Life in the present tense: Catching up and Fashion

16^th November – Catching Up and Fashion

One of the things I had singularly failed to appreciate before arriving in SE Asia is the time it takes to update others on your travels via the interweb. When I started blogging in September of this year I did much of the work from home where a decent connection was readily available and upload speeds passable to enable text and photos to be communicated to those who wished to read about my various exploits.

Now in Cambodia this takes on a whole new level of challenge as the infrastructure to support much of what we take for granted in the west does not exist or exists but in a very poor state. Mobile phone masts are everywhere as are the advertising banners for Metphone amongst a number of others. Wifi and internet are used as major selling points of most cafés and restaurants. Facebook is everywhere on the screens you see in cyber land but coming from a virtually instantaneous service in the UK to click and wait a while is different. Why am I writing this, well I think readers need to know that in order to create one post it is taking 2-3 hours for both of us to do this. In the UK it would have been an hour tops. The connections frequently go down in the middle of uploads and the signal strength is very weather dependant. So we are running a little behind on updates but have decided to stay another day in Battambang to rectify this before we head off for 5-6 days of cycling towards Bangkok.

The 16^th November was a blog day, 3 hours over breakfast in the Red Piano for me to write and upload one post. I went for a quick shop and discovered yet another shopping centre, brand new and almost empty as was the experience in Phnom Penh. Shopping in a centre does not work in Cambodia. Too many of the population do not have the means to be able to purchase the inflated indoor prices and many others live by day to day existence. The same is across the country so the centre felt out of place although did provide the mini tripod I needed.

Bikes were cleaned in the afternoon, I was staggered by how many bolts had worked themselves loose on the pannier racks, should have done what I intended to do at end of day one and tightened them, but soreness and exhaustion meant I didn’t. Will learn, as I am every day.

Dinner at one of the small restaurants in the market, probably the best curry I have had since arriving and G’s shrimp Amok served in a carved out coconut shell looked as good as it tasted. The Blue Pumpkin saw more of our hard earned dollar tonight with a final email/blog session before moving on from this town to Battambang tomorrow.

Fashion, I don’t want to say much other than it has been fun to watch...and learn