For now everything is quiet in Sre Kor. The sun sets on the Sesan river. It is time to fetch water at the river, to wash off the red dust accumulated over the day, next to the buffaloes enjoying some relief from the heat. The following morning will be an important one for the Tampuon […]
Veun Sai is a fairly big commercial hub on the Sesan river, inhabited by Cambodians of Chinese descent (no commerce without Chinese) who often speak Lao, like most of the people here. There is a restaurant with 7 to 8 tables made of precious ‘beng’ wood, 15 centimeters thick, 80 centimeters wide, 2 meters long. […]
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 […]