Needs Repeating

Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.

When rich speculators prosper
while farmers lose their land;
when government officials spend money
on weapons instead of cures;
when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible
while the poor have nowhere to turn-
all this is robbery and chaos.
It is not in keeping with the Tao.

If a nation is centered in the Tao,
if it nourishes its own people
and doesn't meddle in the affairs of others,
it will be a light to all nations in the world.

-Lao Tsu circa 500BC

Bokor HIll Station circa 1924

Bokor1\ old-side
Originally uploaded by ubikwity

This is the Bokor Mountain Hill Station as it was just after the French completed construction. The Cambodians have just recently begun fixing the 41 km road from Kampot to the 1000 meter cliffside that overlooks the Gulkf of Thailand. The ruined buildings of the hill station are worth the visit as is the stunning view.

Is Tourism a Renewable Resource?

The simple answer is yes, it is a renewable resource. The complicated answer is no, tourism is like a loaded gun, if you point it in the wrong direction someone could get hurt. There are too many examples of attractive destinations becoming over developed to a point of total desolation. Like mining and forestry if tourism is not managed carefully soon there will be no resource left at all. Kampot has been isolated even longer than most other parts of Cambodia and has only just begun to take aim at its tourists. Local businesses and government agencies are in a unique position to influence the types of tourist that would be attracted to Kampot. Already a great many come to see the natural beauty of the river, bay, and mountains surrounding the city. They come to see the old town with its crumbling colonial architecture. They come to take the rough road up to Bokor Hill Station. Often they come to spend some time volunteering for a local project helping the Khmers to better their own lot. Tourist and Ex-pats alike have found Kampot a nice respite from the chaos of Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, and Sihanoukville. Existing businesses are already doing a good job of catering to these visitors and they should work together in anticipation of greater numbers that will be coming. By working together they can influence the government to promote sustainable development projects and share in the resulting preservation of Kampot’s culture and environment for decades to come. By seeking only to secure their own piece of the tourist pie they insure that they will only be a lot of crumbs held together by their own dough.
(Editorial for the Kampot Dar'laing issue #3

Quiz Time!

What is a Stony Angel?
A) A cute hippie girl
B) A Japanese Cos-Play Character
C) A breast pump
D) A Cambodian River Fish
E) A Medieval Cherub

Answer in the comments...

Jas and Peekah

Jas and Pica
Originally uploaded by ubikwity

4 kilos of soft sweetness held by 40 kilos of soft sweetness.

Pa and Peekah

Pa and Pica
Originally uploaded by ubikwity

Peekah Amélie Norris born 9am November 12th, 2007 in Kampot, Kingdom of Cambodia.

US Ambassador greets new Warden of Kampot

Ten things you can do at home to simulate living in Cambodia

Some of you reading my blog or looking at my flickr photos may think that I am living in a tropical paradise. I have prepared a list of things you can do to simulate living in Cambodia.
1) Turn off all the hot water taps except to one shower.
2) Leave your windows open all the time and remove any screens from them.
3) Set your thermostat to 86 degrees
4) At least twice a week fill a bucket with water and splash it on an interior wall to promote mold growth.
5) Leave little piles of sugar in every room to encourage ants and other creatures to come live with you.
6) Only shop for food at the farmer’s market or an asian speciality store where you cannot identify any products.
7) Do not drive yourself anywhere, take a bicycle or have a friend with a pick-up truck drive you - you must stand in the back of the pick-up.
8) Go to a pet shop and buy one of the following to let loose in your house: lizard, snake, scorpion, large spider, rat, or pig.
9) Tune your television to only receive CNN and 5 foreign language stations.
10) Find some neighborhood kid, preferably with a learning disability who doesn’t like you, and pay him to do your laundry in cold dirty water.

100th post! - another list

Last 10 Non-fiction books I have read. Note that the most recent book argues that there is no such thing as a non-fiction book as all things require a subjective observer in order to exist.
1) Global Brain by Howard Bloom. Describes the evolution of organized thought from microbes to the current mess we are in.
2) Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos by Ian Stewart. A lot of confusing numbers but still a great introduction into mathematical chaos and why everything you learned in school is wrong.
3) Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Starting 40,000 years ago things have just fallen apart...mainly thanks to Guns, Germs and Steel. Those conquistadors were even bigger assholes than you suspected.
4) A Short History of Everything by Bill Bryson. Starting with the latest string theories of creation and building up to evolutionary biology in a easy to read and often funny book. Gives credit to many great inventors, kooks, and explorers who never got any.
5) A Short History of the World by H.G. Wells. Written in 1941, with an after-word written in 1944, Wells describes our history from microbes to Nazis. Things looked pretty grim for the Brits. This should be a standard text for history as it is well written and displays a fair balance of world cultures. A noticeable anti-religious theme runs throughout. Money quote: “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that at present mankind as a species is demented and that nothing is so urgent upon us as the recovery of mental self-control. We call an individual insane if his ruling ideas are so much out of adjustment to his circumstances that he is a danger to himself or others. This definition of insanity seems to cover the entire human species at the present time...”
6) Sideshow by William Shawcross. Describes in detail the giant shit that Kissinger and Nixon dumped on Cambodia. Great for swatting Republican mosquitoes.
7) The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume 2, abridged) by Gibbon. Déjà Vu all over again?
8) The Histories by Herodotus. Great historian, often describes events with the caveat, “ ...but I doubt this could have happened.”
9) Before Kampuchea by Milton Osborne. Cambodia was once the wealthiest country in South East Asia. Osborne describes Cambodia before Pol Pot but cannot hide his contempt for Sihanouk and a general right wing imbalance spoils the usefulness of this book.
10) Why Do Men Have Nipples? by Mark Lerner and Billy Goldberg. Why indeed.

Jasmine and Bokor

Jasmine and Bokor
Originally uploaded by ubikwity

Gulf of Thailand

DSC00029.JPG
Originally uploaded by ubikwity

We took a boat out to the sea and stopped for a picnic on this sandspit.

Lists!

I can't seem to keep my blog updated so I'm going to make lists. I'll start with a list of the last ten fiction books I've read (most recent first).
1) Prelude to foundation by Isaak Asimov, would've been a good short story as contained only one good idea.
2) Highways To A War by Christopher J Koch, good fictional account of a war photographer's love of Vietnam and Cambodia. Weak ending.
3) KPAX 2 by Gene Brewer, I hadn't read the first one but I saw the movie starring Kevin Spacey. I like the writing style, simple and breezy, but over-all it seemed a bit meandering, and it leaves the major mysteries unsolved, saving them for K-PAX 3, I suppose.
4) Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins, great book with the added bonus of taking place mostly in Laos.
5) Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami, just my favorite contemporary writer.
6) The Sirens Of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, A great American Hero.
7) Hard Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World by Haruki Murakami, this book should be the basis for a new religion.
8) Kafka On The Beach by Haruki Murakami
9) South of The Border, West Of The Sun by Haruki Murakami
10) The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, this was the book that got me hooked

Kampot River

Kampot River
Originally uploaded by ubikwity

Aluminum Screw

My new metaphor for living in Cambodia is ‘an aluminum screw’. Not the kind of screw you would use to connect aluminum - but a screw made out of aluminum. I came upon this metaphor while installing window brackets to keep the windows from flailing in the wind. I purchased the only available brackets at the local hardware store. They have a nice brass coloring and came with matching screws. I don’t have a drill so I used a hammer and nail to prepare the screw holes. Then I screwed the brackets to the wood frame. Each screw was instantly stripped - the screws were made of such soft metal. So I use the hammer to beat them the rest of the way into the wood. The hammer head shattered. It broke into three pieces like it was made of pencil lead. So I got a rock and pounded the screw in with a screwdriver. This worked but it was no longer a pretty solution. The brass coloring is scratched and even just a few days later the screws are oxidized. Whenever someone comes to the restaurant and says to me, ‘wow, you really have the life’, I want to show them my broken hammer and blackened screw.

Conversation with a Mosquito

I had a conversation with a mosquito this morning. I may have been dreaming or I may have been in the bathroom. Usually each morning when I am showering I have the opportunity to kill the mosquitos that fed on me the previous night. The mosquito materialized in front of me and I instinctively swatted the hard tile wall with my open palm. Ouch, why do I always do that. I inspected my sore hand for the remains. Nothing. I scan the room, no sign of it. How do they do that? I thought. And in answer the mosquito said, “We can teleport short distances.” Really? I thought. “Yes, we are creatures of the tenth dimension.” I am familiar with string theory but that does not allow for tele-porting telepathic bloodsucking mosquitos, do you care to explain? “In one possible future, humans have transformed their souls into digital avatars allowing for a kind of godlike immortality.” I could see that possibility, but why would anyone want to be a mosquito? “There was an islamo-commie hacker who maliciously altered the avatar coding to turn us into mosquitos, and banished us to the tenth dimension.” An islamo-commie hacker? Are you a republican? “Well, yes...” That explains a few things. Tell me, did you suck my blood last night? “Um, no, I’m a male mosquito...” So you just cowardly buzzed around my head all night trying to get some chick-mosquito to fuck you? The mosquito hovered in view a few fractions of a second too long and I thwacked it with ‘Sideshow’ by William Shawcross. Sure enough, the tile was splattered with red blood and bits of lying, cowardly, republican mosquito guts. I call that the Shawcross Redemption.

preggers

preggers
Originally uploaded by ubikwity.

Please Clean Up Our Town

One way or another
by Mark Norris for the Kampot Dar'laing
The dry season brings a flurry of building activity - resurfacing roads, new statuary, more houses and hotels. The work must be finished before the serious rains begin. This flurry brings with it an increase in dust and debris. This season it has also brought an increase in fees for garbage collection. The new rates are applied to local residences and businesses based on a fair and detailed pricing structure as laid out in the document titled, “The Prices that we needs to collect”.
The fees fall into six well defined categories: 1) Normal House, 2) House to be Corporation, 3) Restaurant, Hotel, Dance Hall, and Entertainment Club, 4) Good Shop and service, 5) Service of the Clinic and Schools, and 6) Companies, Factories, Handicraft, and Ports. These have clear subcategories, like, “Ground of the flat ($1/month)”, “House for foreigners ($5/month)”, “House in Plot ($5/ month)”, “The house in the building of an orphan ($0.50/month)”, “Dance Hall, Discotaquiet, Night Club that has bigness size (parking space)($15/month)”, “The hotel has not restaurants, are cheaper that $10 per night ($15/month)”, and, “The other Dust that has no Limit time ($5/month)”.
It is not clear, however, if these fees are cumulative. For example; if you owned an international ($100/month), royal ($100/month), port ($50/month), with a Parking space ($100/month), and “the other Dust that has no Limit time” ($5/month) would you pay a combined $355/month or could you assume that the Dust comes with the parking space and only pay $350/month?
I have a vague recollection of living in a city where they charged a set fee per barrel of garbage regardless of whether or not my noodle shop had an air-conditioner...
PS. If you must know, I am building an orphan in my house ($0.50/month)

This article was published in the Kampot Dar'laing. I would note that our garbage collection was 2000 riel per month ( $0.50) for the past year and under the new rules it would be $20 per month with no change in service other than new uniforms for the garbage collectors. We negotiated them down to $5/month and got them to agree to sweep the street occasionally (hasn't happened yet).

Snuggles

Coming out of a up-tempo record... The restaurant is doing very well. Recently, a pair of puppies showed up on our door step. I thought they were just strays from the neighborhood until Jasmine asked me to name them. I saw the two snuggling together and suggested Luke and John. She liked the names and called the affectionate, adventurous one John - the shy and quiet one Luke. I really liked John, he got run over the next morning.

T.G.I.F.T.

Thank God It's Fucking Tuesday - because we are closed on tuesdays.

Cambodia 1300

In Cambodia it is the women who take charge of the trade. For this reason a foreigner, arriving in the country, loses no time in getting himself a mate, for he will find her commercial instincts a great asset.
Foreign sailors coming to the country note with pleasure that it is not necessary to wear clothes, and, since rice is easily had, women easily persuaded, houses easily run, furniture easily come by, and trade easily carried on, a great many sailors desert to take up permanent residence.
-Chou Ta-Kuan 1297 AD

Jasmine Restaurant

We returned from the states and got to work setting up the restaurant. Jasmine had a lovely birthday party, about 18 locals came by and had a great meal followed by cake and carcassonne. Then the monk came by the next day to bless our business and he told us the best day to open would be Monday (this was Saturday). So we opened on Monday. Our Swedish friend Anders was in town for the birthday and he stayed for the opening. We had no sign and no customers. The next day we were closed (we will be closed Tuesdays). I made a quick sign and strung some more christmas lights and Wednesday we opened. We were packed, overwhelmed and exhausted. Thursday the same groups came back for another meal and we were packed again - $100 in sales just that evening. We met some nice people and they all loved the food. They came by for breakfast the next day. Now it is Saturday and we have had only two customers ( it is 8 p.m.). The blender/ coffee grinder broke and the electric grill stopped working (need a better transformer) but we are pulling it off. Our customer have been reporting back at their guesthouses what excellent food we serve and that has prompted visits by the locals to snoop around for our secret. More later...

Jasmine Restaurant, Kampot

Jasmine Restaurant, Kampot
Originally uploaded by ubikwity.

Bob and Dave were visiting from Washington State.

wedding in sb

wedding insb
Originally uploaded by ubikwity.

Back in Cambodia

After three weeks stateside we are back in Cambodia. Once we are unpacked we will be focusing on getting the restaurant open. I hope to catch up on my blog backlog and get back to writing my novel. As I am writing this at the K-West restaurant on the riverside in Phnom Penh three security guards passed by and I looked around to see who they were escorting. A smiling old man with a coterie of woman passed a few feet from me ans smiled at me. I smiled back, he looked very familiar. He was very short, he looked in good health, and he only had a small group around him. They left the restaurant and got into three landcruisers. It was King Sihanouk. I checked by looking at my 10,000 riel note and asking my waitress...

Cambodia 1965

This is an interesting look at what Cambodia was like before the "troubles". Bear in mind that in 1968, Nixon began his secret bombing campaign and in 1970 Lon Nol overthrew King Sihanouk in a bloody coup that led to civilwar, culminating in the Pol Pot regime in 1975 which was overthrown in turn by the vietnamese invasion in 1978, which then led to another civil war that lasted until 1999.
In 1965 Cambodia was the richest nation in South East Asia.