As I made my way to greet some of the ragpickers, my feet sunk into muddy piles of refuse and giant swarms of flies buzzed about my ankles angrily, freshly disturbed from their feeding frenzy. Only one thought crossed my mind: I probably shouldn’t have worn flip flops.

I first heard about the village of the dump while traveling in Laos. I had seen footage of ragpickers, people that make a living from sifting through garbage heaps for scraps, in places like Manila and New Delhi, but hadn’t heard anything about Cambodia. A young Irish girl told me of the friendly welcome she had received from the children that earned a living from the garbage and how grateful they were that she was bearing gifts of fruit and toys. I decided it was something I needed to see.Arriving in Phnom Pen, I loitered about the lakeside backpacker ghetto for a few days, trying to drum up interest from nighttime drinking companions. To my despair, nobody feigned any interest in walking around toxic piles of foul-smelling trash. To make matters worse, not a single one of the aggressive moto and tuk tuk drivers had any clue what I was talking about.

On the third day of questioning, I found a moto driver who agreed to take me for a relatively exorbitant price. He eyed me suspiciously, no doubt wondering why someone would want to visit a massive landfill. His offer was available under one condition: he wouldn’t be accompanying me inside , but would instead drop me off at the entrance. “The smell,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “Make sick.”

The scenery as we made our way to the outskirts of Phnom Pen changed drastically. The center of town had well-paved roads, modern office buildings, and Christmas lights strung everywhere. After a few traffic lights, that changed into a crowded, tenement-populated urban environment, and eventually into a dusty collection of shanty towns. A garbage truck turned off onto a dirt road, and we followed behind him. Soon enough, the driver dropped me off at the long road that led up to the dumps.

The first indication that I probably shouldn’t have worn shorts and flip flops came right at the entrance to the dump. The dirt road had suffered under the recent heavy rainfall and now stretched the definition of the word “road.” It could more accurately be described as a pathway, flooded with mud and garbage-filled slop that cut a trail between garages. I wondered how deep it was and if I could make it through to the other side. The answer: ankle-deep on a 5’7 male, and no, no, I certainly could not.

The road leading up to the dump was in itself foreboding. Sinister-looking garbage workers prowled around, while a few filthy children nearby dug through scraps. I waddled around in the mud, occasionally losing a flip -flop, before a garbage truck with a flatbed in the back came by and I flagged it down. The workers riding on the back chuckled to themselves as I climbed aboard and offered them a few cigarettes to show my gratitude for the ride. Say what you want about the health effects, but in my experience nothing bridges a gap between two people who don’t speak the same language like an offering of Marlboros.

The driver dropped me off at the top of a hill, and I hopped off into a bustling area. All around, mounds and mounds of garbage spread out for miles. I was on a dirt path that bisected the dump. On both sides of the path, creaking, rusted garbage trucks that looked as if they had been through wars unloaded, and groups of men and women stood by the dumping areas with burlap bags, sifting through trash. Shelters had been built by the workers to conduct their searches, and to sleep, relax, and eat. Deeper into the dumps, stragglers and children picked through piles. Near the edge, a shantytown grew outward towards the main roads.

From a distance, the scene could actually have been beautiful. Brightly colored plastics littered the dump and made it look like a huge pile of hard candies. Up close I noticed needles and animal corpses, rotten food and sewer waste. The buzzing of millions of flies provided a background cacophony of white noise, and the smell choked my lungs to the point where smoking a cigarette seemed like a healthy alternative. I stepped over a partially eaten turtle corpse to greet a couple of barefoot children. Most of the villagers actually looked pleased to see me. They wore looks of slight bemusement and appeared to definitely be questioning my sanity. The children gratefully accepted bananas, and the adults joined me in a cigarette.

When the time came to leave, I returned to the dirt road where all the garbage trucks were unloading and noticed my moto driver had decided to ignore his own conditional statement and enter the dump. He greeted me with a smile and we made our way out to a washing station located on one of the main roads, where we rinsed bike and body together. My decision to forego traditional tourist sites for those at the bottom rungs of society seemed to have given him an affinity towards me. We returned to the backpacker area where my hostel was located, and he invited me to sit in the alleyway and drink whiskey with him and his fellow moto drivers. After an hour or so of this, he offered to take me to his village later in the week and show me the real Cambodia. My actions had clearly struck a chord with him.

I was so impressed with myself after the trip, and so enamored with the experience, that after returning to Phnom Pen three weeks later with two friends I persuaded them to accompany me back to the dumps. Everything was proceeding smoothly until I requested that one of my companions take a photograph of me wandering in the garbage dunes.

I imagined I would resemble Lawrence of Arabia, with the heaps of sand instead replaced by heaps of plastic and food scraps. Instead of snapping the photograph, however, my companion chastised me. “Is that the only reason you’re here, so people can see pictures of you among the suffering, see how close you got to it?” she asked. I was taken aback and responded defensively. I soon realized that it was only because there was a lot of truth in her accusation.

A number of articles have recently been written about the emerging tourism trend of “poorism,” and its cousins, grief tourism and dark tourism. These terms refer to methods of travel that focus on the less positive aspects of foreign countries, whether it be sites of previous massacres, cities torn apart by recent wars, or broken down slums of the third world. Though the specifics of all three terms are somewhat different, the common thread of these emerging trends is the act of bearing witness to widespread and massive suffering.

In early March, The New York Times published an article highlighting the debate within the travel community regarding poorism. The article detailed the rise of a number of poorism entrepreneurs and included descriptions of some of the tours offered, most notably those through dangerous Brazilian favelas and massive Indian slums.

The article also mentioned a number of detractors critical of the concept of poorism. This side of the argument portrays those who engage in poorism as slack-jawed yokels, gawking at the emaciated, poverty-stricken locals as they snap up photo ops. Poorism, they say, is exploitative of the locals and voyeuristic in nature.

Traveling and tourism, however, are inherently exploitative in nature. One of the main parts of being a traveler is about being a seeker, and the quest to experience and witness ways of life different than your own. Seeking out some of these ways can lead to horrible, soul-crushing places that make you wonder why you wanted to be a seeker in the first place. Ignoring poverty, however, does not make it go away.

I would have felt worse spending my time at gaudy Cambodian mansions and four-star hotels, photographing opulent luxuries while crushing poverty existed right next door. Granted that one is respectful and does not treat the locals like zoo animals, does poorism really have such negative implications?

I freely admit that part of my motivation was that I wanted friends and acquaintances to glance at the pictures and exclaim things like, “Wasn’t it dangerous?” and, “Are you insane?” I also wanted them (as well as myself) to come face to face with poverty they had never witnessed before, except on television programs or in magazines. The fact that I played a part in the taking of the photograph, or stood in the background, made it more visceral, as only first-hand accounts of something have the power to do.

Is that not what professional photographers, journalists, documentary filmmakers, and even politicianstelling stories of laid off factory workers and failing farmers, do to a great degree? The nature of it all is exploitative. What matters is the end goal. Witnessing the everyday struggles of the ragpickers and the conditions they are forced to live in not only grounded me on a personal level, but also would later effect friends and family in the same manner after they glanced at my photos and my recounting of that afternoon.

Those coming from a western society would have to be comatose not to have their priorities challenged by the sites I saw in the dump, or the similar experiences of those who visit the favelas of Rio and the slums of Bombay. In fact, I think it’s a shame that every single person in the United States is not forced to have a similar experience. For now, one can only dream of a reality show that cast off celebutant heirs at the foothills of the plastic dunes of garbage village, Cambodia.

The world is to be experienced, be it in gaudy foreign nightclubs or destitute shantytowns. No one seems bothered when people line up for tours to gawk at Hollywood mansions in the hills, or cruise along the different 5th avenues of the world. I’d rather have people visiting shantytowns, having their eyes opened to what life is truly like for most of the world, then being blinded by the dizzying falsities and gilded wastefulness of the opulently wealthy. The people in the village of the dumps may live among waste, but so do most of those residing in the Hollywood Hills.

© 2008 Last Exit.