Expresso Kamuchea

[tan]

well, i keep trying and am getting somewhere, but very slowly and learn a lot in the process, that is true.
it is the last of the slow time of the year, the guesthouse is full, but the guests are awfull: cheap and rude. "can i get the room cheaper if i don' t use the bathroom", hard to believe but true...actually it is pretty funny, and we regale each other with the worst guest stories whenever we see each other. as it is also the time of the year when the crazies go travelling, there are quite a few. the last crazy drove everybody to distraction. he came a few weeks ago, uoh it's a dw (definite weirdo) kept him out of our guesthouse. first he got drunk and did not pay his bills then he started to beat up the neighbours , heck, he came even into my guesthouse, started yelling at me (incomprehesible stuff) advanced, i ducked, he fell over and we chucked him out.
he has left the 'hood now. when oh when will the nice people come back!
our worst checked out today:came in a group of five , four wanted to stay, he did not. so off they went, only to come back an hour later and check in. Then the whining started: why was the happy hour not all night, why did the tuna salad look like tuna salad (beats me),started reading the new books from the store instead of the library ones (the titles are identic, because we copy the good stuff, we have no real bookstores, and a person has to read...), brought home 'taxi girls' and got into fights with them,and so on. today he left for kampot, after getting into a fight with his driver, so maybe somebody nice will check into his room today....
wow!! i can't believe it: there should be a picture of route four in this post, i took it from the car. route four is about the only good road in the country, fom phnom penh to snookyville. all matters of vehicle drive on this road, in any wich direcion. it can get messy.
well, i better start downsizing pictures!
<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1050924/doc3633a.jpg" alt=" - " />

[tan]

well, this was less than perfect, but it worked!
another try: <img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1050924/doc3402.jpg" alt=" - " />
ok, strange sometimes the picture gets on sometimes not.
this a river near a small town called sre ambel.
ambel means salt in khmer, so we translate it as Salzburg. near Sre ambel there is a lot of jungle. it is where the cardamom mountais begin. a great place for trekking: nobody has ever properly studied this area. we do see a lot of wild life there, sometimes even animals thought to be extinct. i once came across a siamese crocodile.(pretty scary).croc thought the same and vanished fast under water. Ornithologists, that rare breed we can always make very happy; we know a group of green peafowl, a kind of wild peacock. these do not like to fly, so we have to help a bit here; we send one of the guides ahead to scare them into flight...
snakes aplenty, monkeys,servettcats,which look more like wild dogs, hornbills, eagles, mousedeer leeches and spiders...and other creepy's.
we use speedboats to get upriver. that means one of us has to 'croc-a-log.': when we get into the real dense parts of greenery, one has to sit upfront and look out for something, well it could be a croc, but it is more likely to be a big log that lurks just under water and can rip the boat wide open. it is a tiring job, especially in the afternoons, when the sunlight is at an angle to the water that makes it look almost opaque, and the jungle's reflections are on the water...: <img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1050924/doc3597.jpg" alt=" - " />
will get some more jungle pictures, see you,

<small>[ 07-24-2005, 10:11 PM: Message edited by: tan ]</small>

[tan]

this is the jungle on bokor hill: on bokor there is what is left of an old french hill station, we love going there, ...
<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1050924/bokorjungle.JPG" alt=" - " />

[BigJon@Work]

Great stuff! Please post pics of your guest house. For a minute there, I thought the first pic was your guest house. :p

BigJon

[tan]

this is daisy our jeep, taking a break under the ' 'the jurassic palms', planted by the french as a plantaion, they grew a bit out of hand..
<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1059024/cimg0442.jpg" alt=" - " />
somehow this picture, no matter what i do, won't move.. so i'll look for another....

<small>[ 07-25-2005, 11:52 PM: Message edited by: tan ]</small>

[tan]

will work on guesthouse pictures tomorrow.
Wanted to take pics of the street yesterday, but the batteries finked out (reloadables), so did the electricity, so will take them today.
for the moment a few more bokor and jungle pictures. there was heavy fighting on bokot, even after the death of pol pot.
these days it is quiet there, but no off trailing, as in landmines.The bokor road, well once it was a road i suppose, is one of the worst in the country, 32 km uphill. on top you have a great view, on a good day you can see from snookyville all the way to vietnam. difficult to photograph due to that.... indochina haze.
On top also the ruins of a few vacation homes, a temple, the burned uot casino and what is left of the kings summer place.
as the king dined french, he had a french chef, and a french kitchen garden. at some point the rasberrys happily escaped. Now you can find them all over the mountain top, a joy for us. wild aid wants to get rid of them, because they are not true'tropical high alpine flora', nonsense, the old plantaion trees that are still there don' t belong in the jungle eighter...neihter are the lemon trees (in cmabo we have only limes), nor are the miniature pineapples exactly jungle or high alpine plants.
The casino on the hill is spooky. on new years eve we have a big rave there every year, a point of honour to make the trip by dirtbike, and fall off at some point.
<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1050924/casino.JPG" alt=" - " />
<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p.2005-7/1050924/portrait.jpg" alt=" - " />
this is the 'rockface' as we call it: not man made, even though it could be by the looks of it. there is a small black snake living around it. people give small offerings to it, the legend says it is the soul of the very bad man that got tuned into the stoneface by the gods.
jpg[/IMG] <img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1050924/rockface.JPG" alt=" - " />
bokor casino, i don't know it shows up, but there is a reddish moss growing on the stone, it is soft to touch and we love to pet it.
the casino was never a sucsess: in the archives in pp, i found a lot of complaints, it was leaky, the food was terrible (varried starters four five people consisted of four sardines), and somebody claimed to have used a ruler to measure up the amoebias found in the tapwater...
<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/1005-7/1050924/casino.JPG" alt=" - " />
<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2007-5/1050924/cimg0442.jpg" alt=" - " />

[tan]

<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1050924/guesthouse.jpg" alt=" - " />


that's the outside of the guesthouse with the jeep...yes, there is a vespa on the roof. this was the the one we used to gutt for spare parts, when there were no more, Bob asked me what to do with it, and i joked, 'just put it on he roof' and went to phnom penh. when i came back, there it was.. and we left it there ever since. on the seat that is no more sits poly, our plastic parrot. found her in the market, when you kicked polly or shot her with a pellet gun, it would twitter the 'ode to joy', unfortunately she was helped to a better plastic parrot world by two dutch ornithologists, who hit her once too often...

[BigJon@Work]

Wonderful stuff!

[Schmeelkie]

Great pictures! Love the sunset shot! Hope to see the drunk gekkos soon!

[tan]

Hi, two days ago i had just made a new page - with fotos, send!: server went. then, my manager called, one of our guests was losing it, claimed to be the reincarnation of jezus... (eighter drugs or more likely too much of the wrong anti malarials. ) then i had to repair to Phnom Penh for shoping for the new guesthouse. so now i sit in an internetcafe. got most of what was needed, not easy; you have to go to the big city for things like; toilet seats (if you do not know where in pp it will take you the better part of a day stumbling aroud like alost soul to find just that one back street that is the only place that is the cambodian 'ceter of western toiletseats),cotton for bedding
, matching towels, well matching.. first i thought it was lazyness or somesuch, took me years to learn that khmers really can't distinguish one red from the other, even terracotta, orange, pink, purple (well sometimes it counts as blue) and anything in between is just ' red' or doi kenia' same same. so i had to check 100 towels for exact matches: with other towels that belonged to the same batch,or should belong,
also i got a memory stick to send you the gekkos. Am dead on my feet, forgot to bring my camera, just as well, third world shopping takes all of one's concentration. of course as sooon as i decided to hit my hotel, i met scores of friends whom i hadn't seen in a while, so the night time festivites were pretty strong going. wanted to go back sometime today, but i need three army surplus parachutes. Need them... so i will have to go to the military market, but my friends do not allow me to go there unless accompanied by a resposible adult macho, (now there is an oxymoron for you). so the waiting is for my friend declan, he is the only one who can possibly know how to go about buying second hand parachutes.
As much as i like it here i' m getting homesick already. strange thing, we all have it, we get here,we are ovejoyed, and then all of a sudden we go: not a minute longer!...
that is the stage i'm now,fat chance..of getting away today.
will repair to the fcc for the time beeing, declan is ALWAYS late, might as well enjoy myself..
take care tanja

[tan]

<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1050924/ppnight.jpg" alt=" - " />
Back home,and good to be.here a picture of sisowath quai's traffic, at its best. crossing the street at rush our is not a good idea...

[tan]

so, the gekos, hope they get on the site:
big bayey's sipping from the glass, if you look good, you can see his tongue lapping...

see ya
well , keep tryingto get more pics on without losing any... tried to make a link to the album and failed. will keepat it though

<small>[ 07-31-2005, 09:27 PM: Message edited by: tan ]</small>

[tan]

just took a look on gordon sharpless site; talesofasia.he has a good rundown on the hostage crisis in seam reap and a few orther artikles that might be of interest to you. another expat living the guesthouse business...and boy! can he write!!!
have not much time today, one of my guests, a doctor none the less, slipped on her way to dinner at the corner bar and broke a bone in her foot. the poor soul still suffers under the illusion that it can be fixed in snookyille.. will try to persuade her to go to pp, and alert gloria that she is coming.
so. i re loaded the drunken gekko, just in case there is another vanishing act of pictures, at least you have ol' bailey's going for the sauce
the gekko is on, under in this post,now more:

the other pic is a bit of a strange plant, though is it? do you have those in america? if you take a good look, it is actually a twig. the white little thingies are a very small, and defenseless kind of cricket, they gather in this pretty way for safety reasons. if disturbed, they will scatter, only to regroup into the flowerlike mimicry within a few minutes...


<small>[ 08-01-2005, 12:45 AM: Message edited by: tan ]</small>

[Shapley]

Tan,

I've seen pictures of the Pitcher Plant, but I don't think we have them around here. We do have Venus Flytraps, which act in a similar manner but look quite different.

I've never seen the cricket colonies before. It is amazing what nature can produce.

I am enjoying the pictures very much. I have no idea why the disappear after a while. You may want to send a message to Annettehala. She may know some hidden secrets that are kept from us mortals. At least she may know a decent hosting server.

V/R
Shapley

[tan]

Shap,
we also have a kind of spider that lives in colonies, like anthills, with a similar social structure. No pics here, as we always eat them.fried. not bad at all. think potato chip with a soft center. they look pretty awfull when served, no amount of decoration can make the dish look anything else other than the last scene from a b-movie from the fifties..(invaders from mars or somesuch..)
here another spider- not edible but a pretty fellow: will get a few more pics.. have to upload first..

[tan]

So, here finally big baily's at the tap,the worse for wear, picture quality sadly reflects that he was not the only imbiber in the bar....
<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1050924/drunk.jpg" alt=" - " />
here the jurassic palms, have been trying to get on this one for a goon's age: <img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1050924/jep.jpg" alt=" - " />

by now you will have realized that i find myself at loggerheads with ngo's and other 'helpers' more often than not. the nonsensical ways they 'help'. the latest, two doctors , french, ofthe new age kind want to help people
to heal more natural... boy, here many do not heal at all,natural or not, they just die...
on discovery; a documentary on snakes in cambo: we should be 'nice' to them. great, i'm all for it, but can we have som antivenom first???
and then wild aid and such: take this one:when the buying will stop so will the killing. roight. roight. but: who kills, who buys? there is the industrial killing also called 'harvesting' of wildlife as in ' get them together, take a machine gun and kill the lot,or dynamite fishing etc.,that is a no no,of course. but what about this family that is starving, and lo and behold, they catch a aslow loris in their little trap:

picture vanished, tried to get back onbut no luck o far, so pic,hopefully in later post..

sweet little fellow, isn't he? looks like some kind of sloth, but it is actually a monkey, or so says my wild life book.
so monkeys do not taste good. but loris have a function in traditional medicine (not that it helps anybody) are rare and quite valuable. so this one will feed the family for quite a while, save them from starving actually, when sold. so lori gets tied up and mother makes the long trek to say ,snookyville. there she goes from house to house. arrives eventually at my place. so i know, this little fellow will die. so i spend a few dollars. family happy and i? well have a monkey, or somesuch . they are slow, or so i thought. i get a cage and carefully untie it.and -promtly get bitten, and good. my guests who watched said i didn't stand a chancce. still we manage to get the fellow into the cage, feed him, let him rest some. when he is reasonably recoveed, we take the boat to an island, and let it go.if i would have gotten caught by the wild aid nazis i would have done time...)
this is the island where our biting friend went:
<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1050924/isle.jpg" alt=" - " />
when we go we take not only our tourists but any khmer kid available (with the consent oftheir parents of course), WHEN THEY SEE THE ANIMAL SO HAPPY WHEN IT REALIZES IT ISFREE AND RUNS, I DO THINK THAT IS A BETTER WAY TO EDUCATE THEM, BETTER THAN PUNISHmet
<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1050924/gekosnsuch.jpg" alt=" - " />

<small>[ 08-03-2005, 09:08 PM: Message edited by: tan ]</small>

[tan]

Hi shap,this ...s spider was on for hours, now gone, all other pics still there. is there a obscenity rule against spiders?? did i offend somebody??? well i try try again:this is kinda strange, like some pics are there and some get edited... maybe you guys do not like content, if so please lt me know! it's not like i show anything offensive... but, well, yeah., i will not make this a disney site. bad stuff happens here and yes there are creepy crawlers around, and they are the leasr of our problems, if nothing else;, they make life worth while here, ik can stand in wonder before the diversity of all the things, plants, beasts( provided i get to see them), prae angkorean sites, views, villages not even aware that centuries are passing, and love it. look at it like the kid i was once when i promised myself to experience all this, and now i can, and love to share my love, should people care...
<img src="http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-7/1050924/spid.jpg" alt=" - " />
well spider back, for as long as it lasts..
please guys!, let me know what you want to know...
feedback will give me an idea what to tackle next as a theme, believe me there's plenty...

[Shapley]

tan,

Thanks for the pics. I'm actually a few days behind in reading the text, but I'll catch up.

I'm enjoying it all. I really don't know what to ask. I realize we called this thread "Expresso Kamuchea" after a place where you gather to chat, and so far we've let you do all the talking.

Let me get caught up on my reading and I'll try to be a little more talkative.

V/R
Shapley

[BigJon@Work]

Tan,

B.com is not editing your photos. They are disappearing from your photo album on Villagephotos. I tried one of the picture links in a seperate browser window and it told me "file not found." It seems like your pictures are being deleted or you are over the limit for free bandwith hosting and Village Photo is restricting them from being seen. B.com is a popular board, so everyone that views this thread uses up some of your free downloads.

Did you look at these help pages on Villagephotos?
http://villagephotos.com/help/faq.asp#redx
http://villagephotos.com/help/faq.asp#optimize
The second one recommends that you post a link to your album as viewing it from their website doesn't count against your daily limit.

Or try Photobucket.com. Their site works very well for me.

BigJon

P.S. Love the drunk Gecko!

<small>[ 08-02-2005, 05:53 PM: Message edited by: BigJon@Work ]</small>

[tan]

Thanks, Big John,
begin to slightly grasp where the problem is...
now i have to learn to work around it and that will take me a while, as my computer illiteracy is legendary. five years without internet didnot help eighter...
well at leat it will give me time to come up with more new pics. thanks again
tan