TV ads selling the benefits of insurance to the growing middle class as we waited for our first flight of today, I also thought of the truckloads of riot police I saw in central Phnom Penh yesterday afternoon, plastic shields at the ready, speeding through the Sunday afternoon traffic. As we later discovered, they were off to push back a peaceful protest by garment workers seeking a living wage. The liveable wage in Cambodia per week is $7 according to one of our taxi drivers. We passed large sweat factories when we came back from the Killing Fields, full of women toiling in the heat, making the cheap clothes we wear in the west.
Cambodia has probably suffered the most in this part of the world. But the new wealth seems to be concentrated in very few hands indeed. We were told that corruption is rife and we saw backhanding in action at the airport this AM. Perhaps you have to pay a bribe to get entry into the shining modern building that houses the anti-corruption unit?  The people we met throughout Cambodia were lovely. I sincerely hope that conservative trickle down economics  that appears to be the policy here turns into a torrent soon.