The Phnom Penh Cyclo Driver, a film by Lin Ravy

When CRDT opened their new tour operator service last year they were very lucky to recruit Mr Lin Ravy to the team.  I was on the interview panel and remembered him using a film he'd made as an example for his answer to one of the questions.  After some basic training as part of his learning for CRDTours he has now uploaded this to YouTube.  I hope you enjoy the result, I think it is an excellent and touching film.

Health and Fitness (includes Sam's video skipping guide)

Before we left England both of us were in pretty good shape.  We used to cycle around 30 minutes to and from work (obviously part time in my case) with Gilly also swimming and me burning calories on the squash court.

Here our 'commute' is under three minutes and Gilly was out of action for a long time after breaking her fingers while running on Kratie's less than even road surfaces.  I didn't have any excuse for my laziness.

But this has all changed as.2012 (unconnected to any of our resolutions) has ushered in a new regime which is already having an impact.  It consists of two key components which, in February, were complemented by a booze free month, which I only broke twice.

Reducing our intake of carbohydrates

I'd been suggesting this for a while (inspired by this guy and this lecture in particular) but Gilly only signed up after her brother confirmed it was a good idea.  We are trying to only have one 'carb' intake per day which is quite tricky in a country where rice and noodles are the foundation of every meal.  We're eating a lot more meat, eggs, fruit and salad as a result.  I buy the meat from the market, ideally before 6am as it is displayed in the open air and you wouldn't go near it too much later.  I'm pretty sure the pork I got the other day was 'slaughter fresh' as the meat was unusually warm when I cut it up for mincing at home...

Skipping five days per week

You can see some videos below of me demonstrating what this means.  Gilly is great at using the internet to research new routines and keep us pushing ourselves each week.  One of these is a 40 seconds on, 20 seconds off routine and I managed 121 skips in one round which is an average of three per second, still some way of this kind of speed though.  We're really enjoying it and so do our neighbours...

Skipping intro, including the 'double under'.  (You can buy the skipping rope featured in these videos, highly recommended, here.)

Skipping reprise.