talesofasia

Some things on the forum you might want to check out:

A Siem Reap hotel recommendation post that’s morphed into a discussion of Trip Advisor customer reviews.

Tourist attacked in Sihanoukville.

Preah Vihear.

Thai islands in October.

Tourist attacked in Bangkok.

Hotels in Saigon.

Russia and Georgia.

40 Years of Barbarella

Beijing Olympics

Yes, it’s that time again when Cambodia holds a national election and will almost certainly add five more years to Hun Sen’s 23-year rule. There was a time that a Cambodia election would start a feeding frenzy for journos just chomping at the bit for something to “happen”. And each time, to their disappointment, the masses would head off to the local polling station, cast their votes, and go home. At 3:00 pm the polls would close and around 3:30 pm Hun Sen would announce himself the winner. Hardly earth-shattering news is it?

It’s a quiet day around town as so many people have to return to the countryside to their villages to cast their vote. We have a staff of 10. We had four in this morning and since shortly after noon we’re down to one and will stay that way until closing. And that’s how it is around Siem Reap and around Cambodia. A day to cast a vote and a day to stay home. Seems that perhaps the journos waiting for something to “happen” have finally given up this time and stayed home as well.

We can do this again in 2013, end of July (I’m not clear if it’s the last Sunday of the month, or the fourth Sunday of the month as I suppose some year it’ll make a difference). I doubt a thing will have changed.

Well not exactly, but news reports today might lead some to believe it so. Regardless, my predictions that Thailand was going to do something really stupid over this Preah Vihear nonsense are looking more and more accurate.

What did happen is that this morning several Thai “protesters”, a monk and a nun or something like that, entered Cambodia illegally at Preah Vihear and like anyone that illegally enters a country they were arrested. That is not a fact in dispute. But later today reports began to circulate that 40 Thai military personnel invaded Cambodia at Preah Vihear to “rescue” the “protesters” and that some short of skirmish ensued. Thailand denies everything.

If it is true several points need to be raised. First of all, do all the countries of the world now have a right to invade Thailand and free all their citizens held at the Immigration Detention Center on various immigration violations?

Secondly, do we now have to worry about the 40 Thai soldiers entering Preah Vihear, and don’t get me wrong, if this is true it is indeed a serious violation of Cambodia’s sovereignty,  being blown out of proportion into a story of 4,000 soldiers marching towards Siem Reap with a plan to reclaim Angkor Wat for Thailand? Brings back bad memories of January 2003 and what happened when a Thai actress didn’t say Angkor Wat belonged to Thailand. One can only hope cooler heads will prevail on both sides. That Thailand will once and for all give up this nonsense about Preah Vihear. For f**k’s sake the entire world and an awful lot of your own citizens (not the least of whom is the one I’m married to; “Preah Vihear? Of course it’s Khmer. Are people in my country so stupid they can’t tell the difference between a Khmer temple and a Thai temple? Why do they keep wanting what isn’t theirs? Grow up already!”) have this figured out already. No one denies there is a border issue to sort out, but leave the temple out of it. It’s done, finished. It’s Cambodia’s and it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Deal with it. And that Cambodia will not let this turn into a domestic mess such as what we suffered through five and a half years ago.

Watch this space…

Okay, the e-Visa is still around, but now it’s here: http://www.mfaic.gov.kh/e-visa/start.aspx. And it seems a lot of people who had ordered visas from the old site run by the Malaysian firm are stuck in a visa purgatory.

Why the change? As I said, one can only speculate, but if I were to do so I would venture that the Cambodian government decided to take the service away from the Malaysian contractor for any of many possible reasons. Want the money for themselves? Dodgy dealings? A general falling out? Who knows? Perhaps the (ex) contractor will tell us.

What does this mean for a tourist? Probably that this might not be the best time to get an e-Visa until at least there are enough reports that the new site is working properly and those stuck from the old site still get their visa.

Visas are still and have always been available on arrival.

For reasons not presently known, the Cambodian government has without warning or statement, pulled the Cambodia e-Visa website. It is not clear whether or not tourists already possession of an e-Visa will find them valid or not when they turn up at the border.

One can only speculate as to why the service was pulled suddenly, but in the mean time the Malaysian firm that was running the service have created the following: http://www.cambodiaevisa.com/photos/.

Good luck to all e-Visa holders.

Probably have a lot of upcoming posts under this heading but anyway, in case you thought all Thais have their heads up their you know whats over Preah Vihear, here’s a good editorial from today’s Bangkok Post.

Love Thy Neighbor

Cambodia has shut off access to Preah Vihear over (another) wave of protests from Thais who still after 45 years can’t seem to get around the idea that the temple really, honestly, absolutely, undeniably, indisputably, incontrovertibly, irrefutably, belongs to Cambodia. Okay, it’s not quite that simple… it’s really over Phnom Penh’s plans to submit the temple to the UN for listing as a World Heritage Site and that certain bits of land around the temple are in dispute over who owns it (at least the Thais are in dispute, the Cambodians seem rather sure of their position…). And that certain Thais see any Thai acquiescence as another sinister plot undertaken by the present Thaksin puppet government to further the puppet master’s scheme of global dominance at the expense of Thai sovereignty, national pride, and the right to eat som tam.

I think the matter is simple. Let the Thais protest all they want. But keep it closed off to them. Forever. Let them protest at the edge of the mountain until they die if it’s that important to them. Maybe instead they’ll move on to more important things like southern insurrections, unstable governments, crap public schools, one of the highest murder rates in the world (worse than the US!)….

Okay, time to begin the China recap.

This was my sixth visit to China, and the third time around Yunnan. Why Yunnan again? Well other than the obvious fact I enjoy it, I was taking my parents and they hadn’t been there. A few days in Sichuan were originally planned but that wasn’t to be. Something about an earthquake.

It’s a trip that almost didn’t happen for me if only because the Chinese government has been suffering quite the panic attack since the torch relay protests in Europe a few months back and has added a lot of visa restrictions, which aside for perhaps keeping one or two undesirables out of the country, they’ve had the added affect of keeping out a lot of legitimate tourists as well.

But $140 (US citizens have always been charged particularly high fees by the Chinese government for visas) and a lot of aggravation and trips to the local travel agent, I did get a visa and the trip went as planned… sort of.

I’ve been watching, admittedly with some amusement, the wave of paranoia the Chinese government has been experiencing the past few months over the torch protests and all things Olympic. I don’t understand the Chinese government (then again I don’t really understand any government…). Blaming western news media for protests over Tibet? Expecting the world to conform to the same kind of censorship and control they exercise over their own citizens? Did anyone in the Chinese government stop to consider what kind if protests might have taken place around the world if the 2008 Olympics were being held in New York and what the US reaction would have been? Why, I would imagine China might have even allowed a little anti-American/anti-Iraq war protests to take place within their own country.

Seems like a case of wanting their cake and eating it, too. But I suppose they’ve had enough time to observe the US government exercise similar behavior so I guess there’s no reason to be surprised.

Ah well, the trip started in Kunming and I’ll post on that in a day or two.

The inactivity of the past four weeks can be blamed on the following factors:

1.) My parents were visiting from the US.

2.) We spent some of this time traveling around Yunnan province, China and I had no interest in posting daily blogs providing excruciating detailed accounts of our every movements.

3.) Inertia. I’ve been on vacation.

But today I’m back at it and will resume the irregular updates later today.

This never would have attracted my attention except for the fact that the deceased had stayed at our place last December.

Bangkok art expert dies in US jail

Turns out there’s been a bit of a US tax fraud scheme going on connected to the Ban Chiang UNESCO site in Thailand’s northeast province of Udon Thani.

Ban Chiang: Wikipedia
Ban Chiang: UNESCO

Apparently there is no shortage of Thais around Ban Chiang all too happy to take original artifacts and certify them as copies to facilitate export in exchange for a few bucks (this has been documented by Thai news channels). From there the items are easily exported to the US (Los Angeles, specifically), then upon entry, re-certified as originals at an inflated value, and then donated to a museum, thus allowing the enterprising participants to take sizable tax deductions. Nice scam. Apparently it’s worked so well that authorities believe that there are more Ban Chiang artifacts in Los Angeles area museums than in Thailand.

According to reports Ms. Brown’s involvement was to lend her signature, in electronic form, to documents declaring inflated value of the donated pieces.

It would also seem that the US government will be hauling quite a few more people off to jail and hopefully at the end of all of this, the pieces are returned to Thailand. I only hope that in the mean time, some flag-waving, chest-thumping nationalist Thai politician doesn’t jump on another “look at what those evil westerners are doing to our culture” rant without first examining who was allowing the pieces to leave the country in the first place by certifying the originals as copies. He would need to look no farther than his own television news.

Nice scam, though. Probably would have worked better if someone knew when to say when…. I know, I know, the well wasn’t yet dry.