Squeezing in February Posts

Saturday night finds me alone in a hotel room while Kathy is off celebrating Stefan's 21rst birthday with him in the Masai Mara (Kenya) looking at lions and giraffes and who knows what else. Which is good news for avid followers of the blog since here I am belatedly posting (that avid part would be 3-4 of you from what I can tell) instead of out living up the Phnom Penh nightlife with my lovely wife.

I should have had a lot of pictures to post from my trip this week to the western border of Cambodia (that would be the Thai border for those of you a little shaky on your S.E Asian geography), but inexplicably the camera battery that I very carefully recharged before heading off proved to have no charge whatsoever when I pulled out the camera, I swear...and the dog ate my homework too. I should note that if the battery had worked you would have seen photos of working elephants, not is some namby-pamby game preserve like in Kenya, but being used as beasts of burden. Elephants seem to be sort of the Caterpillar equipment of Cambodia, if you need something big moved, you turn to elephants. Only they don't paint them yellow so you have to keep an eye out to see them. Anyway, you get no photos, only narrative.

Which is more work for me, if you really think about it. So that dog story may have some validity.

Cambodia doesn't look very big on a map, but it turns out it takes a while to drive around in it. The roads were actually pretty good, a huge upgrade from years past (I'm told), but they are only one lane in each direction and there is a lot of traffic that varies in speed from oxen to Land Cruisers, and the slower speeds tend to trump horsepower (this would not be a country where you would get much use out of a Porsche).

So I took a 3 day trip out to the Western border town of Poipet, which turns out to be a really, really low rent version of Las Vegas. Seems that neither Thailand or Vietnam permit gambling and Cambodia does, so Cambodia is the Nevada of S.E. Asia. Poipet, smack on the Thai border, is filled with Thai-owned casinos sitting on Cambodia territory. The funniest part is that the casinos are actually located between the Thai customs checkpoint and the Cambodian checkpoint, instead of a no-man's land like between most border offices it is a free-gambling zone. The Cambodians are clearly not too worried about smuggling because if you are in a car with Cambodian plates you are not even stopped as you drive into the no-man's land (we spent the night in one of the casinos, there wasn't any other choice). And coming out we just sort of indicated that we had spent the night at the hotel (one of about a half-dozen) and they waved us on back into Cambodia. I don't know how you could make money smuggling stuff from Thailand to Cambodia, but if I stumble across it I'll know how to do it.

I do know how you can make money smuggling stuff into Thailand. There was an article in the Phnom Penh English-language newspaper that described an argument between the new customs director of Poipet and a group of handicapped vendors. Apparently for years these handicapped vendors have collected grasshoppers and grubs on the Cambodian side of the border and then wheeled across to the Thai side where they can sell these delicacies for far more than they can in Cambodia. I can't explain why insects and grubs are more highly valued in Thailand than in Cambodia (though it is going to make me examine my food a bit more closely the next time I am in Thailand) but the profusion of handicapped vendors comes from (sadly) all of the landmines and other unexploded ordinance that the U.S. left after the Vietnam War. One of the weird lessons of the Vietnam War is that is was a lot better to be on the other side of a declared war against the United States (i.e. Vietnam) than to be on the other side of an undeclared war (i.e. Laos and Cambodia). Turns out the rules of engagement (don't plant land mines indiscriminately, don't bomb schoolhouses or churches, etc.) only apply to countries on whom we have officially declared war, in undeclared war anything goes.

So, hooray for Obama setting a time line for pulling out of Iraq.

Anyway, to get back to my story the new Director of Cambodian customs at the Poipet border crossing is apparently allowing his staff to hit up the handicapped insect vendors for about 20 cents a kilo which seriously cuts into their profit margin. Apparently insects and grubs are not on the official list of things to which a tariff applies, so the handicapped vendors have the law on their side (not to mention public opinion). We'll see how it plays out.

Anyway, I have more to post on other things I saw, but this post is already pretty long, so bye for now.

Sunrise over the Tonle Sap

Here is a video taken out of our hotel room window looking out over the Tonle Sap River (this side of the point of land) where it merges with the Mekong River (the other side of the point of land and the dredge). I apologize for the jerkiness, I'm just getting the hang of this Flip camcorder.

Stefan's Blog

While the idea of thisblog was that the whole Grundmann/Krasovec clan would post to it you can see that to date it has mainly been me (Christophe) posting. Stefan is in Kenya volunteering at an orphanage and is posting to his own blog along with his friend Frost. If you want to keep up with his life you can read his blog at http://dartmouthinkenya.wordpress.com

Phnom Penh for real

Kathy and I have now been in Phnom Penh slightly short of a week, we're staying in the same hotel I stayed in last time for the month of February, in March we'll move into our new house, an updated French Colonial a mere 3 minute walk from my office. The view from our one-bedroom suite in the Himawari Hotel (think of it as a slightly fancier Residence Inn) is an upgrade from my last posting, we now look out over the Tonle Sap and Mekong rivers, I'll try and post a short video I took from our bedroom window of fisherman seining for small fish early this morning.

The time change seems to have caught up to me this weekend, after a pretty busy week at work which I handled fairly well considering we'd just arrived Monday evening, I find myself dragging around this weekend. Kathy is out with a friend getting a massage, manicure and pedicure which is what recharges her batteries, I'm just up from a 2 hour nap which seemed more likely to recharge mine (that may not have been the right call since I'm still a bit logy).

We have a work plan due to USAID for our whole project, which is creating quite a bit of work for me since to work with our team to come up with a work plan I first have to understand what the project has been doing and we seem to have done (and want to continue to do) a lot of different things. One of my jobs is to put a coherent strategy around those various pieces. On top of which Cambodia is undergoing a lot of changes in their health sector, which seem to be progressing at varying speeds with varying success, to try and understand it all is going to take some time. In the mean time I'm reading a lot of documents. one thing you can always count on development agencies to produce.