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Wow, really counting down the entries now. A month to go of my placement! This is the last of three quick catch up entries to get back on schedule. This Wednesday I'll push out another entry about how my placement has been going.
This is another catch up, and trip, report (short video if you can't be bothered reading ;-)). I visited another friend from Master's, this time in Hanoi. I went there with yet another friend from the same course, who lives in Phnom Penh. We caught the bus to Ho Chi Minh (but $9) and then flew to Hanoi (only $50). This trip was a wonderful week away, and I really needed it. The three weeks before I had had two ear infections and, of all things, a herpes outbreak on my neck. EWWWW! I assure you there were no untoward activities I participated in to earn such an infection. The doctor was most displeased, and made me take 5 days off saying I was very run down and stressed. She gave me all of these impressive antibiotics and creams and a regimen for taking them all which boggled my at the time quite feeble mind. It made me feel a bit better that she said four people the preceding day had come in with herpes infections, she said that that time of year many people get run down and succumb to various things more easily because of the heat as well.
Anyway, so Hanoi was awesome (rooftop panorama). Our host was very considerate and made a hugely comprehensive plan of things we could see. He was supervising university exams at the time so could only see us in the evenings although did show us around Hanoi University of Agriculture where he works as a lecturer. There are so many scooters in Hanoi! And so many of those are Vespas! Quite a few cars and motos are made locally, apparently. We had a terrific time seeing many attractions about the city, such as the Bát Tràng ceramics bazaar on the outskirts of the city. I was even interviewed by VTV 4, a local station that seems more aimed at expats and promoting Vietnam's attractions. I'm not sure if I actually made the cut but it was interesting being peppered with questions about the ceramics... not that I really know anything about them :-)
We spend another couple of days checking out Hanoi and also going on a day trip to the Chinese border! My friend from Phnom Penh was particularly keen to get as close to the border as possible, and was quite miffed when rebuffed at the last kilometre by the partypoopers at the Vietnamese checkpoint. They said we needed visas, damn them! Oh well, we saw some truly amazing sights on the way there, I really felt like I was in a travel show. We saw so many picturesque rice paddy scenes at the foot of this amazing mountain range. Some Photaf panoramas. I've always been amazed at how they just rise straight up out of the ground, the same goes for the islands in Halong Bay described next. See the photos for more detail.
Next we did a three day, $77 tour through Halong Bay on a boat. This was a great trip. I've never really been on a big touristy multiday tour before. We were well and truly hearded like livestock in buses and boats. It was fun and proper tourist action. We went to a beautiful Thien Cung Grotto on an island in Halong Bay first of all, this was even more spectacular than Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur! Possibly because of all the cool coloured lighting but also because of the abundance of growy bits like stalagmites/tites. We carried on with more of a boat trip through the islands, doing some kayaking in the afternoon. Here we went through some holes in the islands to get to these secluded sections of water walled by limestone from all sides. It's hard to describe. See the photos. This was really nice to go for a bit of an adventure in a kayak, haven't done that for ages. We made sure we beat everyone else by exploring as large an area as possible, including going across to an area they said we shouldn't go and paddling around a rocky outcrop. We spend the night moored between another bunch of islands and did plenty of diving off the boat into the water.
The next day and night was on Cat Ba island, the biggest in Ha Long Bay. We rented a scooter and once again beat our fellow tourists for range of exploration, seeing I think every road on the island bar a few side streets. There's not much. But it was fun to have the freedom of a moto and just burning along going wherever we wanted. One of the most interesting sights was the fishermen loading their boat up with ice. Here's a panorama of the harbour. You can see in a video I took the big blocks sliding down the chute to be loaded into the ice chipper. We also checked out the beaches but they were way too crowded, I'm glad we took the moto and went the opposite direction.
After that we went back to Hanoi and spent time checking out a few museums, namely the military museum and Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. It was a macabre experience shuffling around the room that contains his body. I have seen two dead bodies in Cambodia (traffic accidents) but this was totally different, of course. For one thing, that the body had been preserved for so long was a wonder. I am not sure I believed it was real, but the somberness and seriousness of the place certainly was. The skin glowed like there was some sort of lighting effect from a computer game. Anyway, it was a very long wait to get in and we simply walked upstairs through a very impressive stone structure (beautifully airconditioned) and then into the room, walked around at a slow pace (similar to seeing the crown jewels in Tower of London although there were no conveyor belts) and out. We then went and saw where he used to live and various of his personal effects were on display, including a rather imposing black limousine.
The military museum just happened to contain a Cambodia-Vietnam joint exhibit at the time, of great interest to my friend from Phnom Penh. It was also educational for me seeing the extent, and length, of Vietnamese military cooperation. It was timely, really, because I finished epic and excellent Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge during the trip. This also contained great amounts of detail on the relationship between KH and VN. Another interesting exhibit was a lot of destroyed western military hardware (panorama). It was fascinating getting an up close view of all the jet engines.
Overall we had a great time in Vietnam and I returned to Phnom Penh feeling much better, with a stronger sense of purpose with my volunteering position. It was also a real pleasure to see my friend from Hanoi. I think my friend from Phnom Penh and I were overwhelmed by his work and the opportunities he has already had doing things like learning how to do agent based modelling with researchers in the US. It was also really nice to hear that his work has an environmental focus and that he is using the spatial analysis skills that we were taught to monitor and maintain forested areas in Vietnam.
With this trip, I completed my mission to visit Southeast Asia. I have now done much of Cambodia on a motorcycle, been to Thailand as well by moto, been to Malaysia and finally visited Vietnam. This was a major non volunteering goal for my stay here so I'm glad I can go back saying I've done a bit of travelling. Next month I'm off to China to visit another friend from the same Master's program, he asked me to be his best man, of all things. We'll see how that goes, particularly giving the speech in Mandarin... I suspect it will be a view brief utterances, he also warned me of a severe amount of drinking being required. Check back to see if I live to tell the tale.
ការប្រជុំពីការគូសផែនទីនៅភ្នំពេញលើកទី ៧ / PHNOM PENH MAPPING MEETUP 7
This meetup had three presentations:
MeanNaro and John Weeks
Open Development Cambodia
Mapping and demographics in Cambodia
Dr Damian Evans
University of Sydney Research Centre, Siem Reap
2012 LIDAR survey of Angkor, Phnom Kulen and Koh Ker
Shelby Doyle
Fullbright Research Fellow
Request for assistance to get historical maps of Phnom PenhPresentations:
It was good to have another presentation about OpenDevelopmentCambodia. This is a website following the open data philosophy (read all about it on Wikipedia). I am really glad there's an operation like this in Cambodia as there are some issues here with government data and other data of public interest not being made readily available. It's funny knowing that some government employees use the site for government statistics rather than internal sources! Another fantastic presentation was by Damian Evans, who showed, for the first time in public, the largest ever helicoptor based LIDAR survey dataset! It was collected over Angkor Wat in an attempt to find more temples and also map the surrounds of known temples more accurately.
The imagery was nothing short of breathtaking. He advised that even in dense tree cover around the temples the instrument would still manage to get 2-3 returns per square metre, producing the most precise digital elevation model available for the area. He said it was also the largest ever archeological LIDAR survey ever as well, so I was very proud to have recruited him to present at the meetup. He has a documentary coming up on National Geographic channeI about his discoveries, so I can say that I scooped them :-) Something else of interest from his presentation was that he has enough data for four PhD students to process, three of which can be archeology students and the fourth can be a GIS student. I was very interested in the work he is doing and may consider such an opportunity, although it would require one to live in Siem Reap and work at their research centre which, on an Australian university stipend would mean living like a king. If anyone is interested in the position, contact the Sydney University Research Centre in Siem Reap, here.
Shelby Doyle presented briefly for the second time, describing her hunt for paper/historical maps of Phnom Penh. Her blog post about it is here.
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