Video: “My first acid trip was with strangers in Cambodia”

This is an excellent animated true story narrated by a woman who talks about the first time she took LSD, which was with strangers in a Cambodian beach town.

boingboing.net

 
…………………
This is (of course) after VICE’s breathless brothel raid story years earlier. This is right out of the ‘Guns Girls and Ganja‘ playbook.
Folks, you can be seedy right in your hometown.

Some people just need a place to be naughty, but rarely consider that it’s someone else’s home — and that they have their own stories to tell.

It’s often a challenge for me to parse UK newspapers, unlike USA media many don’t maintain even a pretense of objectivity. Reading the first sentence of this article by The Mirror it would sound dire.

“Poor Sombo has been forced to pound the pavements for 30 years after being captured and tortured by communist rebels.”

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/editors-picks/2012/01/12/campaign-to-save-sombo-the-elephant-from-her-agony-115875-23695049/

A few days ago there was a more nuanced article by The Phnom Penh Post, followed by a TravelFish summary.
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2012010653829/Lifestyle/whats-sambos-future.html
http://www.travelfish.org/blogs/phnompenh/2012/01/phnom-penhs-elephant-sambo/

It’s pretty clear that Sambo’s owner is aware of the situation and would be happy to see she gets care.
It’s hard to find someone in Phnom Penh who isn’t a Sombo fan.
http://alisonincambodia.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/sam-bo-for-president/

The real challenge is that Sombo’s mahout, Sin Sorn, will lose his main source of income. So to retire an elephant, you’ve pretty much got to ‘drop the mahout‘.

It’s easy to sympathize with a symbol like Sombo. Like many Cambodians, she is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge time, and has health injuries originating from that horrible time. Many of my older Cambodian friends suffer from fairly preventable health issues such as bad teeth, high blood pressure, and stress-related illnesses. There is a lack of access to diagnosis, medicine and treatment.

Let’s heal Sambo. And while we’re at it, she can serve as a reminder of a larger concern facing the citizens of a relatively poor country.

Petition:  http://www.change.org/petitions/retire-sambo-ban-elephants-in-phnom-pehn
(As of this writing? 3,183 signatories.)

(If you’d like to read more about health issues in Cambodia, I highly recommend ‘Diapers and Durians‘.

I managed to take a little video.  Elephants are rubbery too! Just the way they move and use their trunks. As with any big animal, they are very deliberate in how they step, and seem to operate on a slower pace than us hectic humans.

We explored the local area for about an hour,

which included an awesome waterfall. Surrounded by sharp rocks though, so one would really have to take some effort to get out in the water. Plenty more waterfalls in the area too – for next visit I think.

Wrapping things up that evening was a Halloween party in Banlung. I managed to score some party accouterments from the local market.

Thoroughly unconvinced that the provincial capitol is a boring town.


Tags: cambodia,ratanakiri,cambodge,elephant,elephants

An iridescent green jewel surrounded by trees. Ahhh.

Particularly interesting: on the path around the lake is a small tourist centre. Cultural tourism by Cambodians largely targeted AT ethnic Khmers.  It’s always interesting to see how a country is internally represented to its own people – i.e. the Cambodian Cultural Village. 

Tags: cambodia,ratanakiri,cambodge,lake

A lot of talk about print media lately. The Phnom Penh Post has gone daily. The Advisor is ‘not dead, just resting’, and The Mekong Times has come to a halt. Some of my friends were complaining about the lack of English language reading matter.

But hey, there are heaps of publications – there’s a magazine boom on!

Every day it seems like there is a new magazine, newspaper or book. To prove the naysayers wrong, I rocked up to the newsstand and grabbed a few tidbits.

Economics Today (August edition pictured here) kinda sorta looks like… a similarly named magazine, don’tcha think? I expect they were counting on that.

The fact that there are enough buyers in the Kingdom to warrant a separate Khmer and English edition rocks my world. Looks like they are tailoring it to different readerships too – the English edition has a different numbering than the Khmer edition. (And at the newsstand I went to, no Khmer edition was available. Sold out? Hmm…)

Let’s see… the obligatory tourism article or two, recipes and filler from wire services – especially when it comes to global markets and issues. The magazine shines the most in its original content – with articles ranging from local intellectual property issues to analysis of how middlemen function in the agricultural market (and how farmers get market info via text messages!) Coverage of local exhibitions, a tactful mention of human rights concerns, and a spotlight on the self-employed (‘Wat Phnom’s Women Photographers’) aren’t bad either. The most potentially controversial item is the most understated: pages of market and commodity statistics, including inflation rates. I’ll be reading this magazine again.

By billing themselves as ‘Cambodia’s Business Magazine’ and offering Paypal PDF downloads by issue or article, the publisher is certainly working it.

Perhaps the main purpose is to flog their service of economic data provision. Behind the publisher ETMCambodia.com is – The Economic Institute of Cambodia, a nonprofit. It wouldn’t be the first time a not-for-profit entity spun off a profit generating funnel – Hagar Soya, anyone?

What I’d particularly enjoy amongst all these articles is an analysis of how ‘Economics Today’ came to be, and where it fits in the mixed economy of business and nonprofits. Would it be safe to assume that the overall institutional opinions of EIC (cited as an objective source in one article) will be reflected in this publication?

Economics is not an exact science; the one thing missing is a robust debate on its nonexistent ‘Letters To The Editor’ page.  I’ll be curious to see how the magazine evolves.
Tags: cambodia,economics,magazine,business