Out On A Limb

 

Intrepid? Fearless? Foolish? 

Don't know. Don't know which adjective works best. Maybe all of them. Twenty meters off the ground.

Out on a slim flexing limb, he reaches for branches filled with fruit to drop to his friends waiting below.

I watch him stop to eat some himself.

I had seen him out of the corner of my eye as I drove down the new highway out of Vietnam to Ban Lung, Ratanakiri. I continued down the road, looking for a safe place to to do a U-turn to come back and park on the verge.

It is Sunday, school's out and everyone is excited about the three-nation trade fair in town.

I stop, settle my motorcycle and get my camera out. As I am taking my helmet off, I can see him edging out onto a secondary branch, bouncing it up and down, testing its strength. When I first saw him I did not see his friends--my first pictures don't even show them--they were obscured by bushes they were sitting behind.

Intrepid?  Fearless?  Unthinking?

Maybe he is more than 20 meters above his friends.

I work to get a picture of him and of the two boys below, though they are at some distance from me and from each other. 

That part of me, the photographer, was thinking: "if he falls, he will fall for seconds. Probably cartwheel. His orange shirt clear against the green background."

The rest of me is thinking: "Be careful damn it!"
 
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Pictures Of Triplets: Dangerous

Near sunset one afternoon I unthinkingly took pictures of three kids—nautical engineers and their boats.

In a hurry and without thinking I took a picture of all of them at once, breaking a Khmer rule, and potentially endangering one of the children.

Many Cambodians believe that the middle person in a group of three will suffer bad luck in some form; some believe that they will die.

How old is this belief? Carvings at Angkor Wat give rise to speculation that it has been around a long time.

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The Cambodian Bodhi Tree -- New Leaves, and Old

New leaves are showing on the sacred Bodhi trees across Cambodia as they are on the more common, and decidedly unsacred mango. (At the same time many other trees are losing leaves, shedding seeds, or going dormant :).

Local lore says that at least some of the Bodhi trees originated in India. The trees in front of Wat Botum in Phnom Penh (near the National Assembly) are said to have grown from cuttings from ancient trees growing in Sri Lanka, which in turn were taken from cuttings from the "original" Buddha tree. The Wat was founded in 1422 by King Ponhea Yat (1405-1467), but got its current name in 1865.

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30,000 Kilometers And Counting

Just got into Phnom Penh from a five-day trip to Preah Vihear via Kampong Thom and to Prey Veng via Kampong Cham.

My first trip to Preah Vihear by motorcycle was surprisingly easy, considering that it is widely considered one of Cambodia's 'remote' Provinces. When I first visited this province after Cambodia's 1993 elections, it was remote. There was no land access out of Kampong Thom; we went in by UN helicopter.

That has changed.  Read More!

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Merry Christmas From Cambodia

So it's Christmas Day in Cambodia where the main religion is Theravada Buddhism.

Buddhist religious practice co-exists easily with those of the Muslim Cham people and with the wide assortment of Christian Churches across the country that Buddhism clearly owns: there are more than 4500 temples here. (For such a poor country, this is an enormous story of recovery. All were abandoned during the Khmer Rouge years; many were destroyed or used as animal pens, the monks killed or scattered abroad.)

In the Cambodian uplands ethnic minority groups practice their ancient animism (aspects of religious belief and practice they share with most Cambodians, fear and reverence of forest spirits, for example). Christian missionaries are working assiduously in places like Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri to aid, teach and, of course, to convert. Read More!

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