A tourist stunned locals when he went swimming in a canal just days after mountains of pollution had been removed.
Shocking before and after pictures of the Boeung Trabek canal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, show how just a month ago it was swamped with plastic.
Tens of thousands of bags, cans and bottles were preventing the water from flowing and suffocating the wild life.
But several frustrated locals joined forces at the beginning of March and had a mass clean-up of the filthy waterway.
Within a few weeks it was spotless and unrecognisable from the stinking swamp of sewage and rubbish it had been just weeks earlier.
One brave foreigner even stripped down to his underpants and went for a swim in the notorious canal, which is still used as a drainage channel from the streets and homes.
Pictures show the man standing in the waist high wanted before doing the front crawl for some 20 metres, as bemused locals look on,
British expat Chris Demopoulos, 55, who lives in the South East Asian city, said: ‘’The canal’s a lot cleaner but I still wouldn’t want to go swimming there. Or any canal for that matter.
‘’Local children and teenagers helped to clean the canal and they did a good job. The pollution problem in many of these waterways is severe. I just hope they can keep it clean.’’
