Motorbikes and Camrys Rule

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Motorbikes and Camrys Rule

I’ve been wanting to comment on modes of transportation on our journey through Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, but never quite got to it. As we will be leaving for home in a few hours, I’ll throw it in here. Each place we’ve travelled has its own preferred common carriers. Every country has had a vehicle called a tuk-tuk, but the configuration has varied. In Bangkok it is a motorized tricycle that could, in a pinch, carry 4 people. In Laos, it was a 3- or 4-wheel, usually Daihatsu truck with bench seats on both sides of the bed (with a canopy over). When used as a school bus, an additional narrow bench would sit unsecured between the two seats and as many as could pile in would. I couldn’t act fast enough to get a photo, but we saw one in southern Laos that carried what I would estimate to be at least 32 children inside and another probably 18 on the roof. This in a 6-foot-long truck bed!

Here in Siem Reap, the tuk-tuk is a motorbike with a “5th wheel” connection to a 2-wheel cart holding 2 people facing forward and a bench seat opposite. Another type of motorbike add-on is one the vendors use, with a side car holding charcoal brazier or a display case, or whatever else they might need. Or they can hook on a flat-bed or stake cart for carrying everything from bananas to load of wood.

We took a tuk-tuk out to a silk farm today. It is run by Artisans dÁngkor and is one of many programs to help people from rural areas to learn a trade and in so doing to perpetuate crafts in danger of dying out. Young people from rural areas come to the farm to live for a year at no cost to them, and are taught the art of silk production and weaving as well as the science of silkworm culture and the art of leading tour groups in various languages. It is the same organization that we visited in town a few days ago that teaches its students the art of bronze-work, lacquerware, wood-carving, and stone-carving. Its shop sells the products created there in order to fund the program and the students learn a valuable trade.

A few random sightings from our trip out into the country: a woman riding behind her husband on the motor bike while breast-feeding her baby and with her small son in the middle of the family scene; a man on a motorbike with 3 dead full-grown pigs trussed to a rack side by side, face up, feet straight out.

Cars in Cambodia, especially for driving tourists around Siem Reap, seem to be mostly 1995-vintage Toyota Camrys (1995 being the year that the country was again opened to outsiders). Add to this lots of bicycles (at least two people on is the norm), motorbikes (we’ve seen as many as 5 people on one), and tour buses, it makes for a very interesting street scene. Today, however, we spotted a stretch Hummer limo at one of the swank hotels!

Traffic here is VERY interesting. Cars are left-hand drive and drive on the right like in the US (Laos is the same, while Thailand is the opposite). There are very few traffic lights, but whether an intersection is controlled by one or not(and if it isn't there is also no stop sign for either street), the tuk-tuks and bicycles use the same tactic: they enter the intersection on the diagonal, turning onto the shoulder on the left side of the road. If there is a vehicle coming, the turning vehicle simply continues down the left side of the street, with the oncoming traffic on its right. When he has a break, he moves across the oncoming lane into the correct lane. As to passing, they seem to gauge the width of the oncoming vehicles and go ahead and pass if there’s room, even if there are only two lanes and no shoulder (the shoulder is generally full of people walking or vendors with their wares spread right out to the traffic lanes). At a round-about, if the driver is going to the left, he simply turns left rather than going around the circle. A ride at night is something best accomplished (by the passenger) with both eyes closed and a fervent prayer. Come to think of it, that's probably how the tuk-tuk drivers operate too.

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Photos

Vendor
Motorbike with sidecar corn-cooking stand

Silk-worm cocoons
Separating the chrysalis from the cocoon.

Winding the raw silk
Raw silk is made from the outside of the cocoon; fine silk comes from the inside. Silk is naturally this color.

Dyes
Natural dyes from various barks and leaves.

Weaving Silk
It takes 3 days to weave 1 meter of fine silk with a pattern.