I’m no longer an atheist. Surviving thirty-six kilometres over a pothole-pockmarked glorified dirt track on the back of a motorcycle has made a believer out of me.
I can quite honestly say I’ve not seen a more skilful driver than the pilot of said motorcycle, except perhaps his three contemporaries who ferried my three contemporaries. The roads out of Battambang, which we travelled 18km each way to see just about the only thing of interest in the vicinity, barely deserve the label. The journey followed a seven-hour motorboat ride up the Tonle Sap River. I am now convinced I have an ass of steel.
Our short stay in Battambang ended as we packed up and left early this morning for the border town of Poi Pet, from there on moving into Thailand. A beat-up Camry with a taciturn driver got us there intact, despite progressively worse roads – they were quite literally building one as we travelled on it, and the final stretch to the border was not a road or even a path, but a congested thick soup of mud. We crossed without incident – the first time, personally, I’ve crossed a land border on foot – and a four-hour bus ride brought us to Bangkok. For me, for the third time.
I left Cambodia with decidedly mixed feelings. During our ten days there, we were mobbed by touts, swarmed by street children, swathed in dust and bounced about on inferior roadways. Yet what I will take home with me is the genuine earnestness of the Cambodian people. The vast majority, if not exactly all, of the Cambodians we had more than a brief acquaintance with were very honest, forward and open folk, unafraid to be friendly and perhaps more importantly, to voice what they really felt. Our tuk-tuk drivers in Siem Reap, for instance, told us straightforwardly that oil prices were hurting them – though it did take them a day to admit it, they did not try to make any silly excuses for not taking us where we wanted to go. They gave us the real reason and voiced their concerns to us. I value any action of this sort. Additionally, the selfsame drivers did not attempt to claim ignorance of the “loans” we gave them over the three days we hired them; they readily accepted that these amounts would be deducted from their total payment at the end of the three days. Anyone more devious, perhaps, would have tried to make an issue of it. Our drivers did not, and in those three days I felt they provided very good service, short of declining to fulfil our agreement to the very letter and take us “anywhere” due to high oil prices. They were punctual every time, and when one driver could not make it, he arranged for another driver to pick us up. The degree of responsibility and honesty displayed impressed me. I must admit I came prepared for the worst and was pleasantly surprised to an extent.
Even the touts and peddlers that we rejected never showed any hostility towards us personally, unlike some others I’ve met in Thailand and elsewhere. Most in fact still managed to return a smile, and some even engaged in a few moments of pleasant conversation with us. I particularly remember the peddler girl, mentioned in an earlier post, on the road to Siem Reap, who claimed to be twenty-four but looked considerably younger. Her openness and earnestness, I felt, typified our general experience with the Cambodian people.
As for the country, Cambodia itself, I would say, is an unpolished gem. Yes, it is a cliched description, but nowhere have I found it more apt to be applied. Cambodia has a roughness about it one might not find in, say, Thailand. The capital of Phnom Penh, cloaked with dust from the countryside and with barely a skyline to its name, has a small-town feel that one might not expect to find in a national capital. It cannot possibly have many more than a handful of posh establishments. We ate at one, in t-shirts and shorts and covered with grime from a day around the city. The waitress stared hard at the menu when I asked her the contents of the mixed drinks, as if expecting the answer to magically materialise at any moment.
And that, I think, just about sums up the country as a whole. It is working hard and development is occurring. There is a long way to go, but the country is trying its best. After the horror of the Khmer Rouge years and the decades of strife that followed, Cambodia needed time to right itself. It has done that, and now it is at last moving forward, slowly but surely – even while it remembers the lessons of the painful past in respectfully-preserved Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields, and takes pride in a far more glorious chapter of its history in the majestic ruins of Angkor.
I’ll be home tommorrow, and it’ll feel good. It always does.
