Dollarama
During our brief stopover in Cambodia, Louisa and I had one major realization – Cambodia is the best dollar store in the World! Now nicknamed, Dollambodia, Cambodia is bursting with deals and scams just like your local “Dollarama” store.
Bottled water, the refreshing ionized liquid source of life, is the same price as a 30 minute foot massage or even a hand carved Buddha. Just like all dollar stores, there isn’t any consistency with the pricing. In Canada you can get a pen for $1 but you can also get a 10 litre stainless steel pot for $1 – how is this possible?
Cambodia, or Dollambodia for these purposes, uses USD notes as their main currency. With nothing lower than a $1 dollar bill in circulation, it makes it difficult to charge anything less. This makes from some amazing deals and funny-ish stories:
- Throughout Siem Reap, a Tuk Tuk taxi ride will cost $1 if you are going 500 meters or going for 25 KM. Louisa and I paid the same price to drive 25 km out of town to see Ankor Wat as we did to drive 5 minutes to our hotel. We couldn’t figure out if the hotel tuk tuk was a rip off or the Angkor Wat tour was a deal – we still don’t know.
- Siem Reap has an amazing market filled with a lot of t-shirts and foot massages. For $1 you can get a one hour massage, however, for $10 you can get a highly cheap ball point pen – we all know that this pricing is backwards by a mile.
- Like all of SE Asia, Cambodia also has great artists with many paintings and spiritual carvings. Sucked in like the majority of tourists, we ended up buying several different hand carved Buddhas as gifts for family and friends, however, since we don’t have room in our 60 litre packs for a 6 pound Buddha, we shipped them home. The shipping box, made of 1/100 of the wood one Buddha is made of, cost twice as much as an actual Buddha – just to be clear, a cardboard box costs as much as a carving that would have taken hours of labour to complete. Huh?
- The most surprising thing in Cambodia was the shooting range – shooting guns that were used during the war in the 70’s (I would hope that the guns used actually didn’t kill anyone – some things are better left unknown). Shooting an M-18 in the middle of dodgy-town, was not only crazy, but was also very dollarama-like. The bullets, worth pennies, are sold for $1 each - $60 dollars later and twenty seconds of fun, we had spent more than we had in three days in Cambodia combined. We felt so bad that we had to give our taxi drive an enormous tip for driving us 2 hours to fulfil the “white-man’s” obsession with gun shooting.
Cambodia is a great country with so many great aspects that are just being realized by the rest of the world. We both wish we could have spent more time touring the rest of the country as the people are just amazing and every single Cambodian we met was so genuinely nice! If you are going to SE Asia, head to Cambodia and see what the rest of SE Asia was like 15 years ago – Dollambodia!
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