Corona anyone??

At the start of Feb, Jonno and Ren were scheduled to move up to Siem Reap in order to get things organised for the second build we were planning to do up there. Thankfully there were issues with council consents (something we never had to deal with in Sihanoukville), the work couldn’t start, and so Ren went to stay with her family in her Kampot village while Jonno stayed in Sihanoukville to continue with the build down here.

And then Corona hit the news. And we wondered what to do, aside from stocking up on limes and masks 🙂

Jonno’s family really wanted them to return to Australia but then someone suggested we could head to Chiang Mai in Thailand and watch and wait from there. None of us have great trust in the information from China and even less so in the Cambodian government. At that stage the cruise ship was still quarantining their passengers and we thought it was a good test case to keep an eye on – what would the official death rate be and did we need to worry. Cambodia had reported one patient, a Chinese man here in Sihanoukville, with the virus and we also thought we’d wait and see what happened here.

So off to Chiang Mai we went. We were able to stay in the Bible Education Centre there that had been set up by our church. A couple from Aussie (Sam & Abi McGeorge – who have quite the sense of humour (see photo below)) were already there, plus a young man from Myanmar and another from India – so quite the full house (13 of us)!!

Chiang Mai was a delicious breath of fresh air (very figuratively speaking) after Sihanoukville. I say figuratively speaking as we were there during what they call Burning Season (the maize farmers burn off their old crops) and the air was very hazy and polluted. Aside from that, what can I say but wow, we loved it. Orderly traffic (comparatively speaking), clean streets, paved roads, friendly people, delicious, cheap street food, amazing fruit shakes, incredible waterfalls… I said again and again, “this trip is a gift from God”. It was an amazing time.

While we were there we kept an eye on the news. We watched Hun Sen (the Cambodian PM) with amazement – he visited China to show his support and even asked to visit Wuhan, even though it was on lock down! He reprimanded journalists for wearing masks in his presence, saying the virus was nothing to be concerned about. And of course, he welcomed the second cruise ship onto Cambodia’s shores, personally greeting people as they disembarked. Despite this country only having officially 5 people with the virus so far, schools have been shut down in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. There have been reports that it costs $800 to get virus testing done – who has that kind of money?

Quite simply we don’t trust reports of only 5 cases in the past month and so we are busy trying to leave the country. I’m writing this as I sit on hold (for the 3rd time) to the airline we are supposed to be travelling with – it looks like Malaysia has shut their borders so I don’t think we’ll be transiting through there as planned. I’ve only been on hold for a total of 2 hours so far – I’m sure I’ll have time to fill you in on all our Chiang Mai adventures before this is done 🙂 Until then I’ll leave you with a couple more of my favourite Corona memes.