Naga Cambo, Koh Ke Temple, May 2016 | Photo: Melanie Penicka-Smith We have a guest blogger to introduce to you today. Many of our friends and partners in Cambodia are facing big changes in circumstance due to Covid-19, so we’re welcoming them to our blog to tell you a bit about their lives in the beautiful Kingdom of Wonder. Our first interview is with our friend Naga Cambo. Naga is a tour guide who we first met in 2016. We caught up with him again during our scoping trip in January 2019. He’s an excellent story-teller. In this interview, Naga reveals something of life in Cambodia, particu ..read more

Sarah sound checking PPC from the audience seats. Photo: Lisa Chanell, Lisa Chanell Photography Photoblog #5 They say a week is a long time in politics. The same is true of touring and rehearsing. Days filled with sight-seeing, rehearsing, enjoying meals together, shopping and relaxing in the pool see days stretch. Time warps. And yet, in some senses before we knew it, it was concert day; the culmination of 2 years of planning. On a Friday night in July, in just 2 hours, it would be all over and we’d be back on the bus, heading back to the hotel for a drink or two and some last minute packing ..read more

Photoblog #4: It’s no mean feat to work with a choir week in week out, building skills and confidence working towards a major concert months down the track. It’s quite another to work with 25 singers, drawn from Australia, New Zealand and the US, having relied on them to learn their parts and to have as little as 12 hours to mould and shape a group before your first Hanoi concert. But this is what PPC does - and did. With 4, maybe 5 singers to a part, from the moment we opened our mouths we felt that we were going to be okay. We had trust; trust in each other and trust in the person out the ..read more

Photojournal #3: When we last met Hà, he was managing a cocktail bar in the French Quarter of Hanoi. Burnt out from activism, he was taking a break and, by the sounds of it, not planning to go back to it any time  soon. This trip, we’d emailed to say that PPC was coming, and that we’d love to meet up and introduce Hà to the group. When we didn’t hear back, we were concerned, but wondered if he’d moved on from the bar to a new job outside activism. We were half right; Hà had moved on from the bar and straight back to activism! Taking inspiration from us (how weird is that?), Hà had founded ..read more

PPC Photojournal #2: Rehearsals for Pacific Pride Choir 2019 all took place in the small hall at the Vietnam National Academy of Music. The ornately carved wood panelling and plush velveteen chairs created an air of sultry luxury in the summer humidity. This photo tells the story of PPC’s first meeting with Hanoi’s Diversity Choir; DC was less than one year old at this time and its members were drawn from various minority communities, including ethnic minorities, LGBTQI+, people with living with disability, and, to make it truly diverse, some kids and community elders, too. Lisa’s snap of ten ..read more

If you'd been following our blog up to July 2019, you might have noticed something was missing - say, any posts at all about our actual tour to Vietnam and Cambodia? Having blogged enthusiastically on our scoping trips, we'd planned to blog every day once the tour itself got going. ‘It’ll be easy, we know what we're doing now,’ we said to ourselves as months of planning finally came together & the last few things were packed in our suitcase. We had a good schedule; the right balance, we felt, of rehearsals, performances, sightseeing & free time. Surely we could find an hour or so each ..read more

Remember how, on our last trip to Hanoi in May 2018, we met Thư from iSEE? And she said that if we brought our choir to Hanoi, iSEE would found a Diversity Choir to sing with us? Here they are. Hợp xướng Đa dạng, or Diversity Choir, began less than a year ago, with a call-out to people across minority communities in November 2018, and then casting calls for over 200 people (iSEE had so many applicants they had to stop accepting them). From this, a choir of 70 people has grown into something quite remarkable. Diversity Choir is open to different communities from the elderly to the young, peop ..read more

Lolei Mr Sareth's jail at Bakong It’s 11am on Friday 11 January, and Sarah’s in the shower at our Sydney home, watching red dust from a pre-Angkorian temple site swirl around the chequered tiles and wash away. It’s not our usual homecoming; we’re the kind of travellers who prefer a final shower and some calm, tying up any loose ends before getting on the plane. We didn’t expect to visit any temples this trip; we hadn’t even bought a temple pass. So we’re still reeling from the day before, when a last-minute alignment of stars saw us go from our hotel to Angkor to the airport. Our Sydney fr ..read more

Mel, Sarah & Naga Cambo ‘Your driver is here,’ says one of the hotel staff as Sarah enters the foyer on Wednesday night. ‘That’s not our driver,' says Sarah, 'that’s our friend.’ Naga Cambo, our tuk-tuk driver from three years ago, has arrived to take us to dinner. We greet each other with a sampeah. There are five levels of sampeah, all involving a bow: for friends -  palms together at chest level; for older people or people of rank - palms together at the mouth level; for parents, grandparents or a teacher - palms together at the nose level; for the king or monks - palms together ..read more

A woman, fierce and fluid, is dancing to Tom Waits and a shrieking angle-grinder. She moves through spangled golden light: builders’ dust, caught in the strong Cambodian sun which pours through the open doors at the back of the theatre. We’ve driven through dusty backstreets to find this place, the first black-box theatre in Cambodia, purpose-built for contemporary dance company New Cambodian Artists. The six-year-old, all-female troupe embraces the empowerment of women through expression, but after everything we’ve seen, we’re not prepared for Tom Waits. ‘The girls have been choosing their o ..read more