The discovery of oil, the commodity that the whole world would like to get its greasy hands on, is always momentous, and it was no different last Sunday afternoon in the Battambang commune of Tapon, when a resident doing some garden maintenance had the shock of his lifetime, and 'made a lucky strike'!
Moys Kenwood, 55, had collected the dumped rubbish and lit a fire, dug up a tree and some weeds, and pruned a wild bush, before venturing into a little-visited area of his 'garden' that had grown completely out of human control, and was now back in the hands of nature.
As he hacked this way and that with a huge scythe at the head-height grass, he became aware of a 55-gallon oil drum, half full of a treacly-black mess, covered in undergrowth, that hadn't seen the light of day for some considerable time.
He found a stick and dipped it in. It was oil, sure enough! Being aware of the high-value nature of oil worldwide, he started to become excited. He went to find his wife, to tell her of the 'strike', calculating a price-per-barrel figure as he went.
His wife, however, wasn't impressed, and looked at him as if he had been born yesterday.
There are no plans to drill an oil well at the location.
