From the Border to Siem Reap – On Southeast Asia’s Worst “Road”

Cambodia…Almost…

Our last two weeks in Thailand were marked by illness, and as we lay in bed, hot and feverish, we watched the days count down until our visa expired. As it was, we reached the border two days late, and with our expired visa in hand, had to pay a fine of $5 per day. We thought that we could get by with only one day late, but as we approached the border at 8:30 PM on that dark and rainy Monday evening, all we saw was a group of young men playing soccer in the rain in their underwear. The border control had closed half an hour earlier, and we were forced to turn around again and spend one more night in Thailand.

The border to Siem Reap…First Impressions…

The rain was falling as we entered Cambodia, sweating underneath of our bright orange ponchos. We had just left Thai territory and entered a sort of no-man’s land between Thailand and Cambodia. In this small strip of land between the two border crossings were expensive hotels and fancy casino complexes with names such as “Diamond City.” How incongruous.

Cosmetically, the differences between Thailand and Cambodia are great. The sparkling cars and 4X4’s of Thailand are replaced by bicycles, motor scooters, and bicycle rickshaws. Women and children pull large wooden carts piled high with goods behind them. Sometimes, other people sat on top of these carts and these stacks of goods, and I looked on in amazement, wondering how it was possible for women and young children to pull what seemed to be such heavy loads. Many of the trucks had monstrously huge loads strapped on, overflowing and looking ready to burst. Several men sat on top of these, perched some 30 ft. in the air. It seemed in a way as if we had stepped back into India, especially with the several cows and other animals that populated the streets. The several large houses and buildings at the border town were quite different, though. They were fairly ornate, two-storey buildings painted in pastel colors with trim. They appeared strangely out of place – something from a different world or a bygone era.

But the largest, single most obvious difference was the state of the roads. The paved roads stopped at the border. From there came unpaved, dirt and rock roads. The road that we were traveling is supposed to be Southeast Asia’s worst road – if it can even be called a “road.” As Stephane put it, it was simply a “rocky path between rice fields.”

There were potholes and huge rocks or bumps in this “rocky path” almost every couple of inches – without exaggeration – so that we very rarely had even one revolution of our tires without hitting a bump. This made it extremely difficult to bike, and we were forced from one side of the road to the other, looking for the smoothest and easiest path. It wasn’t just hard on us; cars, motorcycles, trucks, buses…they all shared the same fate. In fact, unlike in some countries, where the monster trucks rule the road, here they were on the bottom of the totem pole. Even at our painfully slow average of 10 km./hr. (6 mi./hr.), we were beating the trucks, who had extreme difficulty navigating the large and sometimes deep holes in the road. The rain and mud compounded the problem, because you could never tell just how deep those holes really were. We’d sometimes be well above our ankles in the muddy puddles, struggling to hold on and keep our balance as that unseen rock hidden by the puddle would throw us a surprise. Though traffic had changed back to the right side of the road when we crossed the border, it seemed hardly to matter, as vehicles crossed back and forth, looking for any way possible to navigate the huge holes.

Rocky roads, potholes, ditches, mud, monsoon rain…I had a distinct feeling that Cambodia was not going to be easy. By the end of the first day, my rear-end hurt me so bad that I became seriously discouraged. The roads were supposed to be the same throughout the country and also in Laos. Three months of monsoon rain and a sore butt to look forward to – oh no!!!

The roads were both physically and mentally fatiguing. Physically because each rocky bump threatened to throw us off, and I had to put all my force into just staying on the bike and not falling off into a mud puddle. All the pressure went on my shoulders and my wrists, which hurt terribly after just a short while. And it’s painful to even think about my rear end. With each bump, it came down on the hard seat, and even my padded bike shorts didn’t help much. I was in considerable pain after only the first half-hour, and by the end of the first night – well, I won’t even go there! Suffice it to say that by the time we reached Siem Reap three long days later, I could hardly sit or even lay down comfortably!

I fell only one time, which I considered somewhat of a miracle. Nothing worse than a scraped up hand and a tear in the poncho. The extra mud didn’t seem to matter because I was already pretty well covered. And certainly we weren’t the only ones. Every car and even the jeeps were completely covered in the red stuff, right up over the windows and the roof! The rain turned the splattered mud on my arms into tiny rivulets. I actually didn’t mind the rain as much as I thought I would, because compared to the pain I was feeling, nothing else seemed to matter much.

With all this concentrating on the road, it was, as you can imagine, quite difficult to pay much attention to the scenery. When we did manage to take a look around, what we saw were endless rice paddies – a beautiful, bright green that contrasted sharply with the red mud on the road. There were also banana plants and wooden houses on stilts, similar to those found in Thailand. Every one or two kilometers, there was a sign for the “People’s Party of Cambodia.” One or two other signs advertised other political parties. As for the people, they seem to either opt for the bicycle or a shared taxi in a pick-up truck, or sometimes a motor scooter. They wear either straw hats or a brimmed, cloth hat that protects them from the sun and the dust. At nighttime, all is enveloped in a shroud of almost absolute darkness. There are no lights on the road, or anywhere else, for that matter. There are one or two candles lit in scattered houses, and perhaps a fire or two here and there to cook the dinner…other than that, a black nothingness. If the sky is overcast, as it often is towards the end of the afternoon and the early evening, even the light from the moon and the stars is blocked out.

Sometimes we would see a bicyclist with dozens of chickens hanging by their feet from the handlebars. One sight (if seen less frequently, it is even more surprising) is that of a motorcycle with a huge pile of goods stacked on it (cartons or appliances or textiles or bags). Although this is common enough, it becomes surprising when a woman sits at the top of that pile, some 6-8 feet higher than the motorcycle itself! I’ve never understood how she was even able to reach that height in the first place!

The road got worse each day: we went from an average of 12.3 km./hr. the first day to 10.2 kph the second day, and a painful 8.4 kph the third day. The recompense was the spontaneous, wide smiles of the people, who would wave “hello” or “bye-bye” when they saw us. The children, especially, were excited, and would jump up and down and squeal in delight and sometimes run around excitedly. There was no begging or rock-throwing here. The people are pretty, not unlike the Thais, and their smiles light up their faces.

When we got hungry, we had to wait until we came upon a village, where there might be a small restaurant with three or four tables. Like Thailand, these restaurants were just the extension of the owner’s own home. We would let them know that we were hungry, but being unable to speak the language, they would just bring out whatever was available in their kitchen. And boy, what a lot of food it was! I don’t know if it was because they thought that foreigners eat a lot of food, or maybe just because we looked like we were mighty hungry, but in any case, they always brought out enough food for a feast. We had noodle soup, cabbage, smoked pork, some kind of a vegetable concoction with unknown vegetables, and snail soup. And once we arrived in Siem Reap, we found lots more in the market: pumpkin and pork, chicken and ginger, fried pineapple with chicken and tomato, grilled chicken (including the feet), eggplant, coconuts, the juicy mangosteen.

We were almost always quoted prices in U.S. dollars or in Thai baht, even in the small villages. People generally prefer these currencies, as their own riel is not very stable. Until recently, it wasn’t even worth the paper that it was printed on! We pay in baht or dollars, and often they give us change in riel, which is good for the very small purchases.

If the face of Cambodia is made up of rice paddies, muddy roads, and smiling people in straw hats, its voice must be that of squealing pigs. Motorcyclists often attach pigs to their cycles, more often than not several piglets or one small adult inside of an oblong wicker basket. For the adults that were too large for the baskets, they were tied on their backs, with their heads sticking over the sides and their feet sticking up in the air. Sometimes a pig was held in place between two men on the cycle. When the motorcycle would hit an especially large bump or hole (which happened quite often), the pig would let out a great squeal.