Water Festival is Cambodia's biggest holiday celebration held over several days in the capital, Phnom Penh. While numbers are impossible to authenticate, it is thought a million or more poor rural folks pour into the capital to take part in the festivities. These subsistence farmers and merchants arrive in the city with their extended families in all forms of dangerous, rickety contraptions packed with people and stuff well in excess of the "vehicles" intended limit.
Even the very scruffy three to 12-dollar a night hotels in town is well outside the vast majority of these revelers budget. Camping in the city - anywhere one can afford - is the norm. This is where the police come into play and become the campers landlords.
In an informal manner, area police 'sell' public city space to camp with prices that reflect the quality of location, size of the family and how well the people speak and dress.
The fees the police charge to bolster their meager $30 - $75-monthly salary balloons and most often goes directly in their pockets and shared with their superiors and never finds it's way to National coffers.
To Westerner's, this is corruption. In this part of the world, this is lifestyle.
Interesting.
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