December 16, 2008

Part 5 - Water Festival (week 18)

Hi,

I have had endless troubles with managing my email as Office and Vista (spawn of Bill Gates and Satan) don’t get on, and am in another long period of no internet access. This time it is largely stupid delays in getting the bill paid, and power cuts. Having regular communications makes life a lot more pleasant (although lately a lot of my communications have been the email equivalent of window envelopes, not what you need when you’re flat broke). To add to the frustrations, my long draft of ‘Notes 5’ has vanished, so I’ll start again…

In the brief time when I did have ‘net, I discovered “torrents”, the file sharing method that has picked up where the likes of Napster left off (or were cut off by the likes of Sony). Michael Crichton’s Prey was all about how computer programmers use biological principles in advanced programming, and this is how torrents work: you get a ‘swarm’ of people all passing tiny bits of music or whatever around like ‘flu in an office building. Its fascinating, and has also led me deeper in to the world of open source software. This is where a bunch of enthusiasts all pitch in to develop a program, make it freely available and gradually improve it. They have already produced a perfectly good office suite - if you don’t want to pay $150 for Microsoft’s Office just go to OpenOffice.org and get theirs for free! What gets me is that these programs (such as the ones I’m using to download and edit music) are easier to use, more stable and fuller featured than stuff you buy, and its all done by hobbyists. Its great to know that trains get spotted and birds twitched, but these guys have a really useful hobby, and they’re damn clever. Childhood obesity and social alienation is surely a small price to pay for such computer literacy…

Looking at all this and working with people who think a net is for fish (or with the success of our education program: mosquitoes) brings home the ‘information divide’, a new way of looking at the separation of developed and less so. As web sites get bigger and heavier they get less accessible rather than more; many aren’t worth the wait. I am becoming very tired of BBC World which seems to be a 24 hour ad for a website, its always “look it up here” and “for more information go there” - you are a freaking tv channel guys! We don’t all have ADSL blipping away in our spare room! If they spent all that air time on news stories we’d all be better informed.

Anyway, back to my corner of the world. The monsoon has come to a belated end, and the town is turning into a dust bath. It isn’t helped by the constant roadworks which have been providing an ever changing moto cross track into the town centre. At times its almost fun but tricky in the dark, especially if you haven’t seen it lately in the daylight, with huge trenches appearing across the road daily. Its not helped by the fact that when you get a rough spot and back off the throttle the headlight goes out! I bumped up the idle a bit which has helped. There is constantly a red layer forming on everything, inside the house and office almost as much as out.

Meanwhile the market has been half demolished. It consisted of a good sized concrete pavilion with a definite communist-funded look about it, propping up a slightly larger area of shanty roofs and mud baths. Now all the shanty part has been cleared and a concrete structure is going up. The stalls have moved out to a temporary ring around the site, which is actually better than the old market, with wider aisles and firmer footing, though the tarpaulin roofs are very low for a barang.

There is ever increasing crime and violence in town, with muggings, thefts and breakins all rising. A family who live near me have a farm and house about 4 km from home. One night they were at the farm, having just sold a crop and so with a sum of money on the premises; they were robbed and the whole family shot. Later the thieves realised the wife had survived and pursued her to the hospital to finish the job, which they didn’t manage. A couple of nights back someone was trying to get into my place in the small hours.

I got to see the local aristocracy at play one lunchtime; I was sitting in Gecko House restaurant when I heard the sliding of tyres and the clash of a moto accident. From my seat I saw a young teenage guy come off a shiny new moto, he soon got up so I kept out of it. Soon after a guy turned up in a Lexus and demanded to know who hit his son. The motodops (moto taxi drivers) who work from that corner said that it was the kid’s fault (he sped around the junction without looking, which is not uncommon) and the guy started belting the motodops. By then four police had arrived and when they told him not to hit them, he turned on the police, punching three of them and copping a few good ones in return. Eventually one of his associates calmed him a bit and he stalked off to his Lexus and left. Seeing him punch police with impunity is a good illustration of the power balance in Cambodia. One of the cops was my landlord!

There was a march through town in support of the rule of law and land rights. The last one of these was broken up with water cannon and tear gas. Despite some pressure to join I abstained, not for fear of some roughhouse but because it is not part of my job and so clearly outside the guidelines laid down by AusAID for my behaviour. It all went peacefully.

One of these land disputes has led to a court case, where local big shots sold off village land to a company and then stole most of the proceeds - one family was paid their share of compensation for their lost land to the princely sum of $12.50! - but the villagers took action and claimed the land back. The company agreed but (not unfairly) asked for their money back. Of course it had been milked off and spent, and the ‘elders’ objected to this being pointed out publicly and have sued for defamation. I was chatting to a British volunteer in his first week at his new job, with an organisation that is (incorrectly) blamed for promulgating a report with the slanderous claims in it. He is wondering if he’ll be behind bars by week’s end! At the end of the first day’s hearing the defendants were in custody and getting a bit of a roughing up from their gaolers, to which the assembled crowd took exception - there was a minor riot and the prisoners freed by the mob.

At the time I was in my office, which is next door to ADHOC, a human rights activist organisation. A sudden hail of gunfire caught my attention, there seemed to be at least one guy with a handgun in the street and someone else had dumped a moto and bolted. Then a pickup full of police bristling with rifles turned up and the guys at the centre of it all took off. I’m not sure what it was all about and my landlord couldn’t enlighten me. No bullets hit our building anyway.

On one of the holidays a bunch of us went down to Boeung Yak Lom, the volcanic crater lake outside town. The water is deep (about 60m) and clear, and on days like this so still that floating in the centre (with eyes hippo-like just above the surface) you can see the curvature of the earth. We shared a pot of rice wine: you buy a ceramic pot filled with sawdust and poke bamboo straws into it, then pour in water, when you suck you get wine. As it empties you just keep adding water, til eventually it loses its strength like an old tea bag. It doesn’t taste a whole lot better, but the delivery system is a bit more controlled than swilling down slugs of lao lao rice whisky from shot glasses.

In November we had the water festival, which commemorates the reversal of flow in the Tonlé Sap: for half the year it drains a huge lake into the Mekong, and for the other half fills the lake from the Mekong (which rises about 7 metres in the monsoon). Near the lake is Siem Reap and Angkor (when I first came the river was the main artery to travel there), at the junction with the Mekong is Phnom Penh, and here there are ‘dragon boat’ races and other festivities which bring around a million people to town. I dodged the crowd and went to the beach for a week. I won’t spout clichés like ‘Kuta 30 years ago’ but if you fancy a beach holiday, go before its spoilt…

On the way back I went shopping in Phnom Penh, pillows for my aching neck, a duvet (now a necessity as the weather cools) and a pair of rattan armchairs (pretty comfortable considering my meagre budget, but they took about 20km/h off the top speed of our car riding on the roof). After a week away I still had yellow-red toe nails from the Ratanakiri dirt.

We in the west are rather coddled with gadgets and stuff. I remember in Zimbabwe asking for a can opener and being met with blank looks; what’s wrong with a carving knife? And once you get the knack its not hard, maybe a bit of a tendency to take the edge off the knife. (The empty cans are less useful with the jagged edges.) In Thailand I stayed with a family whose kitchen was equipped with a goodly collection of blunt knives (from opening cans? they didn’t use many) and I was looking for a sharpening stone, gaining similar blank looks. What’s wrong with a plate? You simply turn over the nearest china bowl and hone the knife on the ring of unglazed surface beneath. This works well as a ‘steel’ but has its limits; in the end I got a cheap stone and sharpened the lot. This minor achievement must have gone to my head, as next time I got bored I completely rewired their house!

I am enjoying using my first ever meat cleaver, really good as a cooking knife but essential for my bolognaise as it’s the only way to mince meat (yes, I do buy those big chunks of pork that lie around the market feeding the flies). I gave it a quick run over the bottom of a plate and nearly took the end of my finger off practicing my ‘Asian tv chef’ speed chopping technique on shallots. I think it’s the first real outing for my first aid kit in the last seven countries.

One lunchtime I came home to a flood - the landlord’s sister-in-law (who lives with them and helps around the house) started the well pump and went out; once the tank filled it overflowed into my bathroom and kitchen. Later I heard a series of loud bangs from the toilet; a guest must have left the light on and the water seeped into the fitting, causing a bit of arc welding.

Its starting to get chilly some nights and I’m glad to have that hot shower (except the odd time when the power is off or the tank empty) and my single jumper. The days are very pleasant though, it’s a great climate at this end of the year. The manager of a German NGO threw a big party last weekend, a great show but in the dark I stubbed my toe on a rock and split it in two, now I don’t get about much while I wait for the halves to rejoin. I forced myself to close and dress it which was a bit gruesome.

At last! Internet .. I can send this without dragging my laptop into town and renting a connection. Cheers!

Tony

October 29, 2008

Part 4 - Home sweet home - 21/11/2008

I had a trip down to Phnom Penh, mainly to interview applicants for a new project (Maternal Health Rights), and took the chance to shop for household stuff like better quality cookware and glasses that’s hard to find in Ban Lung. The social responsibilities of such a trip are mind boggling - my mate Colin arrived back the same day, and three new volunteers on the Friday, it all adds up to a lot of bar-hours, and not much bed-hours. AVI organised a sunset ‘booze cruise’ on the river to welcome the vols and a visitor from head office, and this segued into a party at a magnificent bar on the waterfront opposite town, then another with a bunch of Australian Youth Ambassadors at a place in town… After a week of this I needed to get home for a holiday.

Small world syndrome struck again .. I was sitting with Col in a restaurant and was distracted by the side/back view of a guy walking past, one of those silly ‘they look familiar moments’, took a while to trace the memory to a guy called Toby from Harare days, but no, trick of the mind. Two days later I came out of my hotel and set off down the street, a voice called “Tony?”. I turned to see a strange woman (no, a normal woman that I didn’t recognise, not a strange .. oh, forget it) who saw my blank look and said “were you in Zimbabwe? .. Peterborough Lodge .. from Canada .. I married Toby .. my hair was red then” .. I do remember her, not well as we only met a couple of times, but the guy I saw was Toby, the vol who took over running the education camp on the Zambezi where I canoed with hippos. Not long after being dragged out of bed at 3am with a gun to his head he decided to move on. We got together for a drink; he’s doing natural resource surveys in the Cardamoms now. Gives you a weird timewarp feeling.

I’ve gone through the tiring process of shopping for household goods and settling into the house, got a gas bottle and water filter, strung up the mozzie net and so on. I installed a new power outlet and light by my bed - if I turned off the power I cut off the landlord as well, so I wired it ‘hot’. I’m getting used to this - in Thailand I completely rewired a house, and putting in the main switch had to be done with live wires, which was a bit tricky as there was some old splices to remove and very heavy cable - there was a little ‘arc welding’, which added excitement to the day. I put the light on the wall low over the bed for reading, and the way it lights the net from inside is actually quite cosy and romantic, like a 4 poster.

The water filter is a large ceramic pot which sits in a bucket, you fill the pot and the water seeps through the clay and collects below. Some of my roof drains into the header tank, but the main water supply is pumped from a well. Most houses have a well, and most have a septic tank; you can see the need for the filter.

I have moved one block, and into a new time zone … in my concrete hotel I was well insulated and continued my usual daily routine, but the house with its thin plank walls and usually open windows is not much soundproof, and daily life kicks off in my neighbourhood around 4:30am, with dogs, roosters, families, vehicles and pots and buckets all joining the cacophony. I am waking (and going to bed) about 2 hours earlier than before, but some sleeps wind up a bit short for my liking. The water ran out one night and the pump was started about 4:45 one morning, it is right next to my bed and sounded like a huge storm hitting, an abrupt end to my z blowing.

The house is pretty luxurious really, apart from the standard of some of the work you really couldn’t ask much more, except for insect proofing and maybe some insulation. I was telling my boss that I had the hot shower working, and his wife got in on the act, sharing with him her thoughts on the fact that theirs doesn’t work. He fled back to the office. But when I told him I can access the internet from home, he got really steamed. He is keen to move himself, largely because of a persistent rat problem. I try to tell him there’s money to be made - see the article at the bottom…

[I’ve added photos of the house to http://tonyhobbs.webs.com/tony/gallery/ratanakiri.htm ]

I didn’t need to find a maid, one found me pretty quick. She is the sister of Sal who has a restaurant in my street. Like my landlords she speaks no English so I have more incentive to practice Khmae. Sal went with me to the market to shop for cleaning stuff, and hopefully now I can go back and get reasonable prices at the same stalls. Tooling along on my moto with a woman sidesaddle on the back gripping 2 buckets, a huge tub, broom, mop, plates, bowls, basket and sundry tools and soaps, I started to feel a bit local.

Of course, the traffic in Cambodia is pretty hectic, with road rules treated as a suggestion only and a lot of pragmatism involved. We used to be impressed by the ‘Holden Precision Driving Team’ doing four car crossovers in an arena, but here the same manoeuvre is a simple daily routine, especially at the “Ugly Monument” in the centre of the main crossroads in town. Like the Thais (and unlike the Viets) people are very tolerant and cooperative, so as long as they can see what you’re up to, you can push in pretty much anywhere, and when you make a mistake you are likely to get off unscathed, others will just dodge you and grin. Crossing main roads on foot is an acquired skill, basically you have to ignore the traffic and move steadily with no sudden stops and starts, and the traffic flows around you. It’s a bit the same when driving. Unfortunately this push and go mentality leads to some nasty gridlock in Phnom Penh.

Ban Lung, like most towns, has a large number of ‘karaoke bars’, which do in fact offer this disgusting pastime, and sell booze, but only as a prelude to the real business of commercial sex. I’ve seen cars pulling up at one of these and collecting girls; I’m not sure if they offer full service on the premises as well as wine and song.

I went down to Sal’s one night, being the only visitor I sat with her under the house rather than going down the back to the new restaurant building. There was a woman lurking behind a pillar in the dark, peeking out occasionally; eventually she emerged and sat down but stayed silent and watchful. Later Sal told me that this woman was offered a job as a housemaid by a man who came to her village, so she came to Ban Lung but found herself expected to work at a karaoke bar. After 2 days she ran away and went down my street asking at various houses if she could sleep for a night .. all sent her packing until Sal let her stay. Hopefully she’s home now.

There are big road and drainage works happening on the main road into town, which is where our office is. Its long overdue and has been in progress for over a year, but they look pretty serious about it at the moment. How far they will go I don’t know - will there be bitumen? That would be really good. Meantime they are using a vibrating roller and each time it passes the whole office bounces around like some frenetic amphetamine driven earthquake has struck, rattling teeth and eyeballs in their sockets.

I’ve been trying to set up a small computer network (without much success) and changing the Windows product key on various pcs running pirate software (with more luck). I need to look at antivirus as we have a few worms in the system. For the moment I’m finished with my recruiting duties, but there’s more vacancies so I may get a Guernsey again.

I’m keeping to the tradition of living in ‘interesting times’. I was happy enough to arrive here a week after the latest elections, so all the ballyhoo was done, but now they’ve picked a fight with Goliath next door. The century of tension over ownership of the Preah Vihear historical site is breaking into firefights with the Thai army. Although this Angkor era temple has been affirmed as Cambodia’s under international law, it has long been much more accessible from the Thai side and many tourists have visited by crossing the border. Upset by Cambodia’s move to register the temple as a World Heritage site, the Thai government decided to occupy the area and our guys bit back. Last time the Thai gov’t upset the locals there were riots in Phnom Penh and the Thai embassy was attacked, so many Thais have fled the country.

The wet season is drawing to a close (with major flooding again in central Vietnam I thought we might see a bit more than the odd sprinkle we’ve had), but there’s still a sting in its tail - lunchtime today a squall came through with (unusually) strong winds and rain. Lightning struck very close to my house, and now there is no power or internet. The office has a generator but not many houses do. The town cable tv is dead but doesn’t matter to me - I unplugged my tv too late and it got fried, its stone dead now.

The roadworks have created an 80 cm drop outside our gate, and now the road is turning to claggy mud - when I walk along I gradually get taller as the clay sticks to my thongs and steadily turns then into platforms .. sort of Fred Flintstone does the 70’s .. but they get very heavy and start to drag.

 

 

Poor struggle as rat meat prices soar

Posted Wed Aug 27, 2008

The price of rat meat has quadrupled in Cambodia this year as inflation puts other meat beyond the reach of poor people, officials say.

With consumer price inflation at 37 per cent according to the latest central bank estimate, demand has pushed a kilogram of rat meat up to around 5,000 riel ($1.48).  Spicy field rat dishes with garlic thrown in have become particularly popular at a time when beef costs 20,000 riel a kilogram.

Officials say rats are fleeing to higher ground from flooded areas of the lower Mekong Delta, making it easier for villagers to catch them.

"Many children are happy making some money from selling the animals to the markets, but they keep some for their family," Ly Marong, an agriculture official said.

"Not only are our poor eating it, but there is also demand from Vietnamese living on the border with us." He estimates that Cambodia supplies more than a tonne of live rats a day to Vietnam.Rats are also eaten widely in Thailand, while a state government in eastern India this month encouraged its people to eat rats in an effort to battle soaring food prices and save grain stocks.   - Reuters

 

October 22, 2008

Part 3 - 7th October, 2008 (Week 9)

Like Thais, Cambodians love a good public holiday, and have 26 a year. Yes, twenty six. Ma'phei phra:m muәi in Khmae. Its time Aussies had a good hard look at this figure and sorted out a few more of their own. (None of us are up with the Balinese tally of 60!) We have just had a 4 day weekend for Pchum Ben, the festival of the hungry ghosts, when the spirits of dead ancestors are said to walk the earth and offerings of food are made to them. I thought about travelling somewhere, but the distances are too great and the buses so busy that I decided on a quiet weekend at home. On these big holidays the minivans tend to end up with passengers on the roof, and some have been spotted riding on the bonnet of Camrys.

I ran into some VSO volunteers in a restaurant and was invited along on their touring - most were visiting from Phnom Penh and Kratie and had hired a guide with a Pajero for a couple of days. I had missed the inner tube rafting but went to a couple of the waterfalls - it was a great opportunity to see them in full monsoonal spate without breaking my neck trying to ride a 'bike there - and visited a Tuam Puan 'hill tribe' village to look at their weaving. They are really nice to visitors and seem so unaffected compared to those I've seen in trek areas of Thailand and Laos. (I am so 'not a tourist' that it never occurred to me to take my camera and I missed some great shots.) There was also 3 bottles of single malt and a party 'til 4am but a tussle with stomach parasites kept me from joining in, thanks Buddha.

I have at last rented a house, 'slowly slowly catchee monkey' worked well for me, but with several new arrivals pending the pressure was on to act. It is very close to work in the street behind - they share some fence at the back. Being one block from the main highway and on a tar road it may be a little less dusty and certainly quieter than some. Prices are on the rise and I think I have a good deal.

It is a traditional wooden elevated house, but they have 'built in' the bottom and the owners now live downstairs, which is a bad as far as making noise and disturbing each other but is very good for security, sadly this is becoming a big issue. The landlord is a cop which may help too. They built a new two story 'wet area' so the house has an inside kitchen, shower and separate western toilet, all tiled and with stainless steel sink and modern bathroom fittings. They have put glass windows and burglar bars in place of the traditional shutters. So it is the best of both worlds: cool, characterful timber with clean bright cooking and washing facilities. I negotiated a hot water unit, and there is just enough water pressure and power to have a hot shower, a big luxury in cool season and one not shared by many expats here. Glass windows are useful as the houses are so dark with the shutters closed, and when you open them you get all the dust.

Most houses have much the same floor plan, though mine has had a wall removed which creates an L shaped living room (instead of another small bedroom). The biggest room was the kitchen/bath/washroom and had a concrete pan on the floor with drain and taps as a wash area. I thought I could work around it but yesterday they ripped it all out, so that is now my main bedroom. Then there are two more rooms; as is typical, one of these opens onto the front verandah rather than into the house. While its not one of the larger places it is plenty big enough for me; the only thing that could be bigger is the balcony as this is where most parties happen. Even here I have a little extra space, as the balcony runs around the side (which is unusual), its only 4' wide there but still useable.

The next task is to find a maid ... you can hardly expect a volunteer development worker to sweep their own floor, I mean really... A cleaner 5 days a week starts at $30 a month, and most people are happy to pay this just to keep on top of the dust, but many keep one on full time for security while they are at work. Now I have an incentive to practice Khmer - the landlords speak almost no English and likely the maid will be the same. Hiring can wait for a while as I will be in the house only 2 nights and then go to Phnom Penh for 5 days. Shopping! A great chance to kit out the new digs, plus my mate Colin will be in town, plus AVI are welcoming new volunteers and a head office visitor with a Mekong River sunset cruise which should be fun.

I am still grappling with exactly how I am going to deliver useful training to the staff here, the middle managers are all so busy that it just isn't practical to take them off to classes for any length of time, so I will likely be doing more mentoring that anything, at least until the Indigenous People's Health Association gets up and running. Soon there will be new people in two of the four team leader positions so its hard to guess at what they will be wanting. Also the Australian who works as technical advisor to one of the projects is leaving and a new face will take that spot. Meanwhile I have got onto the selection panel for positions in our new Maternal Health Advocacy Project, some of the applicants will do interviews and work tests in Phnom Penh, hence my visit.

Ban Lung was a safe peaceful small town until a few years ago, but the growth and influx of 'lowlanders', and perhaps some drug use, has lead to a gradual rise in crime. A few of my pals have had to move house because of repeated robberies, in one the guys just started jemmying timbers off the wall to get in, mid morning in the middle of town! The same morning my boss was targeted, but his wife and daughter were at home and disturbed the offenders who fortunately fled. More recently muggings have started to happen, usually around the town lake. One Friday night a Spanish expat turned up at Sal's Restaurant looking flustered; she'd been riding her pushbike and was stopped and relieved of her mobile phone. Not too happy with this she bought a motorbike to be safer, but last Saturday night she left Sal's to go home and was mugged on the main road for her shoulder bag, tipped off the bike in the process. All in all a sad and worrying trend.

Rainy season continues - there was a massive dump last night which caught me out at a bar, so I sat it out for two and a half hours - even if I'd had my poncho I wasn't about to take that on, apart from anything else you can't see in such a downpour, and the roads are murder. When wet the red clay roads are a skating rink; I sat with the Aussie from work and had a coffee next door to the office, and in the course of one cuppa four motos went down slap in front of the restaurant, all local people and so you'd expect well practised on two wheels. I've come off mine again, going out to a lodge on the Vietnam road 5km or so east of town. If you have the skill you are better off getting a bit of speed up, but I was only pottering and so just earned a mudbath and no scars. By chance I had just taken a photo of the offending puddle ..

I thought I'd have Sunday brunch at this 'rainforest eco lodge', which is a community project and well regarded, but when I asked about food the guy said 'sorry no meat, only vegetable, we have no guest'. No problem quoth I. Later he came back: 'sorry no vegetable'. That's OK, I have an appointment with a puddle anyway... I went on to the beautiful crater lake nearby but felt too dirty to sully the clear waters so didn't swim, just relaxed with a book.

Part 2 - 17th September, 2008 (Week 7) Ban Lung

Well, the Khmer lessons didn't disappoint, continuing to throw up new letters until the final minutes. Those 34 consonants can stand alone, or join up to form a syllable, but when grouped the second consonant nests with the first using a 'subscript' form, so there are 34 new letters to learn (a bit like Roman lower case). These are usually below but can wrap left or right of the first letter, then the vowel is added above, below, left or right of the consonant(s). (Except where this is too crowded - then you get another form of the vowel that goes below instead of above.) As I mentioned, the 22 vowels mostly have two sounds, dependent on the last consonant in the group to which they are attached (with a few exceptions where the first consonant decides) and there are also 13 independent vowels (one of which only occurs in two words), the consonants have one of two intrinsic vowel sounds when alone, chuck in a couple of exceptional cases and three punctuations and it gives us about 103 characters and 122 sounds.

There are no gaps between words, and often r and s are silent, especially at the end of words, so reading basically requires you to know the words first so you can recognise where each starts and finishes and which bit to say. An identical syllable when cut short by a bantak (which looks like this ' ) becomes an entirely new word (such as kok (frozen) and kok' (to wash)). Hmm.

Although khmae is not in fact classed as tonal, there are a lot of mission critical vowel sounds and a small error will shatter your intent; a lazy drawling of nyam to nyaum will turn your 'eat' into 'urinate' which can make your dinner a real pisser.

There is no f, so for foreign words you bung lo and vo together to do the job. An essential ingredient in your morning kafae, and a fine finish to a glass of bia draff.

The Khmer really like proverbs and euphemisms, and being sticklers for protocol they have a different word for every occasion. For example, there is a different word for 'eat' depending on whether you are talking colloquially, politely about others, politely about yourself, vulgarly (three options there), poetically, to your betters, inferiors, rural people, a monk, a royal, an animal, or in the latest slang.

By the last week the lessons were basically conducted entirely in script, leaving me scrambling to jot down khmae, phonetic and English of everything while trying to follow the lesson. The teacher is good at delivering ordered lessons and adds a lot of cultural information and fun, took us to the market and temple and joined us for dinner, so we finished up much wiser but buried under a load of information. My classmate has been in Cambodia for 2 years and so has some vocabulary, unfortunately for me this sped up the pace at times and led to long diversions off the topic at others.

Of course, when faced with an actual Khmer person and business to conduct it all flees the mind immediately, leaving you back at sign language and pidgin. I do have a party trick though - when I meet someone I try to write their name in script. I have all my books and tapes and a computer program that writes and speaks the letters and some words and phrases for you, so I can keep up the study alone but probably will need some more lessons.

The moto drivers became so frustrated at me walking everywhere that in my last week one of them called out "Where you go? I take you, its free!" causing great merriment up and down the street. Business was pretty quiet...

After the final session I hopped a bus to Sihanoukville for a beach weekend. During the week I'd got chatting to an Irish guy named Colin who is heading up to Siem Reap to do some volunteer English teaching to street kids, and liking my description of the south he came along. I caught up with a few old drinking pals from 2007, enjoyed the great value restaurants, walked on the beach and stayed up too late. When I saw the state of Colin after 24 hours I was glad I stick to beer and keep away from 'certain substances'. As a first timer to SE Asia he also embarked on a complicated love life, with great encouragement from the ageing and desperate local girls. Of course, 'ageing and desperate' in Cambodia means having turned thirty and begun to surrender your edge in looks to Naomi Campbell.

As I got up at 7am to catch a bus, Colin had just come in from a night out, so I left him to be carted around the markets and temple by his new one true love and headed back to Phnom Penh for my first day at work.

I went in the Cambodia country office for the first week, and my arrival coincided with the first ever strategic planning session, so I got to meet a few staff from the other provinces and even the deputy director from London. I thought I'd sit back and observe but ended up chairing sections of 'development cafe' - a sort of speed dating approach to group work - because most people were keen to contribute to all the topics while the 'chair' is kept to one table. Of course the local staff kept wanting to defer to me, and I kept pointing out I was just the minute taker, I couldn't tell them what their future direction should be.

Having listened to all the advice I could get, I spend time on the final days shopping. I was looking at computer speakers but ended up buying a portable stereo in the second hand stereo district around Oryssay Market, one of the rare ones with an input jack so I can play music from the laptop through it as well as radio, cd and cassette - the latter is only likely to be used with Khmer language tapes now we're in the digital age. It's a Sony from Japan and sounds pretty good for $28; I did get a bit caught up in the multitude of buttons labelled in Nipponese so went to the trusty (?) internet and downloaded an instruction manual in English. Not knowing what my house will have, I didn't buy much houseware, just sheets, towels, mugs, wine glasses, kettle and non-stick wok, but I filled a bag with food, things like mustard, pesto, ham, cheese, biscuits, muesli, wine, whatever I might crave that I won't get in the bush. I scored a motorbike helmet left by some Frenchman, found a couple of cables to connect the laptop with stereo and tv, and I was set. (So were Burke and Wills.)

I had the luxury of travel up by Nissan Patrol with my new boss Per and his family, all comfy and almost no honking. We stopped for breakfast at Skun, a town famous for the fried tarantulas sold from mounded baskets on the roadside. They actually look quite tasty for arachnids. There is a new sealed highway to Stung Treng on the Mekong, but this loops away to the east through Snuol, very close to the Vietnam border, and by taking the old road close to the river you save 100km. [ There's a map here ] The problem is in the monsoon it gets hard to distinguish the river from the land. A new road is being built on a 3 metre high embankment but the old low section of this road is fast becoming impassable. We were briefly stuck in a mud patch, but carried on to rejoin the highway to the Ratanakiri turn off, where a 100km stretch of earth road begins.

I've heard a lot about this road but with the help of a slow start to the wet season and the odd burst of grading and gravel laying it turned out to be in quite good condition. The whole trip with leisurely breaks took 9.5 hours. Most of the 57 odd bridges are planks dug into the roadbed, and it can be hard to see them coming, which is tricky when there are sections that have collapsed. During the recent road work, they pulled out around 80 pieces of unexploded ordnance from the road, including some nice big bombs, gifts of the USofA. There are no land mines in the province though.


Ban Lung is growing fast but is still a rough dusty provincial town. It is built on a fairly flat elevated spot with a small lake in the 'northern suburbs' and a famously beautiful 'crater lake' 3km to the south-east. The two focal points are a roundabout with a classically ugly monument in the middle, and the market a block away. There is a clutch of hotels and guesthouses and a handful of restaurants with western items on the menu, as well as many stalls, noodle shops and so on. There is also a bank and two gas stations (plus the blackened shell of a former and the half built shell of the next). [ There's some photos at http://users.picknowl.com.au/~hanuman/tony/gallery/ratanakiri.htm. ]

The town is built on red clay not much different to Adelaide's eastern suburbs, and the roads are mostly earth-formed, very dusty most of the year and a quagmire the rest. My arrival has been followed by the first decent monsoons - it is bucketing down as I write - and going anywhere is getting to be a dirty business. On the minor roads you really need a trail bike or 4WD, even walking can be tricky, while the main road gets very slick in rain - last night I was slithering about on the motorbike at 10 km/h, and today I stood chatting to the security guard and a guy fell off in front of our gate - at about 5 k's. I've already come off once, thanks to the slippery mud and a large drunk German swinging about on the back.

The weather is very pleasant after the south, up to around 28 degrees and positively cool in the mornings. At ten in the morning with a fan in the next office blowing through the door I am actually a bit too cool. I think October - February will be really pleasant, while later in the dry may get a little warmish.

For the moment I'm staying in a large flash looking hotel while I check out the housing options. Most housing in town is of the traditional elevated hardwood style, and unlike in Thailand they still have some forest and are building new houses in the same style, with the few concrete places standing out. Rental houses are furnished which makes life easier, although the standard varies a bit. They use well water and most have a header tank and running water in the house, while few have hot water. The town has cable tv (mostly from Thailand) which isn't very good but if you're lucky you get BBC, CNN, Discovery, NatGeo, some sport and movies in English. When the power goes off the cable guys tend not to reset the English channels; Sunday night a bunch of us went to a restaurant to watch the Grand Prix and our host had to shoot off to the office and roust the guys to connect star sport.

There is a regular Friday night 'drinking school' (this is an Australian expression which does not aim to imply any learning value..) of expat aid work types, and on my first weekend a couple of Aussies were leaving (albeit temporarily it turns out) so it was well attended, as was a Saturday night farewell party. I got to meet a friendly bunch of reprobates from around the globe; Australia, UK, Spain, Sweden, Germany and Holland all fielded representatives. CARE and VSO dominate the lineup; VSO is the British volunteer organisation but does not restrict itself to Brits. There have been a few comings and goings, and I'm told that curiously the lineup at drinks has gone from 70% female to 90% male of late. Anyway, a good bunch to hang out with.

I quite like Cambodia .. it has climbed a fair way up my list of recommended holiday destinations, especially for those on a budget - its cheap, safe, varied, a bit adventurous but easy, has facilities and the people are nice.

The shower has passed, the sun is out, and steam is pouring from the carport roof outside my window. Lunchtime!

Part 1 - 6th August, 2008 (Day 5)

When I first visited, Phnom Penh had the feel of a place emerging from the dark ages, overlaid with a high level of tension due to the suppression of the democracy movement and a (possibly fake) attempt on Hun Sen's life (a couple of hand grenades were lobbed into his back yard while he was out). About half a dozen citizens were being shot in the streets each day by the police and I saw my fair share of live rounds going off. One night I was tootling along on a rickshaw and we passed close by a soldier on a street corner. Sensing he was up to something, I braced myself, so when he squeezed the trigger on his AK47 and let off a shot three feet from my right ear I didn't give him the satisfaction of jumping. Later though, we beat a very undignified pedal driven retreat from a hail of gunfire on Monivong Boulevard (the main drag), where demonstrators were being dispersed from the ministére de l'intérieur.

The political situation is very much more stable these days, the Khmer Rouge a spent force to most people, but there is a rising crime rate, thefts of all sorts happen all the time while armed muggings and bag snatching are especially in vogue. Corruption is also de rigueur with a coterie of rich and powerful families running most things.

Phnom Penh has become a hectic chaotic Asian capital, typical of many at an early stage of development - hot, dusty, hard to navigate on foot, but there are good guesthouses and eating places and its inexpensive. I've done a bit of the 'this was where I was shot at' nostalgic wander, but the place has changed almost out of recognition in a decade. Streets are paved, lit, and crowded. Last year I passed through and was taken aback at the touts and backpacker traps. While I tire of saying 'no thanks' to moto drivers they accept a knock back with a bigger smile than in most places.

Packing up and heading off to live for years in a dusty third world backwater isn't any easier the second time - knowing what you are getting yourself into is not a help, it's a distraction, and it just makes the lists longer (especially the 'bloody hell, I meant to do..' list). If ignorance wasn't a help then the U.S. would never have got to Northern Iraq.

Having 10kg less baggage allowance didn't help; airlines are getting really tight on weight and I wasted hours trying to get an excess allowance, but in the end I got through unscathed, with pretty much all I really wanted to bring, though struggling with carrying loose jackets and stuff in a way I'd normally avoid like the plague. (And if you think I don't know what that's like, I once had to cancel a visit to a project in India to avoid an outbreak of the plague, so there.)

I really really hate overnight flights, in fact the whole plane/airport thing is getting pretty old. It just adds insult to injury when after 6 hours of lumping bags through two airports, blagging two airlines' check-ins, dull waits and cramped seating you can see the lights of home passing 40,000 feet below. With sleep deprivation and a respiratory infection the whole pack - travel - arrive thing was a bit of a blur. After a few hours sleep I got up to meet my new boss who was passing through Phnom Penh and is quite excited to have me coming which is nice. The rest of the weekend I spent mostly in bed. [ I did get to see a riveting doco on toxins on the Discovery Channel. It was reported in the 1800s that natives of Siberia gathered the bright-red-with-white-spots mushrooms to make a hallucogenic soup. In winter the less fortunate would wait outside these parties with wooden bowls and collect the urine of the inebriated, which they drank to get their own high. This could explain the Australian usage of 'getting pissed'. Later theorists say that shamans were the consumers, able to fly out of their bodies, enter homes and perform healing arts in their altered state, and point to the red and white colours, the illusion of flying that you get while high, and the fact that moose also indulge, as likely precursors to the modern legend of the flying Santa.]

"PP" has a rare system of street names: they are all numbered. Sounds pragmatic, I hear you say, but they are numbered in no particular order. There are groups of them that number in series, sort of in the order they were laid out I guess, but no unifying logic. Only a few have names, at least officially. Finding a street on the map can be a lot like a very dull monochrome version of 'Where's Wally'.

I am staying in a nicer area than my last visit, on street 278 which became known as 'Golden Street' as there are about a dozen hotels in a block all named Golden something .. star, sun, comfort, palace, bridge etc. Now it is becoming known as 'expat street' as it is the epicentre of foreigner café society - aka 'NGO Land'. Its better than being in 'backpacker street' - I hate those useless bludgers who have nothing better to do than bum around Asia for a year at a time. (Yes, I know I did, it was research, alright?) Asian hotels tend to bandy about titles like 'resort' and 'bungalows' with complete disregard for the facility, but I am staying in an 'apartment' which actually earns the title, boasting a full kitchen along with the cable tv, hot water and air con. Its mid monsoon season so afternoon rains are the norm and the mercury gets to about 30 degrees. The weather is not unpleasant, though following the horror of an Adelaide winter on the back of three years in the tropics, my body is not sure if its relieved or in shock. Maybe it's a shocked relief, like you get when your Qantas flight lands with two out of three cargo doors still attached.

My first language lesson came with a nice surprise .. I'm not just going to learn to speak Khmer, I'm going to learn to read and write it too! In a month. Well, of course I am. Given that there are 34 consonants, 24 vowels - of which all but two are pronounced in two different ways depending on which consonant precedes them, no consistent transliteration to Roman characters (and most work in the area was done by French ascetics in antiquity - if anyone can write phonetically its NOT the French) and the writing looks like the trails left by stunned ants escaping a particularly vicious ink bomb attack (producing a lot of erratic squiggly lines author Andy McNab would call 'paperclip'), I feel a little like a nesting dung beetle advancing on the south col of Everest. Still, khnom sok sa:p ba:i (I'm fine).

There are a few similarities between Khmer, or in their own language khmae (pronounced Cahm-eye) and Thai - the Khmer for trouser (khao) means leg in Thai and the khnom sok sa:p ba:i above is sabai dee krap in Thai - but the only really useful bit is that the numbers above ten are the same. If only I could remember the damn things. Last year I could count to 100,000 in Thai. In Thai you have a number (eg three sam) and then add the word for ten to get the tens (eg 30 is sam sip). In Khmer they use this system (and the Thai words - sort of) for the tens, but the numbers one to ten are completely different, so that 33 is sa:m sep bei, with sam and bei both meaning three. So we have to learn two sets of digits to count to 100. I'm not about to accuse an entire nation of being obtuse, but George Bernard Shaw must be spinning in his grave. Still, let he who speaks a language without irregular verbs cast the first stone.

To compensate, the ordinals are created by adding a single word to the number, unlike in English where we have to learn first, second, third etc.

I am really struggling to get over the 'flu and the rest, and my attempts to riәn phiәsa - learn the language - leave me a wreck, especially trying to write those upside down 'e's (try it, it goes against all you learnt from primary school spankings), so enough for now.

September 11, 2008

Here in Ban Lung

So .. here I am in my second remote area development posting. I spent a month in Phnom Penh learning Khmer - reading and writing as well as speaking - and another week meeting people in the Country Office, joining in the strategic planning workshop, and getting led astray by a mad Irishman and his string of girlfriends.
I managed a weekend in Sihanoukville in between, to catch up on a few old drinking pals, wander on the beach and party into the dawn.
I picked a good time to come to Ban Lung, with the road in good condition and the town itself caught between dusty and muddy.