I thought I'd like to get out of the malaria infested woods of Ratanakiri for Christmas and booked a minivan trip back to Phnom Penh. Ratanakiri is in the northeastern corner of Cambodia, and the journey should take 11 hours under normal conditions.
I was pleasantly surprised to find the driver starting off down the road before full capacity of the van had been pushed to the limit; my pleasure turned to pain when he began slowing down and desperately honking his horn for any possible fare holding passenger along the road. Before long, the van had been properly filled to Cambodian standards, and without any cargo in my footspace (it had been giant vats of honey on the trip in).
After a couple of hours we hit the paved road near Stung Treng - from there it's a straight shot on good roads all the way back to Phnom Penh! After an hour there was a noise and the driver lost control, but managed to bring the vehicle to a stop before plunging us into a ditch. After some consultation with the other passengers, I figured out what had happened: The suspension over the front left wheel had broken. The driver managed to do a pretty impressive impromptu repair job on it, and we all got back in and cruised at a leisurly 15 mph for another hour or two to the next city (Kratie. Never did see the dolphins...), where it was properly repaired.
To my surprise, we were soon back on a dirt road! I was sure the road was good and sealed all the way back to Phnom Penh! Ah, but this is a shortcut, I was informed. Have to make up for lost time, after all.
Total time of the trip: 14 hours. Could have been worse.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Beneath the Surface
Living in Phnom Penh, I've been at a loss as to what to post here. I've even written a few articles about life in the capitol, about the traffic, the corruption, the lawlessness - but somehow I felt that posting them would detract from the travel focus of the blog.
Lucky for the readers here, my stay in Phnom Penh is coming to an end along with the year, and there are some new and exciting trips on the horizon.
Now, I'm staying in the provincial capitol of Kampong Cham, a hundred or so miles up the Mekong river from Phnom Penh. The town itself is nothing special, but the rural villages surrounding it are traditional Cambodia at it's finest.
As I rode along the dusty path on my Chinese bicycle, all the children waved and practiced and words of English they knew (mainly "hello"). Most adults in the village were busy with some task: collecting palm oil from the trees, laying bamboo water pipes from the Mekong into the village, chopping wood, planting rice, making huts and houses - but a few seemed to be dangerously unoccupied, drinking whiskey and waving merrily (but a bit aggressively) at 9:00 A.M... I didn't stop to chat.
After a while the houses dwindled but the dirt road pressed on. I started having thoughts of highwaymen - surely they exist around here... But decided to go a bit further. After all, there might be a magnificent sight just around the next bend. Finally, I came across a young boy driving an ox cart. We chatted amiably in my extremely broken Khmer for a bit, then I asked how to get back to the town, and he pointed me in the right direction. When I asked what was down the other way (the way I had been going) he ran his finger along his neck, the universal throat slitting sign. I swallowed hard, thanked him, and went back the way I had come.
Cambodia looks fairly safe to the visitor, but I we have to remember that the country is growing out of the ashes of a 30 year civil war and the people have experienced horrors that no one reading this blog is likely to know. Take care of your safety in Cambodia! Now I know why anyone with money buys the biggest, most heavily armored vehicle they can afford.
Tomorrow it's off to Kratie, home to the famed Irrawaddy river dolphin. I read an article on a website a while back that the species had gone extinct years ago and the whole thing was a sham perpetrated by men with dolphin fins, swimming at a safe distance from the boats. A scheme, the article reported, to keep the tourist business in Kratie alive. I have since heard from numerous eye-witnesses that the article has to be rubbish because they went there, and there were definitely dolphins. Stay tuned for the final word.
Lucky for the readers here, my stay in Phnom Penh is coming to an end along with the year, and there are some new and exciting trips on the horizon.
Now, I'm staying in the provincial capitol of Kampong Cham, a hundred or so miles up the Mekong river from Phnom Penh. The town itself is nothing special, but the rural villages surrounding it are traditional Cambodia at it's finest.
As I rode along the dusty path on my Chinese bicycle, all the children waved and practiced and words of English they knew (mainly "hello"). Most adults in the village were busy with some task: collecting palm oil from the trees, laying bamboo water pipes from the Mekong into the village, chopping wood, planting rice, making huts and houses - but a few seemed to be dangerously unoccupied, drinking whiskey and waving merrily (but a bit aggressively) at 9:00 A.M... I didn't stop to chat.
After a while the houses dwindled but the dirt road pressed on. I started having thoughts of highwaymen - surely they exist around here... But decided to go a bit further. After all, there might be a magnificent sight just around the next bend. Finally, I came across a young boy driving an ox cart. We chatted amiably in my extremely broken Khmer for a bit, then I asked how to get back to the town, and he pointed me in the right direction. When I asked what was down the other way (the way I had been going) he ran his finger along his neck, the universal throat slitting sign. I swallowed hard, thanked him, and went back the way I had come.
Cambodia looks fairly safe to the visitor, but I we have to remember that the country is growing out of the ashes of a 30 year civil war and the people have experienced horrors that no one reading this blog is likely to know. Take care of your safety in Cambodia! Now I know why anyone with money buys the biggest, most heavily armored vehicle they can afford.
Tomorrow it's off to Kratie, home to the famed Irrawaddy river dolphin. I read an article on a website a while back that the species had gone extinct years ago and the whole thing was a sham perpetrated by men with dolphin fins, swimming at a safe distance from the boats. A scheme, the article reported, to keep the tourist business in Kratie alive. I have since heard from numerous eye-witnesses that the article has to be rubbish because they went there, and there were definitely dolphins. Stay tuned for the final word.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
The Year of Kampot
The first things you'll notice coming into Kampot, a lovely little town in the south of Cambodia, are the bizarre memorial statues gracing the roadways and roundabouts. In addition to "2000", there's "rice farmers", "white horse", and most curiously "rhinoceros".
On Friday morning a few friends and I hopped on our motorbikes and headed there for the long weekend. My little 100cc bike handled the trip admirabley, but my friend's much older bike kept overheating, so he bought an IV drip at a pharmacy and rigged it to feed a water drip onto the motor. He made it in the end, an hour or so after me.
On the following day we went to the nearby Kep beach and feasted on fresh shrimp and crabs. Afterwards we swam and relaxed in the sun. In the evening we went to a restaurant specializing in wild meats and feasted once again, this time on hog and deer. The unfortunate vegetarian in the group was surely annoyed, but didn't complain.
On the way back it rained, but we didn't care.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Live from Vietnam
This week Cambodia is celebrating Phchum Ben, a holiday of some sort, so I've taken advantage of the time off work to make a jaunt over to Ho Chi Minh city to see what all the rage is.
I am pleasantly surprised. I heard so many travelers in Cambodia bitching and moaning about how they hate the Vietnamese, what a pain in the ass the country is, etc etc, so I was bracing myself for intensity, but so far it's nowhere to be found. People are remarkably friendly and, yes, a bit more business-oriented than their Theravada Buddhist neighbors to the west (Vietnam, apart from the large Catholic minority, practices Mahayana Buddhism, like China)
My impression is that HCMC is a mix between Bangkok and Phnom Penh, though closer to the former than the latter. It's a bit like Bangkok, but better managed and without all the horribly ugly expressways, fly-overs, and the skytrain which obscure so much of the Bangkok sky with rain stained concrete. It's a city of motorbikes, though it seems that the cars are starting to chip away at the 2 wheel monopoly on the roads. For a coffee lover like myself, it's a dream. Cheap, good, domestically grown coffee is served everywhere. The food is also a dream... a lot more variety than the gnarly strips of pork on a pile of rice that I've been imbibing in Cambodia.
I'd better stop there or I might just convince myself not to go back on Sunday!
I am pleasantly surprised. I heard so many travelers in Cambodia bitching and moaning about how they hate the Vietnamese, what a pain in the ass the country is, etc etc, so I was bracing myself for intensity, but so far it's nowhere to be found. People are remarkably friendly and, yes, a bit more business-oriented than their Theravada Buddhist neighbors to the west (Vietnam, apart from the large Catholic minority, practices Mahayana Buddhism, like China)
My impression is that HCMC is a mix between Bangkok and Phnom Penh, though closer to the former than the latter. It's a bit like Bangkok, but better managed and without all the horribly ugly expressways, fly-overs, and the skytrain which obscure so much of the Bangkok sky with rain stained concrete. It's a city of motorbikes, though it seems that the cars are starting to chip away at the 2 wheel monopoly on the roads. For a coffee lover like myself, it's a dream. Cheap, good, domestically grown coffee is served everywhere. The food is also a dream... a lot more variety than the gnarly strips of pork on a pile of rice that I've been imbibing in Cambodia.
I'd better stop there or I might just convince myself not to go back on Sunday!
Monday, October 01, 2007
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