Competition or camaraderie? Inside the tight-knit community of Siem Reap’s tuk-tuk drivers

“I come here …” he looks off in the distance, counting, “around one million times.”

I’m climbing up the worn sandstone steps of Angkor Wat with Sour (pronounced soo-uh) Lay, a petite man with a mischievous smile. For the last 20 years, Sour has been a tuk-tuk driver in the Cambodian city of Siem Reap—a respectable and fruitful career. Until recently.

At 9am, the sun is baking rather than broiling, and my shirt is already clinging to my back. We walk through an archway that welcomes us into the 12th-century temple, its walls lined with carvings apsara dancers immortalized in the middle of hip shimmies. Barefoot monks clad in orange robes walk ahead of us. Through a dark passageway, we emerge onto a back courtyard, where Sour points me to another archway that looks out on a grid of covered hallways dotted with wispy palms, the ever-encroaching jungle in the distance. “Sister, I take your picture here, like this.” He shows me how to pose, leaning against the wall.

Sour, like many other people who make a living driving people around in a “remorque,” or two-wheeled covered cart hitched to the back of a motorbike, isn’t just a chauffeur, but a guide, a friend—and an expert iPhone photographer. One million times around the temple complex will do that to a person.

When I was last here in 2019, business was booming for Sour and his colleagues—Cambodia welcomed the highest number of visitors ever recorded that year. But now, the same tuk-tuk drivers who were thriving during the city’s tourism heyday when I left are in desperate pursuit of work.

There are no recent numbers, but a paper from 2019  estimated there were some 6,000 tuk-tuk drivers in Siem Reap at the time. To a tourist, it may seem like even more—anyone who’s walked around town has been hailed by insistent calls of “Tuk-tuk, lad-y? Tuk-tuk, sir?”

Few visitors understand why such interactions take place. Drivers who don’t have contracts with local hotels must rely on streetside pickups to cobble together a living. In 2018, Uber-like apps PassApp and Grab began to drive prices down by offering cheaper fares. Then came the pandemic, which drastically reduced the number of tourists in Siem Reap in need of rides. And in October 2023, just as tourism was starting to recover, Siem Reap closed its airport at the outskirts of the city and opened a new one 25 miles away. Because of a high toll to use the airport road, and its distance from the city, many tuk-tuk drivers no longer find those pickups worthwhile.

“Loyalty to the community plays a critical role in shaping business conduct [and can] transcend immediate economic benefits … It’s essential to recognize this behavior not as a deficiency, but as a manifestation of deeply ingrained social and cultural norms.”

- Dr. Sophal Ear, Arizona State University

With city rides dominated by the apps and airport pick-ups dominated by cars and buses, the strongest source of income left for many tuk-tuk drivers is driving tourists around the temples—and that’s made earning a living more difficult than ever.

To stay afloat in such a competitive environment, drivers may have to become more competitive themselves. This is harder than it sounds, since acting out of self-interest to employ cut-throat business practices goes against Khmer culture, which places a high value on loyalty to family and community. As Dr. Sophal Ear, a Cambodian-American professor at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, put it, “In Khmer culture, saving face is paramount.” For tuk-tuk drivers, that means “​​a shared understanding that overly aggressive competition could undermine their community’s collective welfare and social harmony.”

Sour is a great example of someone who has gotten by just fine as a tuk-tuk driver without a fiercely competitive spirit—until this perfect storm of obstacles occurred. These days, he tells me, he makes a little over a third of what he did before the pandemic. With two kids to raise, Sour is struggling, but after so much time in this line of work, what other choice does he have but to push on?

As we walk past the ponds adorned with lotus flowers, Sour tells me how he got into the business. “I’m a crazy student,” he says, when I ask how he learned his way around the 402-acre temple complex. He winks with both eyes and sticks his tongue out, explaining that he cut classes in high school to visit the temples. “After, I make my job tourism because I know the place everywhere.”

As if to make his point, he directs me away from the throngs of tourists that clog the grand walkway between Angkor Wat’s gate and its iconic spires, toward a red dirt path that forms a shortcut back to the moat. The path weaves through the jungle, passing a pagoda where monks gather to burn incense. Here, away from the tourists taking selfies and guides giving tours, I can tune into the quiet reverence this sacred site has elicited for more than 800 years.

I crave a cold drink in this intensifying heat, so we walk to a small coffee stand. Loud bird calls rain down from the treetops and a number of tuk-tuks are gathered below, the drivers waiting for their guests—most drivers don’t accompany their customers onto temple grounds.

A friend of Sour’s, Same (Sam) Savat, comes by. Like Sour, he’s been a driver for 20 years now, carting tourists around town and through the temple complex. His English is very good, and when I compliment him on it, he stands up straighter and says he feels all tuk-tuk drivers should work to improve their language skills: “I don’t want the tuk-tuk driver when they talk to the tourists, it’s just, ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘thank you.’”

Same takes self-improvement seriously. Although temples are a significant piece of Cambodia’s cultural heritage—Angkor Wat features prominently on the country’s flag—Same says he learned very little about their history in school. To provide a higher level of service to his guests, Same turned to Wikipedia and guidebooks, spending six months memorizing facts about the kingdom of Angkor, a powerful empire that ruled over Southeast Asia for six centuries.

Same is about as competitive a tuk-tuk driver as you can find in Siem Reap, calling his peers “lazy” and admonishing them for “waiting on the gods to help them” instead of taking matters into their own hands like he has. Perhaps though, the lack of motivation he notes is more about the Khmer tendency to preserve social harmony than laziness. As Dr. Sophal Ear explained to me: “Loyalty to the community plays a critical role in shaping business conduct.” Despite mounting pressures to compete for limited fares, such loyalty can “transcend immediate economic benefits.”

This may seem strange to those used to a more competitive Western culture, but Dr. Sophal Ear has a different take: “It’s essential to recognize this behavior not as a deficiency, but as a manifestation of deeply ingrained social and cultural norms.” And after my years living within Khmer culture, I agree—to me, this is the downside of a quality I otherwise greatly admire. Does a desire to maintain a peaceful community have to be at odds with making a living?

Sour also gets business from expats who know him as the go-to man for just about anything: The location of a hidden temple that’s not on the map, the best place to get a phone screen fixed, where in town that street stand with the delicious noodle soup is parked.

Iced coffees in hand, Sour and I return to the tuk-tuk parking. From there, we drive through thick jungle growth, alive with the thrum of bugs and birds, and I watch long-tailed macaques scamper through the undergrowth. We reach the next layer of the temple complex, merging onto a paved road lined with enormous thitpok trees, their folds of golden roots splayed over the ground. Eventually, the regal faces of the Bayon temple emerge from the jungle like a mirage, and we join a cluster of tuk-tuks parked in the shade.

You’d never guess that this group of drivers are actually competitors. They’re gathered around their vehicles, chatting amicably—some sit in one of the tuk-tuks, others lean against its wooden frame, talking to a driver who swings from a hammock he’s strung up across the carriage of his own tuk-tuk nearby.

When Sour introduces me to the drivers, one invites me to sit down in the back of his tuk-tuk, where ‘Cowboy’ is written in bold lettering on the leather seat. The driver addresses me in Khmer, introducing himself as “Cowboy” and saying, “Knyum cholchet YEEHAW,” I like to Yeehaw, with a tip of his wide-brimmed hat.

I join in the tuk-tuk drivers’ conversation for a while, joking around in a mix of Khmer and English. Suddenly Cowboy, who’s been slumped over in the back of his tuk-tuk across from me, shoots up. That’s my cue to jump out of the carriage so two European tourists in elephant-print pants can sit down. Cowboy starts the music—Bon Jovi’s You Give Love a Bad Name—and revs the engine, shouting “Yeehaw!” as he pulls out of parking and on toward the next temple in the circuit.

Since trying to outsmart their peers to compete for rides goes against Khmer culture, tuk-tuk drivers look for ways to stand out to customers instead. That’s why some choose to embody a theme—I’ve seen Batman, Superman, karaoke, and now Cowboy—or improve their knowledge like Same. The female tuk-tuk drivers of Siem Reap, who face double the obstacles as they attempt to break into a male-dominated industry, have banded together to form an association called the Driver Srey (driver woman), marketing their services to solo female travelers.

Rather than turning to upgrades, gimmicks, or marketing tactics to entice customers, Sour opts for determination, setting up his post on the corner of Street 26 in the Wat Bo neighborhood before sunrise. He also gets business from expats who know him as the go-to man for just about anything: The location of a hidden temple not on the map; the best place to get a phone screen fixed; where in town that street stand with the delicious noodle soup is parked.

It’s Sour’s resourcefulness that takes us off the main road onto a quieter one leading to Preah Khan, where only a handful of tourists venture. This structure is part of the larger circuit (usually reserved for day two of a three-day tuk-tuk temple tour for anyone who’s not ‘templed out’ after the small circuit of Angkor Wat, Bayon, and Ta Prohm aka the ‘Tomb Raider temple’). Of course, Sour knows just how I should pose for a photo, so it looks like I’m holding the giant lingam in the temple’s center chamber before he takes me on another jungle path shortcut back to the tuk-tuk.

From there, we drive through the countryside, where banana palms hang low over huts on stilts. On a bumpy back road, Sour expertly maneuvers his motorbike and the attached tuk-tuk through thick sand to get us safely to Banteay Thom, a secluded temple hidden in the jungle. “Here no people,” he assures me. “Only snakes…” he adds.

After a people- and snake-free exploration of the temple grounds, we skid through the sand again, headed back to the city. Although my experience today feels special, it’s not unlike that of hundreds of tourists who visit these sacred temple grounds each day, relying on tuk-tuk drivers for a bucket-list trip around one of the world’s wonders. Drivers form the backbone of tourism in this city, but the reality is that these days, there just isn’t enough work to go around.

Even so, Siem Reap’s tuk-tuk drivers remain optimistic about the industry. Wondering if Sour would consider another career if business were to continue this way, I ask him when he thinks he’ll throw in the towel. “Stop driving maybe 70 years old,” he tells me, “Then maybe my eyes no good.”

As Siem Reap’s tuk-tuk drivers maintain social harmony and face the industry’s evolution together, my only hope is that their alliance becomes a tool for communal success, and not their ultimate downfall.

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