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Photography Trip

Date : 11 April 2007
Destination : Melaka Pindah, Machap.
Occassion : Finale of the by-election rally
Target : must get close to a politician to take some shots

Notes:
Got a call from the Queen in the afternoon asking Mr J and I to go for a photography trip. So we zoomed to Machap from KL after work. Poor Queen had to eat bread and cakes in my car. Lucky that Mr J and I overdosed ourselves with some junk food before the trip. Since we were with the Queen, naturally the politician that we must get close must be someone from the opposition. In this case, we chose Anwar Ibrahim and the by-election candidate. Frankly speaking, I feel more comfortable going to take pictures of the opposition camps. They seemed much less threatening. The BN camps had big a** trucks with big fat men who look like thugs.

When we first arrived at the Machap Ombu “ugly” roundabout (as described by RB Soon), we were blocked by a big a**4WD pickup truck to let a convoy of big a** BN trucks to parade on the road. What the… they are not traffic police leh. How can they block traffic as they wish? And I saw a big Berita Harian car sticker on the big a** truck that was blocking the traffic. I was speechless.

We were supposed to go to Melaka Pindah (we thought RB Soon was joking about the name of the place). To get there we need to take the right turn at the ugly roundabout. We came from one direction, so we had 3 directions to choose from. The Queen directed me to 2 and both were wrong. Logically, the last one had to be right. The moral of the story is, don’t ask the Queen for direction.


The drive to the rally venue was painful. Jammed all the way. Hard to find parking. So I dropped the Queen and Mr J first. Parked my car like 1km away from the venue.

The entrance of the rally venue was a mini night market. More pictures of stalls below.

The stage was a couple of hundred meters after the mini night market. I would say there was at least a thousand people there. It was pitch dark and I don’t have a big a** flash so I did not take pictures of the big crowd.

It was hard to go through the crowd. Then I saw a clear patch of land on the side that led to the front. I was so happy but… shit! the clear patch was wet and muddy. I managed to get to the front after all and took these pictures. Yeah! Target achieved!

After his speech, Anwar was surrounded by his fans, or supporters to be exact, when he walked to his car. Funny that no one ask for his signature, some did shaked his hands. Notice the guy behind Anwar with the scary eyes? He is the DAP candidate for the by-election. I really cannot remember his name… So I call him “the scary-eyes fler”.

Just when I thought I am done with Anwar for the night. His car drove by and I managed to get his picture. Damn I don’t have a nice flash.

Opposition parties can hardly, or never, get any coverage on the main stream media. So someone decided to make loads of tapes, VCDs and DVDs, and be their own media. Very affordable prices, all original content. How come our music CDs and MTV DVDs are so expensive one?

They print their own papers too.

This stall was selling perfume. Hmm… PERFUME?!

BN seemed to have more budget to put flags and all.

Poor DAP flags… overshadowed by BN flags.

Well, there’s always hope.

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