Eastlink Hell, LoL?
December 22, 2009
First attempt to read the car Reg. over the phone:
“i’m sorry, i didn’t hear anything. Please tell me the registration number..”
second attempt
“Did you say ROFL w t f 6 8 3 ?”
another go:
“Did you say LOL w t f 6 8 3 ?”
i was sure the insanely cheerful machine at the other end of the phone line was giving me some kind of internet speak as well as the registration number. In fact i’m sure the eastlink machine with the personality disorder was laughing at me.. in LOLCATS language.
“For F sake,” i cried, “What does it take to get a live human being around here.”
“Now transferring you to an operator.”
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$5 to drive to Frankston these days.
But all that ART along the way makes it almost worth the cash. The mini-hotel? Hilarious!
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photo credit: (creative commons at flickr) Thanks: peter forret, and Vermin Inc.
Spontaneous Tram Choir !!
October 3, 2009
Ah this could make you smile.. the Spontaneous Tram Choir on the Lygon St Tram.
i hope we’ll see more from this bunch:
from You tube of course.
Ha ha. Thanks Logan for this video.
Babies on moto
March 30, 2009
My favourite new experience in Cambodia and Vietnam was seeing how many people can fit on a moto (motorbike).
In that part of the world, people don’t really ride motorbikes, rather a local kind of scooter or “step-through”. Katie says there’s no age limit to riding them in Cambodia, as long as your feet reach the footrest.
And yes, the whole family will fit on a moto. Very usual to see babies and children sitting in front holding the handlebars. i love it. In Vietnam the children wear helmets .. in Cambodia not.
Traffic here is something else entirely. The one rule appears to be “Give way to bigger vehicles”. Lauli said it was like schools of fish in the sea; you swim with the group, go with the flow.
So far i have seen on the back of a moto:
- a huge live pig with its trotters bound
- whole cooked dead pigs (2 or 3)
- twenty live roosters, tied by their feet
- panes of glass, held vertical
- a live goat bleating pitifully as its enormous scrotum swung in our car window.
Desperately seeking comments:
Please share your “back of a moto” experience.
iPod heaven at last
March 13, 2009
My beautiful old iRiver died while i was travelling in Cambodia. It disappeared from my luggage on a bus. Device death by disappearance.
i was sad, i was disappointed.
But sooner or later i had to have another music player**.
So i chomped on the ammunition and stole an iPod classic from JB hifi. They took $325 from me but it felt like a steal anyway.
Heaven.
Glamor-tech.
Charming.
and no i don’t have to run iTunes.
So Relieved About That!!
Yes, Winamp manages an iPod just fine.
- No fuss,
- no silly synchronising,
- no locking the pod to only one computer.
Just drag the files across and there they are.
Yay Winamp.
PS: not perfect, this device.
- Sensitivity of wheel changes according to mood;
- iPod freezes, yes freezes;
- display by coverflow is dumb: every song is displayed with its album cover.
**Yes i have the iRiver e100, but that’s a kind of joke really. When you put the micro SD card in, all the screen writing reverses to mirror image. Fortunately i can read mirror writing just like da Vinci.
photo credit: Themis Chapsis
people you meet
February 20, 2009
Thinking back to my time in Vietnam, one of the best things about travelling is the people you meet along the way ..
- Like the Vietnaustralian guy from Sydney who had had “such a boring time” returning home for his sister’s wedding;
- or the Parisien woman returning to her native Cambodia for the first time since 1974, to share christmas with her Son who’s moved to Sydney;
- the German art student who’s half Vietnamese, and studying in Saigon .. to get a better feel for her father’s culture;
- the UK couple, an entrepreneur and his partner, who sold up to go travelling, and flee the UK economy because it has changed shape .. into something more pear-like;
- a Dutch woman who takes a couple of 8-week-long travelling holidays every year.
And that’s not even counting the flocks of wonderful people in Phnom Penh, lovely exPats and aid workers, volunteers, NGO people, teachers and masterful communications officers!
Really it’s all about the people isn’t it
so tell me .. who did you meet in an exotic location?
photo credit: shapeshift
photos of indochine
February 6, 2009
i’ve posted 17 of my favourite photos up on flickr. Selected from a range of ooh about 3000. Is 100 photos a day too much when you’re travelling? i don’t think so.
Some of these shots were taken without looking .. that is i would point and click in the rough direction of whatever i wanted to capture. Usually it would be terrible, but occasionally it worked.
Here’s a slideshow .. or you can look on the flickr site direct, and add comments etc. Go on.
Visit to Tuol Sleng (Genocide museum)
January 30, 2009
i postponed the visit to Tuol Sleng as long as i could. Didn’t want to face reality and find out what happened. Strangely i felt conscious of the whole genocide thing as soon as we landed in Phnom Penh .. as though the soul of this country was still deeply wounded and grieving.
At the museum, i ended up stumbling on a small room, filled with dust and storage. i don’t think this room was meant to be open. There was a big box of skulls and bones, not organised for display, just sitting; this was more disturbing than viewing the skulls on proper display.
Many skulls in another room had been given proper display cabinets, with airholes so that the victim’s souls could enter and connect. This was a compromise between giving them proper burial, and allowing the world to see the evidence of what happened.
i took some photos in the not-display room, but felt like i shouldn’t .. so perhaps i won’t publish them here. i’ll put other people’s photos instead.
So the genocide researchers have found 389 burial sites .. most with 500-1500 people. There was one site with 150,000 people and the biggest site had 510,000 dead bodies. Tim and i tried to work out how big that would be.
Really Big.
At the start of the revolution, people were marched out of the cities into the country to become honourable peasants. If the inner bourgeoisie couldn’t be marched out of them, they were killed. Doctors, teachers .. anyone educated was killed.
Ironic, because Pot and some of his henchmen were teachers who’d had a very elitist education in Paris.
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These days in Cambodge, they don’t kill people so much, just sell off land to developers and march the peasants off to another part of the city, possibly with a skerrick of compensation. This article at the bbc gives detail, via Kylie in Phnom Penh.
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photo credit: blake_lennon
photo credit: tkelly7029
Plus:
- The survivor of Tuol Sleng, work of artist Vann Nath.
- Official photo collection .. many of the people who died.
delights of brunswick
January 21, 2009
Oh thank heavens i’m back home. G Love and Special Sauce is on the stereo, Sam’s getting fish n chips from the new place on Sydney Road .. and the massive heat wave faded away just before i arrived. Tim and Nathan are here, with beer.
Life is perfect.
Sometimes you can have enough of a foreign place and living out of a backpack. Phnom Penh is beautiful in its way, but the poverty gets to me (not as much as it affects the locals obviously), my comfort zones are stretched, the heat and dust wears me down. i needed the comfort of home.
mmmm .. off to Victoria St to get me some frozen lychees.
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Floating markets of Can Tho
January 15, 2009
Here at the floating markets of Can Tho, Vietnam, they have i’m sure the Biggest Grapefruit in the World. These things look like honey dew melons. They are big. And delicious.
Just spent 8 hours soaking in the magnificence of the Mekong Delta, with my own private boat captain. (My own company got a bit much, but the markets, the river and its ecology were all gorgeous.)
Occasionally the propellers get caught in plastic bags. So the drivers get the long paddle out of the water, peel off the plastic, and throw the bag back in the water.
The floating markets are so photogenic. i think the locals might get a bit sick of the tourists though. All taking photo but no buying the goods.
i’m trying to be unobtrusive with the mini-camera .. but there’s one guy with a seriously big lens. One of those tourists who doesn’t smile back when you smile at him. You’re only real if you make a good picture .. and even then you’re real in a fully objectified sense.
Anyway, he was the Voracious Tourist for me .. on whom i projected my own “negative affect” as Jude might say.
(Voracious Photos to come .. later on)
Heroes .. a new obsession
January 14, 2009
Nearly finished Deadwood and Life on Mars, so i was definitely in need of a new DVD obsession. Fortunately the strange futuristic evolutionary tales of “Heroes” were filling the gap nicely.
Similar to the genetically-modified characters of Dark Angel, the mutants of X-men, and also the returned “altered” people in the world of the 4400. This one concerns people who are developing new skills and talents .. the next step in human evolution. In the future, everyone will be Superman, Spidergirl .. Catwoman; able to use their own special powers for good .. or evil.
If i could have a superpower, i would definitely be able to fly. Save so much hassle at airports, and cut down on carbon footprint too.
Or maybe radiate peace and love from my heart into the world around me, so that people around me experience balance and a deep sense of personal safety. That would be cool.
Give me comment please:
What would your superhuman power be?
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PS: when i came to Phnom Penh, all i really wanted to see was the rest of Season One. Fortunately Katie discovered the series and shared my fascination. We got through the whole 23 episodes in 3 days!! How outrageously self-indulgent.
Just a few loose threads in the plot at the end of it all ..
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photo credit: TCM Hitchhiker
photo credit: Randy Son Of Robert
Shopping in Phnom Penh
January 13, 2009
Shanny and Phil turn up in a tuk tuk, to take me to the Russian and Central Markets. Peter is their regular driver who takes them all around town from their base in the Lake District. He’s a friendly man and a good driver.
Along the way, his tuk tuk starts to make cranky noises but after a while it’s okay. Using bits of English and sign, he tells us it’s an oil problem, but he’ll fix it later. He waits at each market while we shop.
My favourite part of the market is the area where women sit cross legged on the counter chopping meat with giant cleavers. The meats hang raw and bloody in the muggy shade. No refrigeration.
oh, there’s the deep fried spiders too.
You always get the best noodle soup at the market, no doubt!!
What a fun day. i love it !!
Seasick in paradise
January 12, 2009
Note to Self: next time i’m about to take a 3 hour sea journey .. do not eat pig trotter soup from a street stall in South Vietnam; just in case the journey is extremely rough.
i had to take a photo of myself halfway across, to find out exactly how green my face was .. but i’m not publishing the photo here. Oh no.
Landed on Phu Quoc Island, a large island which has been sometimes Cambodian, but mostly Vietnamese . (Known as Koh Tral to the Cambodians the island is much closer to Cambodia .. and rumour has it they are not too happy about losing the island either.)
After a 20 minute moto trip, met up with Zeena and Phat .. and did my best to be good company for the evening we had together, but unfortunately i was horrible sick. The smell of their dinner made me go and have a lie down on the beach.
Oh dear.
The pig trotter soup tasted great, too! Really nice soup, and i had fun ordering it, with a fellow traveller from Holland. One of those classic situations where neither party speaks any of the other language.
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PS: i’m on a tropical paradise. Shutup michael. Stop your moaning.
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photo credit: JasonDGreat
Losing my touch-nology?
January 7, 2009
Sometimes i notice that things go wrong in a funny way. My bike and my car always seem to break down at the same time. Or i hit my head on a cupboard door three times in the same day.
Lately i’ve had a bad time with technology:
- i bought a pair of “noise-cancelling” headphones at Singapore airport .. not even as good as my ordinary headphones;
- got my phone unlocked so i could use a Cambodian sim card .. but forgot to back up the phone numbers, which disappeared;
- i left my bag unattended on the bus, and later on discovered my cherished iRiver mp3 player was gone (with the top notch Sennheiser headphones that don’t cancel noise, just give good sound);
- dropped my beautiful new snap-happy digicam .. and one corner of the view screen is all cracked and black;
All my own doing .. nobody to blame.
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But .. i must remember to look on the bright side, put all this into perspective .. because i have sustained no physical injuries. i’m firmly attached to my limbs, my heart and my brain.
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Gadgets are just bits of metal and plastic aren’t they. Nothing compared to a beating heart, a thriving brain .. and a valiantly surviving liver. No point getting attached to material objects .. this is a Buddhist country after all. Got to remember to breathe in the joy of being alive. Yah.
photo credit: lotje
