Let The Celebrations Begin!

Cambodia's second most important holiday week is about to begin. The most important is the Khmer New Year.

On 30 October, the King Father's (Norodom Sihanouk) birthday will be celebrated. On Monday, the Water Festival starts, featuring dragon boat races on the Tonlee Sap River, whose reversal of flow is the cause for celebration. Competitors and boats are arriving from all across the country.

The usual expectation is for two million visitors. Old-timers like me leave the city to the revelers, many of whom will sleep where they can and crowd to the riverfront during  the day to watch the boats compete and each night to see the massive fireworks tower over the river and above the majestic lighted boats drifting on the black waters below. I will head down to Takeo to visit some Topaz gem mines on the Vietnamese border.

My Land Manager's family is traveling down from Ratanakiri. I invited them last year, but Chrorn said that it involved too much money. Since I am footing the bill this year, they will come! His five kids are very excited, none of them has participated before. They have relatives to stay with across the river in Bakhieng.

I told them my own version of the truth: "You got to do it once and it can be great fun. But to do it twice is probably crazy!"

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The Phnom Penh Waterfront

In Phnom Penh the mighty Mekong River joins the Tonlee Sap River in an interesting natural partnership.

The Mekong drains out of China, Laos and Thailand. Its burden of water and silt naturally seek the river's outlet on the Vietnamese coast, but when monsoon rains fall, flood waters force their way into the center of Cambodia, reversing the flow of the Tonlee Sap River which otherwise drains the lake there. A vast flood plain forms and the Tonlee Sap Lake swells, doubling in size. However, as it grows counter-pressures increase. And every year, in a single day, the flow reverses allowing the water to rush back East to rejoin the Mekong at Phnom Penh and resume its interrupted journey to the Pacific.

Back in the center of the country, as water levels collapse farmers recapture previously flooded land in an annual ritual to grow a further crop of rice. This is probably the second most important natural rythmn in Cambodia. It is synchronized with the most important: the alternation of monsoon and dry season!

The Tonlee Sap: the only river in the world that reverses flow twice a year.

Cambodia. Always the same. Always something new. Like this sunset rainbow over the Tonlee Sap River. (The flags of every nation are represented there.)

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My First Two Readers (Thanks)

I wanted to thank my sister Mary Stuart and my brother Bill Brown for taking the time to check out my blog. Thanks for being my first two visitors!

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Typhoon Ketsana Hits Northeastern Cambodia

Typhoon Ketsana struck Cambodia in early October 2009 after devastating the northern Phillipines and causing great damage in central Vietnam.

The following ten pictoral posts are the story of a trip to the Se San River from Ratanakiri's Provincial Capital Ban Lung to check out our Cambodian tree farm near the town of Ven Sai two days after the storm.

The town of Ven Sai was under water, its residents made refugees.

The road to our land flooded after the Vietnamese released water from their strained hydro-electric dams upstream. All the villages along the river road from Ven Sai to our land were under water.

We worried that the rains and flooding might have destroyed the thousands of tree seedlings we had planted in June and July. To our surprise our land remained above the flood; the heavy rains had drained away easily. Lucky us.

As you will see these ten posts are more newsletter than time-phased commentary, more pictoral narrative than blog. They do give strong evidence of my own "analog mentality in a digital age" problem.

But what can I do? I find it hard to break free from these older forms of story telling and information presentation!

But I do hope you enjoy the trip. (The first 'page' is a complete jpeg. Just click it for a larger version.)

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(1/10) After the Typhoon

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