I had intended to avoid Cambodia while I was in southeast Asia. It had opened up to tourism only four years before after decades of war, brutal genocide, and deprivation. The countryside was littered with landmines, armed militias were still the de facto authority in many areas, corruption was rampant, and first world amenities were largely non-existent.
But after being charmed by the modest ruins at the old capital of Ayutthaya north of Bangkok, I wanted to see more. When I asked fellow travelers about where to go to see more ruins, their eyes would focus on something distant and unseen, a faint smell of incense and the soft tinkling of bells would fill the air and they would breathe: Angkor. Okay, not quite, but Angkor did exude a magic allure of remoteness and adventure.
Remoteness and adventure go together with dangers and difficulties and horror stories of travelers being shot at by bandits were not hard to come by, but the people I spoke to assured me that it was not quite as bad as that in the west of Cambodia, and anyway, Angkor was a treasure worth the obstacles.
I scoured my hosts’ guide books on Cambodia and searched whatever resources could be found online at the time. Travelers’ websites and the government of Canada provided many reassuring cautions and warnings. However, it seemed that Siem Reap, the town that was the base for visiting the Angkor temple complex, was developing rapidly and was fairly safe if you were careful.
I decided to travel overland instead of flying in. Although ground travel in most of Cambodia was not recommended, the main highway to Siem Reap seemed to be safe enough by daylight. I decided that if it was too grueling going in, I would fly out. Nothing spawns adventure like being cheap!
I had purchased a ticket to travel “by van” to Siem Reap at one of the shady little travel kiosks in Khaosan Road. The van was a grubby little Toyota with feeble air conditioning and a colourful, jiggling encrustation of bobble-head creatures on the dash. There were seven other backpackers in the van, but the oppressive heat and the noisy air rushing uselessly through the open windows smothered any conversation. It was a dull six hour journey to the border along the straight, sealed Thai highway, past many ugly and uninteresting service stations and spirit house dealerships.
At the border there was a bustling little market on the Thai side and not much else. We got out of the van and several people went to the Automated Teller Machine to make final withdrawals. At the time, there was allegedly only one ATM in all of Cambodia, located in the capital, Phnom Pehn. We had to take all of our cash in with us, preferably in US dollars, though Thai baht was sometimes accepted in western Cambodia. The Cambodian riel was hardly used. I had $300US in little cloth packets pinned and hidden all over my person. There was not likely to be any use for credit cards either, outside of the major hotels and airline ticket counters.
We regrouped and were directed to walk across the frontier. Our Thai driver could only take us to the border. A Cambodian driver would meet us on the other side.
Monstrously over-laden trucks teetered toward us into Thailand. We passed the tidy, relatively modern Thai immigration office where officers in their crisp uniforms could be seen through the clean glass windows, working at computers. And then we left the developing world.
As Adam, one of my Aussie travelling companions, noted, “What a difference a border makes.” The paving turned into compacted dirt and trash. The Cambodian border offices were a scattering of drab concrete bunkers. A sour, sweat-stained man standing at an outdoor table handed me a number of forms to fill out, including a Quarantine and Health Form. The last question on the form was “Do you have an International Vaccination Certificate?”
I had read about this online. It was a scam. They would ask for a Yellow Fever certificate when there was no need for it when coming from Thailand, a country not considered to be infected, but travelers who didn’t have one were either forced to pay a “fee”, or worse, also forced to take an unknown pill or even injection of who knows what. I decided to play Stupid White Female and checked “Yes”.
I walked up to the Quarantine kiosk and passed the form and my Alberta Health Care record of vaccination to the rheumy-eyed little man inside.
My gut clenched as he looked through the papers. The record of vaccination was just a folded, wallet-sized card on which the health nurse had noted my vaccinations in short codes and initialed them for my personal records. The little man unfolded it carefully and examined it, turning it over and bringing it up to his watery eyes.
He looked up at me and said, “Ah, it is very small!”, but he was smiling, almost as though he was conceding that I had won the round. He stamped and initialed the quarantine form, handed both to me and waved me on.
Holy crap, nothing says “adventure” and “I think I might puke from relief now” like bluffing one’s way through a scam. My fellow travelers had checked “No” and each had to pay five dollars, which is a helluva lot when you’re planning to get by on ten dollars a day with no ATM anywhere, but thankfully no one had to take any unknown pills or shots.
Suddenly I was thronged by a mob of begging children. The nearby guards were indifferent. The children pressed against me and groped my pockets without subtlety. I’m sure that in the hub-bub a little hand darted into my “immediate cash” pocket just as I was putting my vaccination card away. I think I ended up paying a five dollar border “fee” after all.
Next we were directed into one of the bunkers where a man sat, not at a computer, but at an enormous ledger three feet across and several inches thick. He took my passport and the quarantine form and noted them carefully in the ledger. Then he stamped my passport. They may not have had much in Cambodia, but they had a gigantic passport stamp. It filled the entire page.
I was officially admitted into a country that, two weeks previously, I had had no desire to visit.
After the surprises so far it was something of a relief to find the promised guide waiting for us just beyond the gates. He led us into Poi Pet, a dispirited town of mildew-streaked warehouses, scrap yards lined with jagged glass-topped walls, shabby guest houses for those unfortunate travelers who failed to make it to the border before it closed at 5:30 pm, and mud. Grim faces peered at us out of darkened doorways in windowless buildings. We shuffled nervously along behind the guide to one of the non-descript blocks and into a room that felt oddly like the waiting room for an automotive repair shop, perhaps because of the derelict cars rusting outside the window and a spare wheel leaning in the corner. A few bleached travel posters longing after places far from Cambodia hung on the wall. The afternoon wore on but the group didn’t talk much. I think we were all wondering what the hell we had gotten ourselves into.
At last everyone was escorted back outside again and shown to our vehicle. It was not a van, but a tiny Toyota pick-up truck which in North America would properly seat two. There were eight of us, plus the driver. Obviously most of us were riding in the back. For 200 baht we could “upgrade” to the cab, which one guy and a girl did, but I opted not to. There was much grumbling about fitting nine people into that truck. A few people demanded to know why we weren’t traveling in a van or bus, but there was obviously no other option besides walking back across the border. We laid our packs in the bed of the truck and climbed in on top of them. We set off… and promptly bottomed out in a mud pit. Plainly this truck did not have four wheel drive. We all got out and pushed, the truck struggled out of the pit and we were off again.
We thought that the road might improve once we got beyond the truck-churned ridges of mud and trash near the border. It did not. It got worse. We had a guide on a moto riding ahead of us to find the best way around the truck-sized potholes. Sometimes he got off his bike and probed the pond-like puddles with a stick to see where the shallowest spots were. The truck lumbered slowly along behind him, slipping and jolting along the path he indicated.
I was squeezed in behind the cab between Dennis and Adam from Australia. We joked between painful bumps about the condition of the road and agreed that we would never, ever complain about the condition of roads back home again. Or about Greyhound, for that matter.
We had bumped along for only a few kilometres when I saw a little lean-to shelter clinging to the shoulder of the narrow road. There was a person sleeping in it. Even though I had just seen the poverty of shabby Poi Pet, the sight of a person forced to sleep on the side of that awful excuse for a “highway” jolted me into the reality of the Third World. I realized that the landscape was nothing but flooded rice paddies and hidden land mines. The only dry, relatively safe land was the road. Homeless people in Calgary at least have some options to get warm shelter, clean drinking water and food if they need it. That person’s only option was to huddle underneath a few boards on the shoulder of the National Highway.
The truck crawled on with agonizing slowness. There were stretches where the road was relatively intact and then our driver sped as quickly as he could, but these were torturously short and rare. We passed fragile huts perched precariously on stilts above the water. A few had a nearby tiny island of mud and straw with a soft, droopy, disconsolate white cow standing upon it. Groups of children on foot and on bikes chased after us waving, smiling and cheering like we were the Santa Claus Parade.
The sun was getting low in the sky. We didn’t need to see the odometer to know that we hadn’t traveled far. We turned off the highway into the little town of Sisophon, half-way between the border and Siem Reap. It had taken us three hours to travel 90 km. Though I wished we could push on before dark, I was also terrifically hungry and sore. I was glad to dig out my food.
In fifteen minutes we were ready to go again, but our driver was not. He was evasive when asked about the delay. A second truck full of backpackers had limped in soon after us. We remarked among ourselves that at least we didn’t have twelve people packed in our truck like they did. Their driver and another man were poking around under it and inside the hood. Apparently, it was having mechanical issues and couldn’t go on.
The sun was drawing near to the horizon. At last our driver indicated to us in broken English and gestures that our two groups were going to have to travel in one truck. We were flabbergasted. It had seemed crazy enough that we had eight people plus the driver in our little truck. Eleven more people were joining us? How could that work? We were told that if we didn’t travel in this truck, we would not be likely to get another one any day soon as all trucks were full when they arrived in Sisophon. The two drivers directed three people to squeeze into the rear “bench” in the cab (probably not intended as a seat), two people to share the passenger bucket seat on one another’s laps and the remaining fourteen of us to slot ourselves together like human Tetris in the bed of the truck. Once everyone was packed in and already losing feeling in their limbs, the other driver waved goodbye as the poor little truck groaned, juddered and lurched back onto the highway.
The sun dropped away, as it does near the equator, and it was dark.
At first it seemed like the choice seating spots were around the sides of the truck where one could hang one’s legs over the side, but I was glad to be in the middle with soft bodies all around me for cushioning as we jolted and banged over the miles to Siem Reap.
It seemed hardly possible, but the condition of the road worsened. Now we came to complete washouts. Each time the truck wobbled into one of these streams we held our collective breath and then cheered when we staggered out on the other side. There were three washouts where we had to stop and wait while vehicles were chained up to a tractor and then towed across a small river to the other side. At the third washout, a transport trailer was jammed in the gap with a truck chained to each end. It wasn’t clear how they were trying to shift it, but it was clear that it wasn’t moving any time soon.
Our truck was chained up. The tractor hauled the truck into the rice paddy next to the road to get around the stuck trailer. I was glad I hadn’t “upgraded” to the cab as the water rose around us. The bodies packed around me absorbed any splashes and I remained dry. The tractor lumbered back toward the shoulder of the road. For a brief moment the truck tilted. We yelled. A vision of muddy water, screams, tangled bodies and darkness flashed through my mind, but in another moment we were back on the road. As an added bonus, the engine was still running. We cheered. The little truck soldiered on.
The flooded rice paddies reflected the last pearly sheen of twilight, turned deep indigo, and bloomed with stars. The last black smudge of the wet season’s clouds slipped away to the south. There were no electric lights to be seen anywhere. We were traveling over land and after dark through Cambodia, something that the Canadian government website had warned emphatically against. But whatever was going to happen, was going to happen. There was nothing I could do but think about family back home, about where I had been and wonder where I was going, cradled in that dangerous, beautiful sphere of warm bodies and starlight.
We met no other vehicles. Our guide on his moto wobbled back and forth in the headlights, tunneling through the blackness. We had long ago run out of jokes about the endless craters and ridges of mud. Now we bumped against one another in silence, overwhelmed by the glittering beauty, our exquisite aches and pains, and a measure of fear.
An Israeli fellow sang a melancholy song softly in Hebrew. He pointed out the angry red glare of Betelgeuse. The flash of the headlights caught a man on a bridge, his thrown fishing net momentarily crystallized into a tapestry of diamonds, and he was gone. A shower of green embers swept over us, eliciting cries of surprise and fear that turned to murmurs of awe. One ember caught between my knees. It was a lightning bug. We passed its winking, ghostly signal from cupped hand to cupped hand.
Dark trees blotted out the comforting stars. It was all black.
Out of the dark emptiness we heard music growing louder, then very loud. Suddenly we were surrounded by an obscenely bright swirl of lights. It was a carnival in the middle of nowhere. A local monastery was raising funds for the wat. While we waited for our moto driver to buy some petrol, we ate fried potato wedges and watched people dance to obnoxiously loud pop music. A rickety carousel and small Ferris wheel loaded down with shrieking children and adults whirled and creaked. Too soon we had to squeeze ourselves back into the truck and trundle into the silvered darkness of silent rice paddies once more.
With a shock we realized that the road had turned to smooth gravel. The truck sped up. A line of ghosts on bicycles rose up in the truck’s headlights and then melted into the tail-light-reddened dust behind us. The palm trees became unlit streetlights silhouetted against the stars. Then the black shapes of buildings closed in around us. It was just past midnight and we had arrived at Siem Reap at last, but Siem Reap had not waited up for us.
A single watery green light shone through a swirling cloud of insects onto the door of the Golden Sands Guest House. As the little truck groaned to a stop in front of it, a man stepped out of the doorway to meet us. The backpacker trucks made arrangements to drop off at a specific guest house on arrival since everything else is closed, but some of my traveling companions moaned that this was another scam. I didn’t care. I just wanted to rest my weary, battered body on any bed. I could figure out different accommodation in the morning.
After brief negotiations on the room rate ($2US), I was in a clean but stuffy, windowless concrete room with two simple beds and three other girls. With barely a word of introduction we turned out the lights and fell onto the mattresses.
It took a while for my body to believe that the beatings of that awful National Highway had stopped. It took longer for my brain to find a place to rest in that swirl of memories of the dangers and delights of my first eight hours in Cambodia.
I have no photographs from this section of my Cambodian adventure because my camera was buried in my pack beneath fourteen bodies. The photograph at the top was taken in Siem Reap the following evening. It features several examples of the truck we fit twenty people into.
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