Outside Phnom Penh and a few other towns, information technology isn't even a rumor. Information doesn't travel quickly in Cambodia, and neither does anything else. Ninety percent of Cambodians live in rural areas, yet the nation's highways are nearly impassable, so rutted that driving them is like steering a boat in heavy seas. A road trip over them that manages 15 miles per hour is considered speedy. Good rice gets shipped not to Phnom Penh but across the border to Thailand or Vietnam, where there is an actual transportation infrastructure.
Bad rice stays home.
A War Correspondent's Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia. On this assignment he visited Cambodia for the first time since leaving Phnom Penh in a US evacuation helicopter on April 12, 1975. Inc. All rights reserved.