I write this in the back of a Jeep on the way back from Preah Vihear, in the north of Cambodia . This is the first sealed road we have driven on in 2 days.

This time last year I was working in the States, staying in the luxurious Westin Hotel in Atlanta. I used to lie there watching cable TV with the irritatingly frequent adverts for SUVs. The adverts all had shots of rugged looking vehicles bounding across stunning scenery, and in spite of a few misgivings about the environment, it did look like great fun. It is not, it is grim. There is no suspension system made in Detroit that will stop a hole in the road at 20mph feel like your aren't getting kicked in the arse. And it goes on for hours. You can go slower or faster it doesn't make much difference, just depends on if you like your beating slowly or quickly. It's like a small boat in heavy weather, bouncing and swaying around, and like a boat after a few hours you just want to get off and stand on something stationary for a few minutes.

Unlike a boat you can get out and enjoy the countryside - just don't stray off the road, there are mines. At one point the driver swerved to avoid a particularly large hole in the road and skidded into the bush. Gingerly pulling out he turns around to me and grins: “No mines”. I think he was teasing.

The road to Preah Vihear

The minefields are all too real up here and de-mining a big employer. It is painstaking work. After they have finished a site they put up a notice recording the job. One we saw took 2 months to clear 22,000 sq meters, (5 acres) They removed 36,000 fragments of metal (shrapnel, bullets etc) and only 15 mines and 15 pieces of unexploded ordinance (UXO in the jargon) Those 15 mines probably took less than an hour to lay. The minefields are often by the side of the road, possibly laid as part of an ambush. It is not unusual to see a house just set back from the road with a minefield marked out where the front garden should be.

Marking cleared minefield

The civil war in this area only finished in 1998. The war kept people out, but now they are moving in and clearing the forest. The elephants and tigers are long gone, but the forest is still beautiful. First the illegal loggers take the timber, and after they have finished the farmers move in and finish clearing the land by burning. We saw fires all around. It is easy to be judgmental; up close you see a more complex problem. These are dirt poor people. You don't set out with your family to build a farm in the forest with nothing more than an axe, a few pots and if you are lucky, a pile of timber, unless you are desperate.

Please dont incinerate me anymore

Local wages out here are low. The garment factories in Phnom Penh pay 3USD per day. That is a sought-after job. Minnie Driver, the actress, came out recently to protest at the exploitation but was persuaded that in Cambodia 3USD for a day's work where you don't have to do hard physical labour in the sun, is a cushy number.

So last night I stayed in a guest house with a large dead cockroach in the bathroom, mosquitoes the size of dragon flies and no sheets on the bed. I got out my laptop and watched a DVD. My job is to have a look at the technical effectiveness of a network of information centres that USAID has funded across Cambodia as a part of an effort to build democracy. Each has a handful of computers and a small library. This one has an internet connection by a mobile phone to a local base station that has a satellite link to Phnom Penh , where the link takes another satellite hop to the world. The result is pretty poor. To connect to a website in the US over 2 satellite hops takes just under 4 seconds at a maximum speed of 9.6kbps. That is slow. Your home connection in the US or the UK probably takes about 250ms and probably runs at 44kbps.

Preah Vihear Community Infomation Centre

I have my doubts about the value of an internet connection to people who have more pressing needs. The objective of the program is to improve democracy by bringing news to the provinces and allowing people to communicate out of the province to NGOs, newspapers, central government that sort of thing. The local governor doesn't like the centre much, so maybe it is having an affect. And it has to be better value than giving it to Halliburton to spend in Iraq .

5 more centres to visit, but they are getting more remote. Next week I get to try the boat up the Mekong instead.