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This is another catch up entry, chronicling a trip to Kuala Lumpur. I visited another friend from Master's, he's probably the most successful of all of us and he's not even working in GIS! One day I'll learn how to be like him...
It was really lovely going to Kuala Lumpur. It was my first trip out of Cambodia since I'd arrived, and it was high time I got out. I had a massive overload of modernity, staying right in the centre of town 5 minutes walk from hectares of mallage. I even found a multi-storey mall entirely devoted to electronics! Bought myself a slow discharge battery for my phone, it now lasts a full day!
The main thing for me was seeing my friend who I hadn't since 2010. He was very hospitable and took us around to many places in KL (highlight being the palaces - they just built a new one) and Melaka. It was amazing being able to hammer along the highways at 100mph without fearing for my life. Malaysia is better than Australia for infrastructure. The place is booming. After all the shopping, we went to Melaka, the old Portuguese/Dutch/British colony. Love it how the British colonised the colonisers. It's now a bit of a sleepy city, compared to KL, and has plenty of touristy things to do. There was a walking street, a few canals and nice sea views. We had lunch at a Chinese restaurant as well. That was one thing I noticed, and liked, about Malaysia - multiculturalism is Malaysia. Everyone speaks at least three languages it seems and I didn't feel like I stuck out as much being a Westerner there. This was a nice relief!
We went to both the old palace (satellite image) and the new one (this is a tool to compare different maps at the same location, here showing OpenStreetMap and Google maps - just change it to Google hybrid map on the right to get the imagery of the new palace). Anyway so it was quite stunning to see both the palaces. The old one was obviously smaller but was in a terrific garden setting in the middle of the city. We were also able to see a vast array of royal memorabilia - the curious thing being that much of the more pricey items were not on display that day as there was a ceremony to welcome the new king (despite Wikipedia saying his reign began the month before). The new palace is far more imposing. There is a massive stone apron out the front of a huge stone arch with mounted guards patiently boring their horses. It was very hot and there was no shade so we took a few pictures and left. The palace was quite a way back behind the arch and vast landscaped slope.
I was under no illusions after these visits that Malaysia is a prosperous place. This view was reinforced after our trip to Putrajaya (don't ya love this map comparison site!), the administrative centre of Malaysia. This is a new, planned city to the south, also near Cyberjaya, another planned city which, predictably, is for high tech enterprises. Putrajaya has many wide roads, large buildings, human made lakes and its own mall of course. I think the civil servants of Malaysia would find a very comfortable existence there. There's not much else to add other than the Petronas Towers are a stunning sight, not so much because of their height (shorter than expected) but because of the sheer amount of polished stainless steel. The thing is so shiny at night because it's covered in lights and they reflect off all the steel. It's a lovely effect. We spend the last night at the famous Luna Bar, which has cubicles practically hanging over the side of the top level of a large hotel in the city. Quite a spectacular vantage point for the concrete canyons of KL.
ការប្រជុំពីការគូសផែនទីនៅភ្នំពេញលើកទី ៦ / PHNOM PENH MAPPING MEETUP 6 and CAMBODIA OPENSTREETMAP UPDATE MARATHON 1
Before I took off for KL there was Phom Penh Mapping Meetup 6. Can't believe how long ago this is now! This was described by the technical director of Aruna, the top GIS company in Phnom Penh, as epic. A pleasing assessment. We had four presentations:
Juliette Rousselot
CCHR
Using remote sensing for human rights
Ou Sokchamroeun
Cambodia Zoom
How the CambodiaZoom web map was made
Saren Sreng and Huy Eng
Open Development Cambodia
An open spatial data project for Cambodia
A Crowdmember
OpenStreetMap
Report on the outcome of Cambodia OpenStreetMap Update Marathon 1
I ended up doing the last one, which turned into a bit of a defense of the marathon because one activity involved updating the border. Cue massive controversy!!! (see comments). I thought I was doing a good thing since the border in OpenStreetMap appeared to be quite old and definitely incorrect - a moment's glance at Google Maps showed that strong improvement was required. So I along with other participants decided to upload the border from Cambodia's Ministry of Land Management. There were a few mild complaints or questions from some people on the Phnom Penh Mapping Meetup Facebook group but none so vehement as that from a recent returnee to Phnom Penh, who had been a lecturer for some decades elsewhere and now holds a position in a senior administrative body in the Cambodian government. See the post in the above link for some of the discussion.
This all turned out to be a bittersweet experience meeting him as I was really pleased that someone like him would come along to both the first Cambodia OpenStreetMap Update Marathon and then the Phnom Penh Mapping Meetup. But then he also developed a quite negative opinion of our activities because we were updating the border. I learned through this that border issues are a very touchy subject in Cambodia and the Indochina peninsular. Of course there is the ongoing spat over the Spratly Islands which even brought into question the usefulness of ASEAN for some. I realised that we're privileged in Australia becaues we have a clear land border, surrounded by sea. Other countries have had to go through sometimes many rounds of negotiation, if not war, to produce the lines that us map makers happily draw on a map. It brought home to me the significance of map making, the meaning that some of these simple lines can have. For me as a foreigner I had no chance recognizing the significance. Possibly inevitable also, one might think, given the title of this blog!!!
Really though, as others said to me (such as in that thread on Facebook) there was nothing illegal in what we were doing, despite this individual's opinion. OpenStreetMap is an example of volunteered geographic information (VGI) - it is not an authoritative source. It is a spatial Wikipedia. What you see there can be edited by anyone. Because of this, the map has been vastly improved since us running the marathons. It now has all of the province boundaries, the roads of Phnom Penh have been improved (now there are only a couple of roads classified as primary where before the place was littered with them), all of the protected areas are now on the map (with the official borders from the royal decrees), the roads of Sihanoukville are practically complete where before there were very few etc etc. We also had about 12 students from the Royal University of Agriculture's land management course attend for 3 hours at the beginning of the first marathon to learn how to edit OSM and make a few edits to their hometowns on the map.
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