LIFE IN THE ZONE

A sure fire way to live a life of abject misery is to build, lease rent or have anything to do with any property that is situated in an Angkor Authority Zone.

Residents in the zone find that any alterations to the buildings or the grounds have to be run past Apsara so that a permit is obtained.

But now there is general bitching on a large scale level. As a feel-good gesture to the locals in the run up to the recent elections, Apsara officials told people in the zone that they were free to build small amenities, as long as they completed the job within the 7 days of the so-called “construction amnesty.”

Village people in the zone happily began building pig sties, bamboo huts, chicken coops.

But in the past couple of weeks Apsara officials have been patrolling the zone and telling people that the new constructions are in fact illegal and must be pulled down.

Bummer.

LAME RUSE FLOPS

The good folks at McDermott Gallery are all a-twitter on twitter, and indeed one of their latest tweets warns of copyright piracy.

Last week Insider ran the story of how the Song Saa Resort is running a photo contest that’s gone gangbusters.

Readers are invited to send in the favourite photo that they’ve taken showing a beautiful Cambodia. The prize as a 3-night stay at the super expensive island resort near Sihanoukville.

Competition it seems has reached such a level of intensity that some contestants are willing to cheat to win, resulting in this tweet from McDermott headquarters: “Someone attempted to submit 2 of John McDermott’s Angkor images as their own work in the Songsaa Island competition. Careful out there folks.”

TOURIST COMEDY CAPERS

BBC News ran an amusing insight into Angkor temple tourism last month. Journalist Guy De Launey reports that at Phnom Bakheng took the unwanted prize for worst visitor behaviour, “The scene at dusk resembled nothing so much as the Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling, with scores of sunset-seeking visitors ignoring the safe path down from the ‘temple mountain’ in favour of the crumbling, vertiginous steps at the front of the monument. “An ambulance was on permanent standby at the bottom.”

THAT F@#^@^#’ MINEFIELD BAR’S BACK

A reader commented on the article about Siem Reap’s notorious Minefield Bar, published on May 25.

The reader wrote, “I remember the Minefield bar well during the Untac days. It, um, was my local. It was truly bizarre: Kevin Bloody Wilson* songs being mimed by teenage farm girls/bar girls tottering about in high heels and a large live python on the (cash only) bar. Outside was what Cleghorn called the ‘Polish swimming pool’ because drunken soldiers kept falling in a fetid outdoor pissoir.”

*Kevin Bloody Wilson is a West Australian exponent of self-written pornographic country and western ditties, with titles such as, That F@#*@#’ Cat’s Back; You Can’t Say C@#^ in Canada; and F@#^ Ya Guts Out.