Saturday, 19 February 2011

Some changes we notice

We've been out here for three-and-a-half years plus now. Our city is changing. Here are a few outward things that I am observing:

1. Cleaner - a most excellent plus. Three years ago most of the city looked like a rubbish dump and many people treated the streets as one big garbage disposal centre. We are not pristine yet but there has been a quantum leap forward in city cleanliness.

2. Car dealers - not so long ago and you had to be in the know to track down a place to buy a car. Now, dealerships abound - as do home-grown street corners with a line-up of vehicles for sale. Toyota rules here. If it is not a Camry (hugely popular) it is a Corolla or a Lexus. Most vehicles are second hand imports from the USA. A very high percentage of them are accident write-offs or flood damaged. Chop shops abound. We have a dodgy place a block from here. Cars come in in pieces, and appear glued up and newly painted, opposite the chop shop a few weeks later!

A block from the Healing Home, this place is now functioning. If you can spit over the road, you would hit a new site for yet another petrol station, coming soon - and this is a minor connecting road!

3. Petrol stations - there are three 'levels' of acquiring petrol here. You can buy a litre at a time from pepsi bottles filled with 'interesting' petrol. You can buy from a guy who hand pumps from a 44 gallon drum. And you can go to a petrol station.

Up until very recently, I would mostly go five blocks from here to get real petrol. No longer. In the last three months, three petrol stations have opened in our home/Healing Home immediate vacinity, and one more is being built! Crazy crazy - but it speaks of the car ownership explosion happening right now. Phnom Penh is already in serious gridlock many places now - and it will be getting pretty horrible in the future as very little roading infrastructure is happening.

'Goldtower 42' - the big Korean project that has turned into 'concrete tower 29'. This monster towers over everything as very few buildings here are higher than 8-10 stories. All work abruptly stopped three months ago and the site is locked down.

4. Construction wobbles - there continues to be a huge amount of small-scale housing going up. Apartments are the building rage now - they are popping up like petrol stations. There is a large over-supply of this up-market accommodation but that does not stop the surge. It seems that is someone has an uncle that is gettng $1000 a month for an apartment, then 50 people with money to blow jump on that bandwagon.

However, big commercial ventures have taken a very big hit in Phnom Penh since the financial wobbles of two years ago. Much of the big development here is Korean-driven, and Korea has been pulling the pin on a lot of big projects that are already well under way. Office space is already in major over-supply too and the wild speculative days of yester-year have hit a major reality check.

Friday, 18 February 2011

More power so pics part 2

Off to work we go - it would be fun to just spend a day sometime to photograph the infinite variations and configurations of what a moto moves in Cambodia.

A local driving my future wagon. The humble Lexus 4wd is the essential mobile status symbol here. Don't be fooled that Cambodia is 'poor' - these machines abound by the mega hundreds. Cambodia is not so poor - but many, many of the people are.

'Open market' - fish, pork, beef, chicken - they are all sold in the open (and very often in the open sun, too!)

We've just been thru' Chinese New Year here. Phnom Penh is pretty well run by the Chinese, business-wise. We had a week of delightful quiet and calm in the city with the majority of businesses shut down - even tho' this is not a Cambodian holiday. These flowers are a part of the festivities.

Yeji lady weighing and collecting scrap metal in an area not far from us where mainly Vietnamese people run streets of wood milling and furniture shops. Directly above is where this young mum and her child live (below)


Not even trying - three adults, a babe and a child on one moto is reasonable but not head-turning-worthy. The best I have seen is six teenagers on a bike. That would be boys, of course!

Pics from our world to yours

Sorry sorry - the blog has been left lying like a winter lawn these last few weeks. We are still alive and healthy, but there has not been a whole lot of stuff happening to inspire a blog posting for a bit.

However, I've taken my trusty old film camera for a few walks recently and enjoyed handling a serious piece of photographic machinery instead of the baby Sony digital. There is something about the clunk of a real camera shutter on the old Canon EOS 1n that pulls me back to my old happy hobby.

Films and developing are incredibly cheap here (develop and print 2x 36exp rolls of film plus bought 10 rolls top quality fuji film just out of date - US$14 all up) and it takes nothing to scan across to digital - so here are a few pics. I would put up a bunch more shots but tonight the internet is hardly crawling and every pic is taking soooo long to download ...

In Cambodia, the family car is very often a moto

These old girls are usually ok on the road. It is the little ladies in their smart office get-up that you have to be wary of - so often they have the road-sense of a pickled lizard, cutting you off without a clue of what they have just done!

These little piggies went to market ...