Fun and games on Cambodia's "roads"...

---

Relieved to leave Phonm Penh I headed to Snoul by bus where I was told I could get a share taxi to Sen Monorom as buses no longer ran that route. Five and a half hours later in Snoul “service station” I asked a couple of minibuses if they were heading to Sen Monorom. No. I asked at the “gas station”, one man and his 20 glass coke bottles filled with fuel. No, he couldn’t help. Some young Cambodians from my bus came to my rescue and asked around for me amazed that I wanted to go there. I explained there was some pretty hiking there. This obviously was not a sufficient answer so I quickly added that there were also elephants there and we don’t have them in England. Made a little more sense but not much. A moto driver’s brother would take me. Great! I sped off on the back of his moto waved off by the bus who obviously thought I was mad. No the brother would take me tomorrow but not today. Snoul was not somewhere where I was willing to overnight. Half naked little children wandered through the rubbish whilst cows ate any scraps they could find. The only option was to wait on the side of the road and hope another truck would pass and be willing to take me. I waited with a guy who mended motos. Word obvioulsy spread that there was a mad English girl wanting to go to Sen Monorom to see elephants. Before long there were 15 moto drivers looking at my map to see where I had been and where I wanted to go. They taught me some Khymer and I taught them some English. We shared my crackers and they passed around my ipod. Snow Patrol proved a big hit. They found me a chair so I could sit in the shade and when, finally, 3 ½ hours later a pick up truck appeared they made sure I wasn’t ripped off.

Some people sat on the roof, others crammed into the back with bags of rice and gravel whilst four of us squished together behind the driver, his 3 year old lively daughter and his wife who spat out the window at an incredible volume. With the windows down and relaxed music playing it wasn’t so bad at first and the dusty road was relatively smooth. We past three trucks which had broken down and I selfishly hoped we wouldn’t share the same fate. Soon my bag, jammed behind the seat and pushing down on my feet, was cutting off my circulation. Just as cramp was about to set in the guy next to me got out. Relief. The black ominous clouds soon gave way to thunder and lightening and a heavy downpour and the road just deteriorated. With the windows back up to stop the rain and the spray of red mud coming in, there was almost not enough air to breathe. It was never a question of if we would get stuck in the mud, only when. When was when it just got dark of course! The wheels turned and turned. We were going nowhere. All the men were outside with bare feet and rolled up trousers trying to push us out. Eventually a local truck came to the rescue. The decision was to stay in a guesthouse. The guesthouse was actually a large room with several wooden dividers to act as walls only they didn’t reach the ceiling so every creak and groan could be heard. A guy with his uncle asked if I wanted to join them for dinner. Yes please! At 7.30pm the night market had run out of food. We found a “restaurant”, a room with a dirt floor and some plastic tables. The TV played a music channel with good looking Korean boys dressed in white suits dancing around in the rain looking rather distressed. A group of teenagers chatted over a large fondue style pot of soup. We ordered the same as that’s all there was. Balls of meat were in the soup which he referred to as “pig’s balls” which made my mind picture something other than sausage meat. With rice as well it proved however to be quite a feast. I retired to my noisy room and lay on my acrylic sheet trying not to think about when it was last washed.

In the back of the pick up truck the following day all ran smoothly. It was dusty and bumpy but no more than usual which is, of course, still a lot. One lady, who had just joined us, wore a helmet with the visor down to protect herself from the dust and hitting her head on the roof. Ingenious I thought although I doubted she bothers to wear it on her moto. 26 hours after leaving Phnom Penh I finally arrived, somewhat exhausted but happy.

Sen Monorom has been called “Little Switzerland”obviously by someone either with a far better imagination than myself or by someone who has actually never been to Switzerland. OK, so it is at 800m, it has pine trees, has two smalls lakes and a couple of waterfalls but that is where any similarities end. In the forest elephants rather then cows wear the bells. It is a small, dusty, overgrown village and few foreigners brave the journey (I now know why) but the welcome is all the friendlier as a result. A Hungarian girl sat next to me in a café and I asked her if she wanted to go elephant trekking with me. Yes! Great - we ordered our elephant. He was 60 years old but he looked older. Our smiley driver helped us climb onto the elephant’s head and into the basket which made a pick up truck feel as luxurious as a limousine. We past small villages with wooden houses and thatched roofs which could be easily dismantled, moved and reassembled. I wondered what they thought of us. The elephant made his way slowly through the forest to the river where other tourists were watching the elephant drivers wash not only the elephants but themselves as well. An elephant driver can never marry as the elephant would get jealous. That’s what you call commitment to work! Once the other tourists left we headed off to find our elephant. The driver indicated we could climb on him without the basket. Sat down, he was hard to climb onto, especially as he was covered in mud. Sitting on him was so much more comfortable than the basket and we were soon in the river with the elephant sat down and washing him. We were muddy and wet but it was great fun and my date with dumbo was worth the journey there.

As it was difficult to get to Sen Monorom I should have expected it to be hard to get away too. It was. The road east to Ban Lung features in the Lonely Planet’s 5 Worst Roads in Cambodia and believe me, there is some stiff competition. No pick up trucks go there, only motos. The prospect of 8 hours on a dirt track on the back of a moto with my luggage also strapped to it was not appealing. Doing it was worse! I persuaded a Swiss guy to do it as well thinking it would be more fun, plus there was safety in numbers. When I say moto I mean a city moped. Imagine a 1982 model and then picture one that has been used every day since 1982. The first three hours were on a wide, bumpy and dusty road and between us we had two breakdowns and one puncture. Sitting on part seat and part metal bar I could feel every bump and there were many. After a lunch stop the road turned into a dirt track through the forest. Now I knew what bumpy and dusty truly was. Up and down and around we went. Some bits I would have been nervous to mountain bike down! At one point my driver lost his flip flop as he tried to maintain balance in all the sand, another time we fell over completely. We crossed a river on a “ferry”, several pieces of wood tied together, and we knew we were only an hour away. It was the dustiest road ever. When trucks went past we could see absolutely nothing. Finally 8 hours 45 minutes later we arrived. All of me ached and I felt as tired as if I had run a marathon although all I had done was clung on. I have never been so dirty. I was a different colour. The red dust in Cambodia gives you an orange glow far worse than any bottle of cheap fake tan. There is a wonderful phrase in the Lonley Planet where they say, “Grime is your passport to happiness”. I am a big believer in this but I have to say the hot shower and the cold beer helped me reaffirm this faith!

Good job I was getting used to dust as Ban Lung was the dustiest of dusty towns. A walk through the dark and dirty market made me feel uncomfortable for the first time in Cambodia. Unfriendly faces stared back at me from behind the stalls, unhappy for me to be there making me unhappy to be there too.

Escaping to the jungle for a three day trek was a relief. More dust was to be endured on a 1 1/2 hour moto journey to the river followed by two hours on a long tail boat passing kingfishers and the brightest coloured butterflies. The agencies pamphlet said that crossing the road in Phnom Penh is more dangerous than trekking in the Ratanikiri National Park and winning the lottery is more likely than seeing tigers and snakes. Within 10 minutes of being in the park a cobra swam past us. Thankfully I was in a boat! After the hot journey we washed in the river, me in a borrowed sarong just as the locals would do, much to the amusement of the local children. I tried to stop my imagination believing that every stick that brushed past me was a snake and failed miserably. In the village children ran around amongst the bamboo houses playing with home made toys made out of bamboo and old sticks. No ridiculously expensive, brightly coloured plastic toys were necessary for them. It was a strange feeling sitting on the steps of the community hut, our home for the night, watching the villagers watching us. Our guide was inexperienced and possibly uninterested as well and didn't introduce us to the chief of the village as was promised which meant there was little, if any, integration. It would have been rude for us to have simply approached the villagers. Bed was a hammock which folded up neatly into a type of briefcase for easy transportation. Easy to put up and surprisingly comfortable once you could convince yourself it was not going to collapse. A zipped in mosquito net protected you from a variety of creepy crawlies.

Walking through the jungle was like walking through a sauna only I felt that all the dirt was entering my pores rather than leaving them. It was hard work and I was only carrying a little pack. Some of the trek was along part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail which was an extensive maze of dirt roads running from North Vietnam to South Vietnam via the neighbouring countries of Cambodia and Laos and used by the People's Army of Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Along the route there were numerous supply bunkers, storage areas, barracks, hospitals, and command and control facilities, all of which were concealed from the air by an intricate system of natural and man-made camouflage. By 1973, trucks could drive the entire length of the trail without emerging from the canopy except to ford streams or cross them on crude bridges built beneath the surface of the water. Today there are still remnants of bunkers and trenches along the way and machine guns dating back to WWI lie amongst the foliage rusting away.

Next stop Laos, the most bombed country in the world...

---