Secret Chinese Airfields

Hi everyone

Last week on Thursday and Friday I was sick of the office so i went out to Kampong Chnang with a colleaugue. We went to conduct a school feeding baseline survey in new schools we are moving into (which i reckon was total BS but no-one listens to me!) and monitor early morning cooking activities.

As some of you may have heard me rant, the only way to check if a school is cooking the amount of food it says it is is to be there at 5am in the morning when cooking has begun and see if it matches the record.

So after two nights of five am starts I am quite re-convinced on the value of the school feeding program which i had been disillusioned with because many schools were stealing and many kids were not eating.

But these schools the kids were all eating, no stealing and we heard some great stories, such as last year students were passing out from hunger or just eating some rice with salt for breakfast. Now they have enough nutritious breakfast to last the day.

Also while waiting for a School Director i took some photos of buffalo. I love buffalo.

While on the way back to the town, Hay mentioned that there was a disused airport so we swung by to check it out. It was built by the Chinese Government to fly in supplies for its ally, Pol Pot. Rumour has it that all the Cambodians who were forced to work on it were executed to keep it a secret.

We drove up, flipped the army guard a few bucks and he let us in and we drove onto the tarmac. First up this place was spooky, lots of abandoned buildings and it was massive! Much bigger than Phnom Penh airport. Which makes you wonder what they were really using the airport for but we may never know. Awesome experience going at high speed down the tarmac was lots of fun and an experience not many other people have :)

Later that night over some beers (everyone still a bit green from a party at the office a few days earlier that went messy) I found out some intruiging stuff about my colleaugues, including they used to organise marijuana and sandalwood runs to the Thai border when the Vietnamese occupied Cambodia. This guy used to buy it all up from his village, send it to Phnom Penh to get vacuum packed then bribed the Vietnamese army to send it through.

And he also taught me how to make Sandalwood grade 3 look like Sandalwood grade 2 using tobacco.

Oh how i love the randomness of my life :)