The village of Kahchen is the former Governor of Ratanakkiri’s turf. He is an indigenous Tampuon. He builds a nice big house, painted a shiny light blue, near the centre of the village. He was recently replaced by someone closer to the central power and who is not a Tampuon. Most of the villagers in […]
We could have gone straight along the Sesan for 15 minutes and then cross the river with a small boat to reach Tan Kathe. Instead our translator took us left, over the bridge in Andong Meas on a 1 hour trip by car on tracks just very recently scraped through the hills and on another […]
Cassava: you see it everywhere on the last 100km to Banlung. White patches neatly spread out for drying along the road, whole families peeling and chopping the roots, mountains of bags stuffed with the dry chunks waiting to be loaded on trucks, bald hills after harvest when the thin stems were cut and the root […]
Just before Bar Kaev, not that far from Banlung on the smooth tarmac road to Vietnam: take a left on the dirt road, then a second left. There is a cashew nut plantation there. It is not big. It covers just a very small part of the thousands of hectares of cashew nut trees or […]
Taveang Leu, still on the banks of the Sesan river. Cambodia being Cambodia, crossing a rickety and dancing suspended bridge not just takes us across a small river. It projects us into another world. The indigenous Brao of the village had finished a ceremony to appease the spirits menacing a member of their community hospitalised […]
Cambodia is developing fast. Very fast. It needs ever increasing numbers of Megawatts to feed its growth (and its neighbours’). Cambodia has rivers. Particularly in the more varied terrain of the Stung Treng and Ratanakkiri provinces. The solution to provide for more energy by building hydropower dams might seem obvious. Unfortunately this is a country […]
Sorry for the absence… I was out in the bushes this past weeks. Well… in what is left of the bushes, as most of the forest in Ratanakkiri province seems to have been replaced by rubber trees, cashew nut trees or cassava. In what might be the most interesting (and tragic) story about land issues […]
Sincere congratulations to the winners of the World Press Photo. The Olympic Games for photographers? Pierre de Coubertin said ‘The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.’ So here is one of the contributions I sent to ‘our’ […]