The end of a month in Cambodia and what have we learnt?
29th December 2005

We seem to be seeing a lot of corruption lately
Just call Pat a wuss and you can get him to do anything
VSO woes - same as it ever was
Baguette, brie and ham. Ambrosia
Visa countdown
Haggling over a quid. How sad are we?
Corruption, landmines and dodgy politicians. Fresh thinking called for.

Kampot corruption

Matt, the VSO we met in Sihanoukville, is actually based in Kampot and he’d recommended it as a nice stopover on the way north. Just nearby is an old hill station, Bokor, that Hippy had found in the ‘book’ and fancied visiting. There was no avoiding it.

After tearful farewells with Jan (and of course, Kermit, our resident tree frog who had steadfastly occupied a strategic position in our soap dish, only taking a time out each evening to go partying with his mates) we had a light day on a good road under the lea of the escarpment which is home to Bokor. It was only a short jaunt and so we got to Kampot in plenty of time to get lost in the roadworks. It is probably one of the smallest towns we’ve been to in a long time, consisting of something like a five by three matrix of roads. It seemed that every road we went down had been dug up to lay drains. When they dig up roads here they don’t mess about - there’s no point carting muck away to have to bring it back to fill the hole, so you just fill the street with it.

The Blissful Guesthouse is run by Angela, a Belgian lass with big problems. She took out a 10 year lease on the house to run it as a backpackers only for the landlord to sell on to someone with royal connections. She has now been told that she can only have one of her remaining eight years and then it will be reposessed. Apparently one cannot argue with the rights of the monarchal folks of these parts. I’m caught in two minds. Maybe we could do with a few kick-arse royals of our own or maybe Pol Pot had a point and should have done away with the lot of ‘em. Pol Pot was a maniacal killer, but it is easy to see how poeple would naturally support someone offering something different from the corruption they already knew, at least in the beginning before they knew what he was up to. Anyway, poor Angela was a bit tearful during our stay and one cannot blame her. Her biggest disappointment is that she has spent so much on doing the place up that cannot be recooped. Local feeling is that when her time is up she should move out and get someone to torch the place. Rather a hollow victory. The least she can do is reinstall the termites that she had cleared and the resident snake population.

At the back of my mind all the time is this nagging feeling that just about every country we would like to settle in is somewhat subject to the vaguaries of a ‘flexible’ legal system where the gringo tends to lose; Zimbabwe, Latin America in general, SE Asia in general.

To cap it all, it seems that someone has hooked up to her electricity so her bill has gone through the roof. In the evening that only way they could think of tracking down the culprit was to wait till all the neighbours had their lights on and then switch of the mains and watch to see which lights were eclipsed. There was afree in it for the guest who spotted the scabbing neighbour. The Watson clan will all be muttering “Minch View” at this point.

Never say never again

There was another European owned gaff in town, The Rusty Keyhole. Kristian, the owner, is from some or other outskirt of Manchester and professes to be a United fan. This is totally acceptable and indeed right and proper in my book. It’s the non-mancunians who insist on carping on about how they’ve always been ‘Reds’, but have a Chelsea shirt in the wardrobe to be on the safe side, who get my back up. I’d have been more impressed if he were a City fan but you can’t have everything. Anyway, I really can’t say a word against the man. He rustled up a litre of 10-weight hydraulic fluid (the chosen alternative to fork oil in these parts) and a syringe so we could re-invigorate the front suspension on dear Berthette. He then filled us in on the best routes to take from here north. A more helpful and charming Man U fan it would be hard to find.

All reports of the road up to Bokor were uniformly negative, apart from the masochistic Swedish biker who thought it was great fun. It had been a hill station for the colonial French dudes, and promised wonderful views, waterfalls and an eerie ruined casino and such. It seemed worth the effort of 40km of bad road. Come on how bad can 40km be, really. Truly shit is the answer. What was worse was that it wasn’t so bad that it was impossible, it was just hard work. Patrick always bears the brunt of these things. It was a lot of nasty fist-sized, chunky, loose rock. Typically the bits that no doubt the 4x4 found the worst were the uneven sections where we could weave a reasonable path. Most annoying was that we were told that the road gets better on top of the plateau. They lie. Maybe for a car, but the loose rocky stuff is in some places worse than on the way up, for a bike.

On the top was a plateau, with a view, but the fading concrete ruins of the hill station failed to inspire the enigmatic feelings they were meant to. I only thought it was a shame that this mainly structurally sound building were no being renovated, the position was spectacular and the temperatures refreshing compared to the heat haze below.

I was cursing a little. I’d only really conceded and agreed to ride up this road as I knew that Hippy had it reasonably high on her agenda (after all, it is listed as a highlight in the Lonely Planet so it must be good?). There had been a bit of ribbing going on while we were with Jan about what a pussy I was about riding on rough roads. They’d got to me and against my better judgement I’d ridden this nightmare to find the ends did not justify the route. Truly, I thought Pat was beyond the need to prove his macho-ness. The truth is I rather like the fact that he is a ‘pussy’ when riding Berthette, it has I am sure saved us from a multitude of accidents and avoidable repairs. I don’t know how many times I’ve said it now but that is positively the last piece of unnescessary dirt road I’ll be riding on. Maybe one day when I have a bike that I’m happy to trash and is a bit lighter (maybe the truth is that I am the excess bagggage that he intends to ditch, he certainly cannot manoever the bike quickly enough, with a dead weight of a fat Hippy on the back) I might get to enjoy this stuff, but when Berthette has still got to get us about 15,000 miles back to Blighty I really don’t want to abuse her.

Kampot VSO issues

We met up with Win again by chance. I confess that the night we’d met her in Sihanoukville I’d not really taken in what she looked like. I’d spent most of the evening chatting with Matt and the candlelight hadn’t been conducive to recording how people looked. It came as a bit of a surprise that one of the voices from the adjacent table in the restaurant belonged to none other. She was engrossed in chat with Katy, yet another VSO resident in Kampot. We joined them and chatted over the usual VSO problems; water supply, corruption, expectations of colleagues. Funny how these themes seem to be recur without fail wherever VSO work. I remembered all too clearly the tears that had flowed when our rain water tank burst and all our lovely, safe drinking water sank into the ground just as the dry season was about to commence. Water is taken for granted by so many, but I understood totally the frustration of a being promised by the landlord water and there being none. Unusual in our experience and coming as quite a surprise was the request by one of the colleagues of a VSO to borrow some money. We’ve certainly come across instances of volunteers ‘adopting’ a family and helping them out with problems that may arise but never of a direct appeal for financial help. Hearing of it in Cambodia struck us as very odd. Maybe it is time to rethink the allowance that VSOs get here - it’s not good that they should be seen as a money pit. The volunteers were correctly, treating the request with caution especially when it is generally against Khmer etiquette to make open requests, implying that this was a bit on the cheeky side.

The initiative in Cambodia is quite large by VSO standards. A 1.8 million budget stumped up by, I believe, the World Bank funding 70+ postings and their associated project expenses. None of the other VSO programmes that we’ve seen can match these kinds of figures. To be honest, we can’t state categorically where funding for volunteers’ allowances come from in other countries but it was always our understanding that the main difference between VSO and, say, the Peace Corps was that VSO volunteers had their allowances paid by the local government rather being gratis. This, we always considered as an inducement for them to consider their needs carefully and prioritise whereas PC’s don’t nescessarily have a clear job definition. As someone pointed out here, though, ‘If the money spent on the project was distributed amongst the teachers so that they got a reasonable wage, they would probably show the commitment needed to move forward by themselves’. A Cambodian teacher’s wage being, only $20 a month, all teachers have second and third jobs to make ends meet and entirely understandably, the other occupations take priority if they bring in more cash. When the rice harvest is due, teachers and pupils will take time out. Prepation and marking are shelved in favour of running the shop in the evening. There’s an element of truth in the dispersal of aid money theory, but 1.8 million doesn’t really stretch very far and, of course, there is a need for training and development.

Generally, standard of living is poorer in Cambodia to Thailand, fewer homes with water and electricity, lower wages and higher prices, petrol for instance being one and a half times that of the neighbouring country which has knock on effects for prices of goods that have to be transported. It came as no real surprise that the reason for our terrible fuel consumption was that petrol theft is commonplace. When I thought about our tank having the equivalent of 2 months wages contained within it, I could see how much of a temptation it must be.

Heaven is baguette and cheese but we forgot to mention it at the time

There are definite bonuses to a person that has been on the road for a while, in Cambodia. Two things that must not be under estimated is the glee of finding good French bread and cheese. I thank the French for leaving their colonies with the skills to create edible bread and the desire to import a variety of cheeses. Generally, bread production around the world needs an overhaul, in our travels, only Mozambique and now Cambodia have non-sweet, non-pappy bread as the norm. Flat breads of the world get a bit samey after a while. The US had been particularly disappointing, with the only appealing bread being sold at inflated deli prices. It struck me that considering all the countries we had been to that have cows, why is there so little cheese production. We must have died and gone to heaven. It got better, in a supermarket in Phnom Penh there was a deli counter that was salivatory in its options, parma ham, salami, brie, it was all too much. We had succumbed, there is little that tempts me to splurge but with Jan and Patrick as conspirators, we were drawn to the deli counter irrestibly like Eve to the apple tree, there was no turning back. Most of you, in Europe, and the civilised parts of the North America, take the availability of such things as for granted as applicator-less tampons, non-techno music and clean water.

It was such a treat to have good deli food that it felt almost debuched and gluttonous. We savoured, we chewed, we experiemented with combinations, parma ham with blue cheese, smoked cheese with olives. It was decadence in a traveller’s world.

Northward ho

We’d been led to believe that the road back to Phnom Penh had a bit of a nasty stretch of dirt road that buses refused to travel on and so when Kristian recommended an alternative route that was much better and more scenic, we were overjoyed. Not only did it turn out to be as attractive as claimed, but it was better than a road with a section of dirt to the extent that it was perfect tar all the way. Super. Pausing only to fill up with gas and take a leak in PP, we kept heading north. Actually taking a pee turned out to be more of a problem than one would have thought. The ladies who worked the petrol pumps had chosen this time to all wash their hair in the sink in the lavvies. We waited 10 minutes hoping that they would finish and allow us some relief. I had to move on and promise to stop at a food vendor with facilities. The frustration of there being a toilet but our not being able to use it was just too much. I assumed that they wash their hair at work because they have little in the way of a bathroom at home. So many we had seen washing in the muddy river at the side of the road. I ponder the logic of washing in such dirty water, surely, if they filled a barrel with the water and left it for a couple of days much of the sediment would settle, but maybe a barrel is a luxury one step beyond them.

And so we stopped for lunch. I’d passed loads of eateries for a variety of reasons; no sign of good toilets, just a little too basic, no where to park. Our chosen venue seemed to fulfil all relevant criteria and as the sign advertised ‘Khmer food’. There is a certain logic here that may pass the reader by, but the Khmer language uses a different alphabet, so if they have bother to write ‘Khmer food’ in latin font it would suggest an invitation to non-khmer speakers. I thought we wouldn’t have a communication problem. How wrong I was. There was no menu, nothing to point at and our khmer has only reached the hello and thankyou level. We resorted to the time-honoured mime-a-food method. Pretty easy with animals but vegetables are extremely tricky. We tried to ask for the couple of dishes that we had learnt ‘tom yam?’ ‘Luk-lac?’ neither produced a positive response. We were having no joy so we went for the shoulders raised appeal for whatever they had. Our waitress pointed out of the window. I went to the window and looked around. There was nothing but a tree. Our faces clearly indicated that she had not managed to communicate effectively with us. So she returned from the kitchen with a small dead bird, head hanging lifeless over the side of her outreached palm. It looked awfully scrawny but we nodded that, yes, this was a plausible foodstuff and we were prepared to pay for and eat it. Once deep fried and featherless, it became smaller still and we were overjoyed that the provision of boiled rice was considerable. We caused consternation by pouring the dipping sauce for our thrush over our rice in an effort to make it a little more interesting. Much shaking of heads and the waitress returned with more dipping sauce and mimed the correct thrush and sauce etiquette. The sauce was scrummy, lime, tamarind and black pepper at our best guess. Mum arrived back from shopping and took pity on us by providing f.o.c. a bowl of boiled vegetables and fish. It had been an uphill task but we now had a balanced, healthy and tasty meal. We pondered our pathetic lack of language assimilation and found it ironic that although we’ve never been to India we know the names of nearly all the vegetables, meats and types of bread in their language. We really should try harder. Although we left the restaurant replete, so the essential mission was accomplished, I am not convinced that the combination of foodstuffs was at all conventional. Somehow, fish stew does not really compliment deep fried thrush with zippy sauce. I pondered on the bike as we were riding to Kompong Cham whether ordering food back in the UK would now have become a dull, predictable experience. There was something rather exciting and enthralling about ordering food in foreign lands - you are never quite sure if y you and your host understand a mutual understanding of what you conway. We had gone in hoping for some noodle soup and had instead consumed a bird of unknown genus, with unspecified sauce and fish stew of dubious origin. Hey, we are so adventurous.

Kampong Cham has got something of a bad press in the guide books. OK so it is short of architectural merit but it does have a nice vibe. If you are happy to take side trips out to see temples and what have you, you could base yourself here for quite a few days and not get bored. Unfortunately we had to get cracking as the Cambodia visa was running perilously short of remaining time and an exit to Laos was called for.

Having said that I would never ride on dirt roads if there was a viable alternative, there is a short cut to the next major stop up the Mekong which involves about 50 km of dirt road but takes 80 km off the whole distance. Kristian had proved to be knowledgeable about the roads of Cambodia and so we followed his advice again and took this short cut. Bumpy in parts but not too much to grumble about. I can see the slide starting again and we will end up on crappy roads and have to draw the line once more about what we really find acceptable.

What was weird was the huge flash football stadium apparently in the middle of nowhere. Lurking in the midst of Cambodian countryside is an avid footy fan, with enough spare Riel to fulfill his dream of having the best stadium on the Mekong. There was an added bonus of leaving the tar road that we also left the kamikaze taxi drivers on the other route. We had learnt from Matt that although right-hand drive cars are technically illegal in Cambodia, most of the cars are imported from Thailand and with a back-hander is the right quarters the illegal car is suddenly OK. But it does rather explain some of the reckless overtaking manoeuvres.

Kratie (Kracheh to the locals) is another nice little colonial French town that has survived reasonably intact. The French didn’t really go a bundle on developing Laos and Cambodia as they were busy taking the profits from Vietnam. The towns then are not really so grand and only the buildings that remain from that time are a tad worn out.

We found the dolphins which were playing in the river as promised just up the road from Kratie. We were faced with the option of taking a boat ride for 5 dollars to go and seem more of the critters at play further out in the river. Oddly, for two people it was this 5 dollars each but for three or more people it was 3 dollars each. We saved ourselves a dollar and treated Jamie the student to a free trip out on the river. Predictably there were few other dolphins out and about and so just had a one hour boat ride pointing out to each other the ripples where a dolphin had just gone down. There had been talk of making it to some pool where they like to hang out and we don’t know whether this was a reference to a stretch of Mekong that is a bit deeper and so known as the pool or whether we simply didn’t get taken to it. I think it is fair to say that the consensus was that our money had not been well spent and had we simply sat on the bank gazing down at the river we may have seen more Irawaddy Dolpin action. Heigh ho.

There’s a small hummock next to the road on the way to the dolphin park that is locally known as a mountain. I suppose that anything that rises a little above the Mekong floodplain makes a good landmark and so is worthy of note, but applying the epithet ‘mountain’ is a little exaggerated. We walked up the mountain in approximately 5 minutes and poked our noses in the wat on top. The most fascinating element of the monastery compound was a small shelter decorated with moral murals. They demonstrated many of the weaknesses of mankind; sex and drugs but no depiction of rock and roll. Oddly all of the pictures of women seemed to involve auto-bleeding from or mutilation of their vaginal region. Maybe we were looking too deeply at the pictures and seeing something that was not there, but it certainly did seem that there was a message about menstruation being unclean. Or a suggestion that us women have been permanently cursed for sins of the past. I was certainly not aware of this being a concept in Buddhism or Hinduism as it is in Islam and Judaism, but stranger things have been known.

Kratie is an excellent spot for a sunset and we were lucky to experience another lovely one. The trouble is that sunsets are quite early here (around 6 o’ clock) and Hippy does not find my yawning acceptable so early in the evening. My sunset obsession was appeased that night - it was truly glorious. But, I fear that Pat has reached the stage that he just sees another sunset. He keeps saying, ‘the sun goes up, the sun goes down’ implying I should cease to be enthralled by sunsets. Can he not see that each is unique; the clouds; the colour changes, the ripples in the river or silhouettes of the trees, each is special.

There is no option with regards to roads north from Kratie towards the Laos border - it has to be the dirt road, mostly recently built and partially ongoing, that the Chinese have provided. The Chinese are doing so much road building around the world. In Cambodia, it was easy to see the commercial sense in having a decent transport route for the Chinese to distribute their goodies around SE Asia. But the road building in Ethiopia and Latin America, is either evidence of a selfless act or a cynics view is that it is in exchange for a trade agreement. Whatever the reason, the Chinese are responsible for a whole lot of improved infrastructure around the world. I saw some photos of the road from a year ago which clearly showed it to be quite the worst in SE Asia. We weren’t sure how much of the road was complete and certainly the first section out of Kratie did not live up to the billiard table reputation. When the tar ran out a narrow road with mild potholes took over and it seemed that a hundred miles of this up to Stung Treng would be a nightmare. Thankfully, after about 6 km this road joined onto the billiard table superhighway that we had been promised. It is a huge road with a perfect surface - so new that corrugation, the old enemy, has not set in yet. OK, so none of the bridges are complete yet and so a little side trip is needed off the embankment at each river crossing, but overall one would think that you were the first person to drive down this recently constructed marvel. Apparently the bulk of this 200 km work was knocked off in 5 months. Makes the 1 mile stretch of M65 that I worked on in Lancashire, that took the best part of a couple of years to complete, look a bit lame.

Either side of the road is clear cut back about 100 metres which makes the drive somewhat dull. There are perhaps a total of 30 houses visible from the road in this whole section and many of those look to have been built for the road construction crew. Yes, it truly is a blessing that you can hoon up this road at high speed otherwise boredom could be a killer. There is one silver lining in the fact that the diggers had cleared the sides of the road. I kind of assumed that if there were landmines in the area the diggers would have already set them off, so I was relieved, I could relieve myself in safety.

Stung Treng, the last fontier post in Cambodia. It lacked the wild west feel I was expecting and was surprisingly up tempo. It was our last night in Cambodia and if were to complete our Karaoke challenge, it had to be tonight. Karaoke, is not permitted in public places which is maybe something that was introduced by the taste police. Private clubs are the only places that one can legally sing and annoy others. Sensibly, these places cater to Khmer vocalists and the lyrics are written in the appropriate font. But cunningly, the barman in the bar, (where else would he be?) had an alternative plan, karaoke via his video phone. Man these new phones do everything. In fact we are going to need a technological update course if we ever decide to be mature and settle down somewhere. It was all a bit strange, but we managed to succeed in the first stage of our mission without being arrested by the Karaoke police, with the bar clientele as our audience. (Photo evidence on the challenges section of the website).

It all became clear; the confusion over the road/no road/you have to take a boat thing beyond Stung Treng. You do have to take a boat, but only across a tributary of the Mekong. The road up until the Chinese were enlisted was so bad that it was quicker and more comfortable to go by boat, but now......the road is wonderful, give or take a few bridgeless bits of course. I felt for the ferry boat man, his living about to die a death as a bridge is being constructed. We pondered what this would mean for our fare. Would the prices triple in the last year of use, so that the guys could save enough up for their retirement, or were they hoping to bribe the contractors to leave the bridge unfinished, in true Siem Reap style.

We stood and watched a serious game of flip-flop shy, with a group of kids. Equipment needed is at least one flipflop and some old cans or bottles and some cardboard. Set the bottles/cans an agreed distance away and hurl your flip flop at them, skimming stones style, to try and knock one over. The game had the sophistication of advancing in difficulty, first upright bottles, then end on, on their sides, then down to a small bent piece of card a couple of cm high. It was nice to see that the lad with attitude that seemed to think he was king of flipflop shy, was beaten every time by a girl with a wicked throwing technique.

Micro economics

In fact, the ferry may well have been free for motorcycles but being farangs we ended coughing up a dollar. When the prices are as small as this, you may wonder what the big issue was. We had the dregs of our Cambodian Riels to get shot of and didn’t want to take any out of the country with us as there would be scant chance of changing them beyond the border. We did our best to calculate down to the last bottle of drinking water what our costs would be and keep back enough for the ferry.

Everyone thought it was their duty to give us advice. Most bikes were going on the people ferry. This involved lifting the bikes about a metre off the jetty and onto the bow of the boat. Great plan with your average 100cc moped, but not so bright with 400kg of fully loaded Berthette. We were in no great hurry and happy to wait until there were enough vehicles for the ferryman to think it worthwhile to cross. But the locals knew best, they all tried to convince us that it would be no problem lifting Berthette up. I had horrible visions of them getting half way trying to lift the bike up, then losing grip on it and it ending up face down in the bottom of the river. We had seen it before, people thinking that they are macho starting to manouever the bike and realising too late that it was way too heavy for them. (As we write this a week later we can confirm this from an incident at our guesthouse in Vientiane. We were sitting enjoying the afternoon on the verandah when the jingling of the padlocks on Berthette’s paniers caught our ears. We ran over just in time to see a minion of the hotel lift her off the centre stand to get her out of the way of the bosses car. We shouted for them to stop only to see her tip over into the dirt. The culprit was unsympathetic and simply said that the bike was too heavy. He found it astonishing that I was angry. One of the guests pointed out that getting angry over a material possession was not cool. Perhaps he was right and it wouldn’t remedy the situation. By the guy’s attitude, it was clear that he wouldn’t stop to think faced with the same situation again. I kind of felt sorry for the guy, he had I assume been told by his boss to move the bike and Pat shouting something at him in an alien language need not have been as easy to understand as Pat seemed to think. The American who berrated us for being so het up about material possessions postulating that people were more important, may have been right in what he said but very hypocritical as he proceded to shout aggressively at the same minion to carry his bags for him.) We were not to be persuaded and pragmatically waited for the big boat. As we waited, we were willing cars and lorries to come down the jetty, a car sat teasingly at the top of the embankment. Will it or won’t it. ...... After an hour and a half of waiting two lorries trundled past him and onto the boat. We were off. To my delight when the car that had been at the top came down honking his horn expecting the ferryboat to pull back to allow him to board.... there was no turning back and his honking went unheeded. One up for the ordinary man. I ought to explain, it seems that only those in powerful positions have a car, so if someone is in a car people and the authorities tend to allow them to do pretty much what they like, and kow-tow to them all the time. So it was nice to see the cocky bastard in the car who had decided he was too important to sit in the sun on the boat and wait for it to leave, got left behind. Shame! Oh, she’s so vindictive. I thought that maybe the poor chap had been held up by the police who have their office at the top of the ramp and so had been a bit shafted.

Round town no-one seemed to know or at least to want to divulge the price of the ferry to us and the best estimate we had was 4 dollars. As we boarded, one of the ‘helpful’ young men that hang around in places like this told us that he had negotiated with the captain and that we’d have to pay, yes, 4 dollars. We’d met a French motorcyclist, Henri, who had paid one dollar the previous day and when I found the captain, sure enough, all he actually wanted was the dollar. From all of our careful planning, we now found ourselves with a whole spare 3 dollars. Drinking water is generally overpriced at 500 Riel a bottle but all of the vendors on the ferry ramp hiked that a bit further, the first asked 700, the next 800 and so forth and it seemed that word was spreading and each was raising the price higher than the last. It really fascinates me that often in poor countries, even when it is clear that you know the price, the huge guffawing belly laugh that salesmen get from asking a ridiculous price and then not making a sale is more important to them than actually selling their wares. Whatever. Round the corner a nice little chap knocked us out a bottle at 400. But we still couldn’t get rid of the last Riels.

We met Henri by chance in town, in fact we met his bike and through it we introduced ourselves to Henri. His bike was sitting outside his guest house and had all the hallmarks of an overlander like ourselves. A French number plate being the biggest clue and travel-tired baggage being the other. We left one of our cards on his bike with info about where we were staying. Henri is in biking terms not a ‘pussy’ he had been through all those ‘stans’ and China. Which implies he has money, and a job awaiting his return. He was also in a sense coming home as he had lived in Cambodia for a while. Hence he was on a time limit, and had 2 days to get to Phnom Penh. Now most people in the situation would plan to take the most direct route, not Henri he was including a diversion out to the East of Cambodia. Why, we weren’t sure? Was it clock up more mileage, tick off another destination, to pop in on old friends or merely to prove how hard he was? To me there seemed little point in adding on a couple of 100 miles of dirt road just to spend the night there and leave first thing in the morning. But each to his one, eh?

We had a fall back position for the money. It’s pretty well known that at the border we were heading for the officials request a stamping fee of in the region of a dollar. This is totally bogus and if you contest it, they will generally stamp you through for free as an act of international good will. I thought I’d keep the cash in case we needed to smooth the way. Contrary aren’t we. One week we’re moaning about having to bribe police and now we’re preparing a graft fund to cross a border.

Off the ferry and back onto the Chinese road. Lovely jubbly. Quick chat with a couple of cyclists coming the other way. They, too, were mighty relieved to hear that the road was the same as this all the way.

Sure enough the border guards asked for their pieces of silver for stamping our passports. We managed to persuade the Cambodians that this was actually what they were paid to do and they caved in. Not so on the Laos side. When we balked at coughing up the 2 dollars, the boss was called for who did not seem very malleable. We got rid of our Cambodian money on them and high tailed it into Laos. As promised, the first 8 km of road was pretty grim. Thankfully we have hit the dry season and so the 2 foot deep craters had dry mud in the bottom.

A few notes on Cambodia

Corruption is a national sport. We’ve already pointed to this here and there; the road doesn’t get repaired because a powerful man runs the airline, the profits from a National Monument are swallowed up by an oil company, the police do as they please to extract cash from whoever they can, the royal family can evict leaseholders at will. It’s a mess. The acceptance of the situation by the masses is worrying. Surely they have suffered enough in the recent wars and opression to deserve better than this.

Sadly, landmines are still lurking in wait of the inncoent civilians, and their effects will continue to maim those that can least afford to lose their ability to earn a living.

Everywhere there are signs up advertising the political parties; CPP (Cambodian Peoples Party, Funcinpec and Sam Rainsy. They all profess forms of socialism but the country seems to be encouraging an enterprise culture. I guess it ties up with the corruption thing. There are plenty of people who are more equal than the others. For me the most annoying thing was that these signs were were often the only thing on the roads that was written in Latin font. It would have been nice if they wanted to write in an understandable font that they could have at least mentioned on the sign what town we were in, or something helpful like that.

Things I will remember Cambodia for are those piled up trailers on the back of mopeds, the chickens hanging from bikes, monks riding 3 up on mopeds. In fact generally a lot of monks, on mobile phones, or having a sneaky fag. The ubiquitous wraps about peoples head, to act as dust masks and sun shades. A haven of decent bread and cheese in the developing world. Those enigmatic faces of the Bayon style ruins and the waterfall sculptures. I am afraid that Angkor Wat, itself, does not quite hit our favourite ruin list. Maybe there were simply too many tourists to really feel the atmosphere there. That is not to say, it is not tremendous, but there was something about jungly Tikal and deserty Petra that topped Angkor for romanticism.