Decades after the conflicts that scarred Cambodia, large areas of the countryside are still contaminated with landmines and unexploded ordnance. The APOPO centre trains giant African rats to sniff these out.
The rats are trained to walk back and forth across land that could contain landmines and indicate if they sniff explosives. The rats are big, but not big enough to detonate a mine.
The rats wear a harness that attaches to a rope.
Then the rope is used to guide them back and forth across the land.
After watching the demonstration, visitors are able to hold the rats.
There’s an interesting presentation that follows the rat encounter – we could see some visitors skipped this last part.
APOPO is an acronym from Dutch which stands for ‘Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling’.
We paid a Tuk-Tuk US$2 to take us from our our central hotel FFC Angkor to the visitor centre and that included a tip!
We enjoyed our visit to the visitor centre. We’d had three days of temples and this was an interesting change.
APOPO
Trapeang Ses Village, Kouk Chauk Commune, Koumai Road, Siem Reap 171253, Cambodia
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