connection sucks

It's been a while since i've posted. the internet in Senmonorom has been RUBBISH for the past few weeks. there's only one place to get online. the guy who runs it doesn't bother opening a lot of the time. and when he does open the connection often crashes for long periods of time. right now i am sitting in the only place with a connection and the guy isn't here! so i'm writing this waiting for him to show up so i can get online.


I can't remember what I last posted and i don't want to repeat myself so in this post i'm only going to say one thing that i know i haven'tmentioned in the blog. all my other antics will be included in the next post which should be in a day or two. maybe even later today- who knows?

SO.

We've been trying to get money out of the RSPA for a new truck. this might sound a bit swish and perhaps peripheral to the work we do, but without a truck we simply cannot get to the villages where the elephants are. We do havea truck but it is unreliable and relatively high maintenance. Just last week i had to go to Phnom Penh to fetch a part. It was a $28 part and it cost £20 just to get there and back, not to mention a guestguese and motos around the city. also it meant i was away from senmonorom for 2 days. the return journey took ELEVEN HOURS.#
Anwyay, the rspca have been a little reluctant to give us money. 1st they pretty much didn't believe we existed. then they said they'd send a guy from thailand to come and look at what we're doing before they would give us any money - i thought this was great and meant in effect that we were sure to get the money, otherwise they wouldn't bother wasting the money to send an elephant specialist to us. Then we got an email saying this wasn't going to happen.

INSTEAD they want to pay for us to go to thailand and check out an established elephant project their! We can learn from these guys and ask em questions and hints, and explain more fully what we're doing. our travel and accomodation is paid for - i'm not sure if that includes the visas or not, but either way it's a pretty cheap trip! we've been invited- at a time convenient for us- to stay for a week or two. this should be completely awesome. we're very excited about this for a whole host of reasons. it'll be very good for the NGO and it will help us with a number of connections. the more we show our collective face the easier things will become in the future. Also it means that i will beable to add to the0 hours i spent in thailand on the way here. woo.
also, jack has a puppy. his name is Gopher, and he's pretty much a little bastard.

PS
all the dogs in Cambodia have really curly tails.