We spent a day at the Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, Thailand a week or so ago. It's worth a visit if you're in the area. Amazing story to the place.

Note to self: Never say anything while holding a camera taking video.

I'm often, given my role, the mouthpiece for silverorange. We've been criticized before for being Borg like in our mindsets and our thinking. Mots of the time it's true. When it comes to the Immigrant Investment program we weren't that perfect unified group.

As I mentioned before:

... silverorange, or any of our associated corporations (we have a few), have never received immigrant investment. We qualify, and we've had very serious debate about using the program, but we have never received any cash nor have we even applied. I'll make a post on this in the future as it's a whole story in an of itself.

This is a true statement but "very serious debate" is a little bit of an understatement.

When this program came to our attention I, like any dutiful CEO, brought it to the company to evaluate. Our company qualified under the rules of the program, it was fairly straight forward, and many people I know in the business community were legitimately using the program. It seemed like it could be a good fit for us. We had some expansion and upgrades we wanted to do and who doesn't like a little padding on the balance sheet?

When I brought it to the rest of the group all of us, myself included, except for one were in favour of proceeding to the next level of discussing it with lawyers, accounts, brokers, etc. The issue of debate was the morality of the program itself. Is it right for a country to allow this path of immigration? We brought in journalists, other participants in the program, and whomever else we could find to discuss the issue. It literally paralysed us for a solid three weeks.

In the end, after all of the research and debate, we still could not reach a unanimous decision. The founding principles of silverorange prevailed and we allowed one person to veto the group. As a result we did not pursue the investment.

So if it had been up to me I would more-than-likely have taken the money. I'm ok with that. I would not have tried to squeeze our real-estate company through the loopholes, I would not have created more companies out of thin air to qualify. I simply would have used the program as it was intended to be used.

It may seem from my recent posts that I'm against the program all together. I'm not. Heck, my father participated in it. The debate about the morality/existence of the program is completely separate from the abuse of it.

Do I regret the one person veto? Do I wish we had gotten the cash? Not at all. The integrity and long term health of a team is worth far, far more than whatever they were offering us.

I've been saying it all along: investigate the brokers. Well now it's finally happening and it is horrendous. It may or may not be criminal but it is definitely wrong on many levels.

CBC finally posted a story on the agents/brokers and their involvement in the dealings. The only numbers you need to concern yourself with are these:

"...in the past two years of the $525 million put up by potential immigrants, businesses received $120 million for investment, while the intermediaries earned $144 million."

Yes, that's right. The middle man took more money in the end than the actual businesses that received the investment. Oh, and there were only seven. 20.5 million is a nice chunk of change.

To nip the "they provided a valuable service" argument in the bud let us look at what they did.:

• They found the investor. There wasn't a shortage of them. From what I understood there were thousands upon thousands wanting in and had the money. They did manage to line up 2000 in a matter of months. I also think there were agents on the ground in Asia looking for them.
• They found the island company. That also wasn't hard. "Hey do you want free money with no strings attached?". In fact I would venture a guess that most companies approached the brokers, not the other way around.
• They facilitated a $1,000 - $5,000 legal process. Creating classes of shares, issuing new shares, etc isn't complex law. They didn't do it either, they just made sure it got done. The lawyers were paid by the companies to do the shuffling.

There is nott 144 million dollars worth of value there. This wasn't good business. It was sloppy government, greedy businesses and greedy brokers. This kind of money and mismanagement deserves a criminal investigation. I guarantee that some brokers were bending and breaking rules to get even more of the hideously large pot.

Robert Ghiz needs to realize it's not about which MLA received 50,000. It's about poor government oversight, greedy businesses, and power brokers that seemingly abused a program and made off with tens of millions of dollars of immigrants money.

The absolute worst part of it is that no one gives a shit because it's not their tax money being wasted. It's "foreign" money. We should be begging for their forgiveness for being such poor stewards of their investments.

Travelling is about seeing things you've never seen before, eating things you've never eaten before, and sometimes it's about meeting people that sometimes you've seen before.

Anyone who has travelled for a few weeks in roughly the same geographic area has had it happen. "Didn't we see those people in the last city we were in?", "Hey isn't that the guy who had that hilarious shirt on in the previous country we were in?". It's weird but it happens. People, like you, are often traveling to the few must-see areas and are following the same guide book's schedule as yours. Sometimes though you meet the person who writes the guidebooks.

While sitting in a massage parlour in Siem Reap, Cambodia, two ladies came in and sat across from me. Instead of the awkward sit and be silent I decided to ask where they were from. They were originally from the Boston area but one was now living in Bangkok and the other, her sister, was living in southern California and was in Asia for the first time visiting. I say something like "Bangkok, nice. We're going to be spending a few days there in a few weeks. Any suggestions on what to do?". As it turns out she wrote the Moon guide to Thailand. We exchanged email addresses and a day later we had a customized itinerary for Bangkok. Awesome.

Today, two countries later and four of five days later, Becky and I rent kayaks and are skirting between the giant limestones cliffs of the Thai coastline in the Krabi province. A snake is clinging to the cliff just a few feet above the water. A fellow kayaker has paused to look at it. We chat for a minute and I ask him where he is from. He's from Boston but has been living in Bangkok for a few years. He points over his shoulder and introduces us to his fiance and her sister in another kayak pulling up. Lo and behold it's the same two girls from the massage parlour in Cambodia.

We look forward to bumping into them in the days to come. We must be doing something right if we keep running into the guide book author of the country we're visiting.

Check out Suzanne's blog. Her travel writing is a must for anyone visiting Thailand and its surrounding areas. All of her reccomondations have been bang on for us.

Apparently if you're "in the know" you call Kuala Lumpur just KL. I'm not in the know.

We arrived in the city around noon after a quick flight from Siem Reap, Cambodia. We're only here for one night as we're in transit to Krabi, Thailand. The city seems nice, from what you can see in an afternoon. Becky and I went up the fourth tallest tower in the world but were rejected (too late in the day) from the Petronas Skywalk.

The "TD" has caught up with some of our travel mates. Imodium and Cipro seem to be the weapons of choice.

If you're ever in Kuala Lumpur a few notes for your consideration: The chicken seems to always come with bone-in. The monks on the street are scammers of a giant magnitude. They were asking for $20-30 to help build their new temple and got very irate when I only offered $2. Maybe they are for real but they need to be less tricky and pushy.

Again, no photos yet as we're traveling light and have no computers.

We're off to Krabi, Thailand in the morning.

We're enjoying the final hours of our last day here in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Wow. What an amazing place. The people are the nicest we've met in our travels and the sights are remarkable. It's also crazy cheap.

We are limited to 15 pound carry-on bags for this leg of the journey so we had to leave the laptops back in Singapore. This note is brought to you from the busted keyboard of our guest house's computer. Internet is reminiscent of 14,400 modem days, but that's only when it is working.

So far we've enjoyed floating villages, the famous temples, and some discount massages. I'll post more as we migrate towards faster Internet. Tomorrow morning we fly to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for a one night stay before heading to Krabi, Thailand.

We arrived, unscathed, in Singapore a week ago. I apologize for the lack of updates. My new hard drive decided to completely fail while watching Lost flying over the North Pole... Thankfully the resourceful slices back at the Slicedome were able to fetch my most recent backup, put it on a new HD, and get it to me via the Fed Ex protocol. I'm now just getting back up on my digital feet.

I'll be sure to post more photos and updates in the days to come. So far we're blown away by Singapore.