Cycling is something i love too.

Thanks Andrea!

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“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.

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i hope we’ll see more from this bunch:

from You tube of course.

Ha ha. Thanks Logan for this video.

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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.

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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

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• 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

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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.

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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.

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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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photo credit: roboppy

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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)

photo credit: -RS-

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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

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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 !!

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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

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