Hot Diggedy Dawg!

Sorry to start with such a cliche, but it really IS a very small world! There we were on Wednesday (14 December), on a small boat touring some the tributaries of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam as part of an organised 4-day trip - and we discovered that the young couple, Martha and Jake, with whom we've been chatting for the previous two days, not only live in Sussex, but also know 'The Cajun Dawgs' - one of our favourite local bands, featuring, amongst others, our friends, Jim and Darren. The Dawgs play fairly often at venues around East Sussex, including The 6 Bells - indeed, are playing for the Christmas Party night at the Folk 'n' Blues Club on the 20th - but apparently also played for Martha's 18th birthday party three or four years ago in Rye. How's about that then? (Sorry, do I sound like Jimmy Saville?)

Our last weekend in Phnom Penh, just before catching the boat down to Chau Doc in Vietnam, was very relaxing after the work at the orphanage. On Saturday evening, we sat at an outdoor table in a really good Cambodian restaurant overlooking the riverside promenade, eating a fabulous Fish Amok (the national dish) and enjoying a spectacularly clear view of the lunar eclipse. Most of the staff and customers of the many riverside restaurants came out to watch the final few minutes of the eclipse as the sky went black, and there was a truly festive occasion all round.

Watching the Eclipse

The Eclipse Itself

On our walk back to the hotel later, in the gradually increasing moonlight, we noticed a new installation of dozens of pieces of fun/exercise equipment - rather like, for those Bromsgrovians amongst us, the 'trim-trail' equipment which the District Council installed many years go in Sanders Park, some of it right outside our house (though we understand they've now removed it all on the grounds of, yes, 'elf and safety'!). Anyway, these new installations in Phnom Penh are clearly a great hit. I think we've mentioned before about the wonderful atmosphere along the promenade every evening when hoards of Cambodian families - often 3 generations at a time - come out to sit, walk, play, do Tai Chi, aerobics, or what seems to be a kind of Cambodian line dance, together. On this lunar eclipse evening, dozens and dozens of them were queuing up to have a go on this new equipment, all laughing and talking about this new-fangled idea, and encouraging us to join in the fun. Further on, we also stopped to watch what seemed to be a 25-a-side football match, in which a rattan football was used by bare-foot teenage lads, with several dozens more queuing up on the edges to take part. Just wonderful!

Part of the 'Trim Trail'

Another Part!

The next day, we went back along the promenade to see, in daylight, a huge photographic exhibition we'd spotted the previous evening. This exhibition turned out to be a beautifully-displayed, almost romantically-photographed, often deliberately softly-focused, series of pictures of a variety of anti-personnel mines (APLs). The juxtaposition of the beautiful images and the description of the grotesquely sophisticated ways in which these anti-personnel mines continue to kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people every year all over the world, was truly heart-stopping. The exhibition had been timed deliberately to coincide with the 11th meeting, here in Phnom Penh for the first time, of the Members of the Ottowa Convention (also referred to as the Mine Ban Treaty, which prohibits the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of APLs - a treaty which the USA, still clearly dominated by its military-industrial complex, has still not become a signatory to). Both the Ottowa Convention meeting and the exhibition also coincided with celebrations for the 63rd anniversary of the UN Convention on Human Rights, and there were many banners all over the city, bearing truly heart-warming slogans about the rights of women, of trade unionists, of children, of ethnic minorities, of political activists, etc, (including public sector workers, Mr Miliband? - Ed.).

The Photographic Exhibition

Heart-warming, yes, but ironic too, given that Cambodia has just been placed 165th out of 183 countries monitored by Transparency International in its annual Corruption Index, and that a UN envoy here has recently pronounced that the relationship between the ruling CPP (Cambodian People's Party), and its main opposition party, Sam Rainsy, is damaging to the point of being anti-democratic. We've actually counted 5 different political parties on political banners around Cambodia, but Sam Rainsy himself is in self-imposed exile, having been charged with some fairly dubious 'crimes', including one of removing a government notice, for which, if found guilty, he could face a 12 year jail sentence! (Oh, and here's some homework for you, Cameron or Dylan: can you find out for us where the UK ranks in the Transparency International Corruption Index? The newspaper article we saw only mentioned the top 5, and the UK was not one of those).

Well, we have one more day left of our Mekong Delta tour before we fly from Ho Chi Min City to the Vietnamese (once Cambodian) island of Phu Quoc in the Gulf of Thailand, where we'll spend 10 days over the Christmas period. Then, off to Kuala Lumpur for the New Year celebrations. But we'll undoubtedly fit in one more blog before then, so we can capture our experiences of this part of Vietnam before we head to pastures new. A bientot.

A View From the Roof-top Bar

Phnom Penh Riverfront

 

'Bye for Now!