Dave and Jen For Oxfam

In a previous post I mentioned that I promised Jen I wouldn’t use that terrible play on words in a post, and here it runs as the post title itself. It’s a terrible instance of terrible word play to reflect the terrible weather. There is a storm warning on the Bureau Of Meteorology website and the rain continues to simply fall from the sky. There’s no point describing it as bucketing as there is no bucket large enough to hold this much rain and no time for it to sit around waiting for buckets. It’s simply falling straight on our heads. Or would, if we were riding right now. Instead, we’re in a gym typical of an apartment block. It looks something between a set from Fallout 3 and a retirement home for gym equipment rescued from the Taliban. A map of Cambodia is temporarily covering up a cheery sign instructing us at length in all the things we cannot do in the gym, with a the end of a pleasant “prohibited” poking out somewhere below Sihanoukville.

As an iPod and portable speakers attempt to drown out the rain to the sounds of The Doves, we pedal and run and lift bits of metal in eagerness for dusty trails in a country where we hope it won’t rain on our heads either. We quickly lose interest in the gym but persist, trapped with the notion that the enjoyment of our riding will be directly influenced by our preparation. The little laptop sits here as both the means to write this post between sets, and the gateway for journeys into FlickR to seek inspiring photographs of the regions we will be travelling. As you should know, nearly every photo on this site is a direct link back to that section of our collection of photos on our own FlickR account. I chose this route rather than FTP as a means to utilise some time saving Wordpress publishing plugins (namely tan tan noodles gallery) and also to create a persistent gallery within FlickR itself. I can’t say enough about just how useful FlickR has been for us to scope out photos of places, and I’ve been a big fan of the popularisation of photo publishing services and the resulting communities as a historical social study.

Geek topics for another time, I did consider SmugMug and alternatives but nothing really beats FlickR for the community of great photographers, and a little trick the photographically inclined tourist might consider is the update of the old “postcard positioning” trick. The traditional wisdom was to purchase a few postcards from the inbound airport when you land, and use those as a rule for the best spots to get similar photos. As simple as it sounds, flicking through postcards is a nice way to get some ideas about advantageous framing and positioning for photographs of Big Obvious Tourists Things. Given we are going to a Big Obvious Tourist Thing called the Angkor Wat temples, I have been enjoying some of the overlapping perspectives of the people who have been there, taken photos, and uploaded to sites like FlickR. In the future we won’t have to wonder about “all the people that would have stood in this spot”. We can see most of them on FlickR.

As fun as this rant is, it’s my turn to hop on the treadmill and stare into either a beige wall or an imaginary distance. If this weather clears even to a light drizzle we will happily hit the roads again, but storm warnings and lightning suggests otherwise. As ever, insert reminder on how to support us on our ride with the Oxfam Cambodia Challenge for 2008. You know, that thing where we actually ride bikes on roads, rather than treadmills and machines in small rooms.