Getting Ready For Water Festival

Water Festival is Cambodia's biggest holiday celebration held over several days in the capital, Phnom Penh. While numbers are impossible to authenticate, it is thought a million or more poor rural folks pour into the capital to take part in the festivities. These subsistence farmers and merchants arrive in the city with their extended families in all forms of dangerous, rickety contraptions packed with people and stuff well in excess of the "vehicles" intended limit.

Even the very scruffy three to 12-dollar a night hotels in town is well outside the vast majority of these revelers budget. Camping in the city - anywhere one can afford - is the norm. This is where the police come into play and become the campers landlords.

In an informal manner, area police 'sell' public city space to camp with prices that reflect the quality of location, size of the family and how well the people speak and dress.

The fees the police charge to bolster their meager $30 - $75-monthly salary balloons and most often goes directly in their pockets and shared with their superiors and never finds it's way to National coffers.

To Westerner's, this is corruption. In this part of the world, this is lifestyle.

Interesting.

Labor in Cambodia

The cost of labor in Cambodia is nothing like that in the Western world. Not even close. While an immigrant day-laborer in the United States may earn between seven and 10-dollars per hour, in Cambodia, semi-skilled workers earn between one and three dollars...a day.

You may ask, 'How does anyone live on that kind of money today?'. There are several reasons. For one, there are very few mortgages in Cambodia. During the Khmer Rouge regime (1975 - 1979) all private property reverted to the State and all homes in every city were vacated by force and occupants were marched to the hinterlands to plant and grow rice. Resistance to this immediate command was met with death - on the spot. No exceptions.

Details will be forever sketchy, but it is loosely thought that 45% of the rural population and 75% of the city population died prematurely from murder, disease or starvation.

How Sweet Is This?

In-flight delivery: Malaysian gives birth on plane

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – An official says a Malaysian woman has given premature birth to a boy on a domestic flight, minutes before it landed in Kuala Lumpur.

Liew Siaw Hsia gave birth on budget carrier AirAsia's flight from Penang to Kuching on Wednesday.

AirAsia spokesman Nazatul Mokhtar said Friday that the flight was diverted to nearby Kuala Lumpur for anemergency landing when Liew started labor pains.

A doctor on the flight helped the 31-year-old deliver while the plane was still 2,000 feet (600 meters) in the air in its final approach to land.

Nazatul says both the mother and baby are healthy and will get lifetime of free flights. He says Liew was 27 weeks pregnant, 11 weeks short of the full term.

How To Fix Your Camera

Here's how you fix a camera in Cambodia

Work in the Boutique Cruising World

Like many, I have had to adapt and adjust in this current economic environment. These are particularly punishing times for land developer's like me - big and small.

My roots are sales management and advertising. In these troubled times, I have enjoyed going back to my roots.

A French firm, Compagnie Fluviale du Mekong, operate a fleet of boutique cruise ships along the Mekong River in Cambodia and Vietnam and a client for about a year. Here are some examples of our recent media works. My job is rainmaker and creative director. Chean Long's job is creating the images. Real fun.