Way off the tourist track, as I'm discovering. My back's been killing me lately, so I brought a ticket on a big, comfy, tourist bus, as opposed to finding someone on my own to take me in the back of a pickup truck. I didn't realize (and wasn't told) that taking the tourist bus involved a layover. When the second bus finally picks me up, I'm in a foul mood, taking little comfort in the cushy seats and air conditioning. I've spent the last four hours wishing I'd found a pickup. My mood improves when we hit the dirt road, though. I imagine sitting in the back of a truck eating all that dust, and I decide that, even with a four hour wait, I'm happier where I am.
Then it starts raining. My first thought is that I'm happy to be dry. But the rain starts making the road slick, and now that we're getting into hill country, the road is getting narrow and steep. Ahead of us, a van is stuck going up a hill, and we have to stop behind it. The van spins and spins its wheels, getting nowhere. The driver turns off the bus, opens the door, and he and the conductor get out to help push the van.
They don't do much good, and soon some other Cambodian riders get out to join them. Unusually, this tourist bus has more locals (about 20) than tourists (7). The folks pushing the van don't have much success, and I go out as well. The rain is a light, persistent drizzle, not so terrible to be in, but it is turning the ground into an increasingly wet mud. My boots sink a little with each step as I walk in the rain. I love my boots deeply, if for nothing else than their trade name: Waffle Stompers. I've had them for fifteen years, and it shows. I start to feel mud seeping in through the deep cracks in the soles.
A group of eight of us are starting to make some progress with the van, but it's slow going. Every time we manage to give it some forward momentum, it goes about ten feet and then gets stuck again. Eventually, though, we get it to a point where the road is just slightly less mushy, and it manages to get up a bit of the way on its own power. I get back on the bus and it starts trying to get up the same path.
The bus is having a harder time on the road than the van. The huge wheels make a distinct whirring sound as they spin fruitlessly against the mud. I glance out the front window, and notice something strange: the road is moving sideways. The road's only supposed to move sideways out the side window. I turn to the side window and see the road coming forwards, and I realize the bus is sliding sideways and backwards down the hill.
I'm not the only one who figures this out. Soon, mostly everyone is outside, standing in the rain and watching the bus fishtail back and forth across the road. There's a deep, steep dropoff on either side of the road, so standing in the rain seems like a much better option than risking one's life in the bus. People are recruited to start pushing the bus, and soon most of the passengers are grouped around the huge behemoth trying to coax it further up the hill. All the spinning wheels and non-stop drizzle has turned the road to mush, and our efforts feel increasingly futile. It's starting to become apparent that the chances of this bus getting over the hill are slim to none.
The tourists start talking to each other about alternate plans. Unfortunately, none of us speak Cambodian, and none of the Cambodians speak English. We have no idea how far we are from Sen Monorom. Somehow, a figure of 15 km comes out as our distance from the city, and though we can't figure out who actually said that's how far away we are, we soon come to accept it as a fact and start discussing how long it would take to walk 15 kms. It's 5:30 in the afternoon, just past sunset. In an hour, it'll be pitch black.
The seven tourists divide into two camps -- the keep-pushing camp (all men) and the start-walking camp (all women). I want to stick with the bus and keep pushing, along with Richard and Hugo, two tall, thin, bearded backpackers, British and French respectively. In the hoofing it camp are two Frenchwomen, Julie and Emilie, and an Irish woman named Jo. Jean, a Chinese tourist, is keeping neutral.
The men resume their pushing, but the whole thing is becoming ridiculous, and as the bus starts sliding back towards the edge of the road, dangerous. The women have given up on us and are watching all this from under a tree at the top of the hill.
The mud is unbelievable. Most of the roads seem to be manmade, huge hills of dirt that have been piled up by the tractors and bulldozers we occasionally see as we trudge along. The persistent drizzle is returning the hills to their primordial state -- my feet sink deep into the road with every step, and when I try to lift them up, there's a sucking sound as the mud tries to pull them back down. Richard and Hugo are walking barefoot now, because the mud kept sucking the sandals off their feet.
As night falls, even the die hards are forced to give up on the idea of getting this bus anywhere. Even if we could get over this hill, there's another one after that, and a further one beyond. We get back on the now still bus and consider our options. The bus has become a damp, humid, mud-soaked nightmare -- nobody wants to sleep there. We could wait for the next 4x4 vehicle to come through and try to hitch a ride, except that not a single car has come by us in the hour we've been stuck. The roads behind us have probably become as impassable as the roads ahead. Or we could try walking.
Walking it ultimately is. All the tourists have backpacks except Jean, who has a wheeled suitcase that's handy in an airport but utterly useless here. A monk from the bus, wearing nothing but his saffron sarong, quietly comes up beside Jean, lifts her suitcase onto his shoulder, and starts walking with her. I pair up with Jo, the Irish woman, and a Cambodian father follows slightly behind us, his two-year old son perched on his shoulders.
I start going over all the technology I somehow felt obliged to carry with me: plug adaptor, cell phone, iPod, 3 different power cables, electric shaver, USB keys, and worst offender of all, my 35 mm SLR digital camera. Not to mention more books than I need. On a sunny day the weight makes me feel like I'm trudging through molasses. Now that I actually am trudging through something like molasses, I yearn for cement.
The rain is light but constant, and the road is slick and unpredictable. It is soon dark, and I pull out my flashlight and light the way for the four of us. Jo and I share backgrounds and travel stories as we walk. The stories seem distant, even a little surreal, as we walk through the rain and mud.
There are insects everywhere, a constant flow of them around the group of us. They're drawn to our flashlights and they create a small cloud around each group. It makes me think of Pigpen from Peanuts.
My backpack is, at this point, wrenching my body with every step. Jo and I have lost track of the rest of the crowd -- we think everyone's gone ahead of us, though the Cambodian father and son have stayed with us. We occasionally pass another car that has given up driving, with its residents huddled together. We also sometimes pass construction vehicles with the crew ensconced inside.
After an hour, we very suddenly come upon the entire busload of people grouped together near a massive tractor. Apparently, they've collectively given up on walking to the nearby town, and have regrouped to figure out what's next. I decide that I can't take one more step with my backpack on and so I knock on the door of the tractor to see if the driver will let some of us sleep there for the evening. Eventually, we get him to let Jo, Julie and Emilie in, and I abandon my backpack under the tractor. The women promise to deliver it to me when we all safely (we hope) arrive in Sen Monorom tomorrow.
The rest of us, lacking any better plan, continue walking, a little over twenty people in all. We go for about twenty minutes when, miraculously, two bright lights come shining through the rain from behind us. We all stop and wait as the lights come closer, eventually revealing themselves to be connected to a new, beautiful, heroically huge four wheel drive truck easily making its way up the hill. The flatbed is completely empty, and the driver seems to be happy to let us all pile on board with our luggage. I didn't know twenty people could fit into the back of a truck, but you learn something new every day. It's insanely packed. There's nothing to hold onto if you're in the center -- the only thing keeping you stable is the press of the other people around you. I think about what it's going to be like with the truck bouncing and sliding through the mud. From somewhere inside the pile of people, the two year old boy that had ridden his father's shoulder next to me and Jo for the last hour starts to cry, and I wonder if I had a two year old whether I'd let him be on that truck, or whether I'd get into it myself if I had a two year old waiting for me at home. Looking at it from that perspective, I decide it's better to walk.
To the bewilderment of pretty much everyone, I extract myself from the pile and hop back into the mud. The truck starts off, and I walk after it, watching it go up one hill, then another, and then another, getting smaller and dimmer, until it goes over the highest hill and its red tail lights blink into oblivion. I hold my hand to my face to see if I can see it, but I can't. I start to wonder if maybe I made a mistake.
But at least I have my flashlight and no backpack to weigh me down. I start walking and soon discover something new about the distribution of insects around light. There are, it would seem, a finite number of gnats, mites, mosquitos and the like, and they apparently distribute themselves evenly around light sources in a given area. So if you have, say, 20 people spread out along a road with a bunch of flashlights, then the bugs aren't so bothersome. But if there's only one light source around for kilometers, they swarm.
The bugs are soon clouded around me as dense as rain, and then denser. They carpet on my neck, down my shirt, on my face. I try wiping them from my lips, but it's like trying to use a windshield wiper in a monsoon.
So I orient myself on the road, turn off my flashlight, and start walking in the darkness. It seems like the only reasonable thing I can do. I figure I can briefly turn the flashlight on every five minutes or so to orient myself and then hope that nothing trips me up along the way.
It's slow going. It feels like the longer I spend between flashlight blasts, the faster I go, so I start stretching out my time in the dark. But I also find that my imagination starts working overtime on what might be waiting in the dark. Are there bears in Cambodia, I wonder? Do they go out in the rain? How about tigers? Is there such a thing as rain ants? Visions of horrific deaths start coming into my head -- prolonged maulings, horrific vivisections, so many different ways of getting eaten alive. And underneath it all, a recurring worry that's the only realistic concern of the bunch -- I wonder how long my flashlight batteries can last.
After about thirty minutes of this, I've worked myself into quite a frothy terror, so that when I hear voices singing from the bottom of a hill, I literally start running towards them. I step down the hill and my legs sink into the dirt up to my calves. I half walk, half slide down the hill. It's probably a Cambodian construction crew settling down for the night.
I get there and find three Cambodians who have carefully set up a series of hammocks one directly above each other, allowing all of them to barely fit into the compartment of a small bulldozer. I gesture to them that I'd like to join them in the compartment. They mime back to me: fat chance. I somehow manage to mime to them the extent of my terror and desperation, and they take pity. One of them hops down and leads me to an even smaller bulldozer with a tiny, one-person driving cabin. I climb up the ladder, pop open the door, and climb into the driver's seat. Even with the door open, it smells overwhelmingly of vinyl. The kind Cambodian smiles at me, shuts the door, and walks away. In about thirty seconds I feel like I'm in a vinyl sauna -- I'm quickly drenched in plastic-smelling sweat.
I open the door to try to cool things down, but as soon as I do the light in the cabin pops on and the bugs start coming. I can't win for losing. Then I see it -- at the top of the hill, in the distance, a moving pair of bright lights. It's going in the oposite direction that I want, back towards the bus, but I don't care. I scramble down the ladder and sprint towards the hill. There's no traction on the hill, so the only way to scale it is to claw my way up on all fours, sending clumps of mud cascading behind me as I pull myself along at a maddeningly slow pace. All the time, I'm glancing up, watching the lights getting closer and closer. If I don't catch this truck, I think, I'm just totally screwed.
I finally heave myself onto the road when the truck is only yards away. In my manic rush, I'm about to jump in front of it, waving my hands and screaming, when I remember the condition of the roads, and realize that doing so might be a bad decision. I have to hope that waving my hands and screaming will suffice.
Happily, it does. The truck skids to a halt (there's no such thing as a graceful stop in these conditions), and I run up to open the passenger door. The Cambodian in the front passenger seat turns to me and says, in perfect English, "Need a ride?"
Turns out that the truck has been sent by the bus company to pick up the passengers and their luggage. They apparently passed the other truck on the way, not realizing that it contained all the other passengers. I tell them what happened, and that the only people left to pick up are the girls camped out in the cabin of the construction truck, but they insist that they have to go to the bus. So for the next half hour we drive all the way back to the bus, fishtailing madly the entire time. When we get to the bus, no one's there, of course. On the way back we stop at the construction truck, but the girls aren't there - the driver says they flagged down another 4x4 and hitched a ride, along with my bag. So we proceed the rest of the way to Sen Monorom.
We pick up a few other random people on the way back, including a woman with a piercingly loud voice who dominates the conversation the entire way. I can't understand a word of it, though it's clear that the topic gives the woman cause for great surprise and offense. By the time I get in it's 9:30 at night. When I stumble out of the truck, my feet feel like they have ten pound weights attached to them - all the mud that had collected in them made them heavier and heavier, but I never noticed the cumulative effect. I find a hostel, and, shockingly, my bag, and am relieved beyond words to take a shower. The water in the shower turns a dark, dusty red.
The next few days in Sen Monorom are great. The seven tourists all eventually find each other and hang out in various configurations. There's nothing like trying circumstances to build friendships, nothing like a crisis to bring people together.
As night falls, even the die hards are forced to give up on the idea of getting this bus anywhere. Even if we could get over this hill, there's another one after that, and a further one beyond. We get back on the now still bus and consider our options. The bus has become a damp, humid, mud-soaked nightmare -- nobody wants to sleep there. We could wait for the next 4x4 vehicle to come through and try to hitch a ride, except that not a single car has come by us in the hour we've been stuck. The roads behind us have probably become as impassable as the roads ahead. Or we could try walking.
Walking it ultimately is. All the tourists have backpacks except Jean, who has a wheeled suitcase that's handy in an airport but utterly useless here. A monk from the bus, wearing nothing but his saffron sarong, quietly comes up beside Jean, lifts her suitcase onto his shoulder, and starts walking with her. I pair up with Jo, the Irish woman, and a Cambodian father follows slightly behind us, his two-year old son perched on his shoulders.
I start going over all the technology I somehow felt obliged to carry with me: plug adaptor, cell phone, iPod, 3 different power cables, electric shaver, USB keys, and worst offender of all, my 35 mm SLR digital camera. Not to mention more books than I need. On a sunny day the weight makes me feel like I'm trudging through molasses. Now that I actually am trudging through something like molasses, I yearn for cement.
The rain is light but constant, and the road is slick and unpredictable. It is soon dark, and I pull out my flashlight and light the way for the four of us. Jo and I share backgrounds and travel stories as we walk. The stories seem distant, even a little surreal, as we walk through the rain and mud.
There are insects everywhere, a constant flow of them around the group of us. They're drawn to our flashlights and they create a small cloud around each group. It makes me think of Pigpen from Peanuts.
My backpack is, at this point, wrenching my body with every step. Jo and I have lost track of the rest of the crowd -- we think everyone's gone ahead of us, though the Cambodian father and son have stayed with us. We occasionally pass another car that has given up driving, with its residents huddled together. We also sometimes pass construction vehicles with the crew ensconced inside.
After an hour, we very suddenly come upon the entire busload of people grouped together near a massive tractor. Apparently, they've collectively given up on walking to the nearby town, and have regrouped to figure out what's next. I decide that I can't take one more step with my backpack on and so I knock on the door of the tractor to see if the driver will let some of us sleep there for the evening. Eventually, we get him to let Jo, Julie and Emilie in, and I abandon my backpack under the tractor. The women promise to deliver it to me when we all safely (we hope) arrive in Sen Monorom tomorrow.
The rest of us, lacking any better plan, continue walking, a little over twenty people in all. We go for about twenty minutes when, miraculously, two bright lights come shining through the rain from behind us. We all stop and wait as the lights come closer, eventually revealing themselves to be connected to a new, beautiful, heroically huge four wheel drive truck easily making its way up the hill. The flatbed is completely empty, and the driver seems to be happy to let us all pile on board with our luggage. I didn't know twenty people could fit into the back of a truck, but you learn something new every day. It's insanely packed. There's nothing to hold onto if you're in the center -- the only thing keeping you stable is the press of the other people around you. I think about what it's going to be like with the truck bouncing and sliding through the mud. From somewhere inside the pile of people, the two year old boy that had ridden his father's shoulder next to me and Jo for the last hour starts to cry, and I wonder if I had a two year old whether I'd let him be on that truck, or whether I'd get into it myself if I had a two year old waiting for me at home. Looking at it from that perspective, I decide it's better to walk.
To the bewilderment of pretty much everyone, I extract myself from the pile and hop back into the mud. The truck starts off, and I walk after it, watching it go up one hill, then another, and then another, getting smaller and dimmer, until it goes over the highest hill and its red tail lights blink into oblivion. I hold my hand to my face to see if I can see it, but I can't. I start to wonder if maybe I made a mistake.
But at least I have my flashlight and no backpack to weigh me down. I start walking and soon discover something new about the distribution of insects around light. There are, it would seem, a finite number of gnats, mites, mosquitos and the like, and they apparently distribute themselves evenly around light sources in a given area. So if you have, say, 20 people spread out along a road with a bunch of flashlights, then the bugs aren't so bothersome. But if there's only one light source around for kilometers, they swarm.
The bugs are soon clouded around me as dense as rain, and then denser. They carpet on my neck, down my shirt, on my face. I try wiping them from my lips, but it's like trying to use a windshield wiper in a monsoon.
So I orient myself on the road, turn off my flashlight, and start walking in the darkness. It seems like the only reasonable thing I can do. I figure I can briefly turn the flashlight on every five minutes or so to orient myself and then hope that nothing trips me up along the way.
It's slow going. It feels like the longer I spend between flashlight blasts, the faster I go, so I start stretching out my time in the dark. But I also find that my imagination starts working overtime on what might be waiting in the dark. Are there bears in Cambodia, I wonder? Do they go out in the rain? How about tigers? Is there such a thing as rain ants? Visions of horrific deaths start coming into my head -- prolonged maulings, horrific vivisections, so many different ways of getting eaten alive. And underneath it all, a recurring worry that's the only realistic concern of the bunch -- I wonder how long my flashlight batteries can last.
After about thirty minutes of this, I've worked myself into quite a frothy terror, so that when I hear voices singing from the bottom of a hill, I literally start running towards them. I step down the hill and my legs sink into the dirt up to my calves. I half walk, half slide down the hill. It's probably a Cambodian construction crew settling down for the night.
I get there and find three Cambodians who have carefully set up a series of hammocks one directly above each other, allowing all of them to barely fit into the compartment of a small bulldozer. I gesture to them that I'd like to join them in the compartment. They mime back to me: fat chance. I somehow manage to mime to them the extent of my terror and desperation, and they take pity. One of them hops down and leads me to an even smaller bulldozer with a tiny, one-person driving cabin. I climb up the ladder, pop open the door, and climb into the driver's seat. Even with the door open, it smells overwhelmingly of vinyl. The kind Cambodian smiles at me, shuts the door, and walks away. In about thirty seconds I feel like I'm in a vinyl sauna -- I'm quickly drenched in plastic-smelling sweat.
I open the door to try to cool things down, but as soon as I do the light in the cabin pops on and the bugs start coming. I can't win for losing. Then I see it -- at the top of the hill, in the distance, a moving pair of bright lights. It's going in the oposite direction that I want, back towards the bus, but I don't care. I scramble down the ladder and sprint towards the hill. There's no traction on the hill, so the only way to scale it is to claw my way up on all fours, sending clumps of mud cascading behind me as I pull myself along at a maddeningly slow pace. All the time, I'm glancing up, watching the lights getting closer and closer. If I don't catch this truck, I think, I'm just totally screwed.
I finally heave myself onto the road when the truck is only yards away. In my manic rush, I'm about to jump in front of it, waving my hands and screaming, when I remember the condition of the roads, and realize that doing so might be a bad decision. I have to hope that waving my hands and screaming will suffice.
Happily, it does. The truck skids to a halt (there's no such thing as a graceful stop in these conditions), and I run up to open the passenger door. The Cambodian in the front passenger seat turns to me and says, in perfect English, "Need a ride?"
Turns out that the truck has been sent by the bus company to pick up the passengers and their luggage. They apparently passed the other truck on the way, not realizing that it contained all the other passengers. I tell them what happened, and that the only people left to pick up are the girls camped out in the cabin of the construction truck, but they insist that they have to go to the bus. So for the next half hour we drive all the way back to the bus, fishtailing madly the entire time. When we get to the bus, no one's there, of course. On the way back we stop at the construction truck, but the girls aren't there - the driver says they flagged down another 4x4 and hitched a ride, along with my bag. So we proceed the rest of the way to Sen Monorom.
We pick up a few other random people on the way back, including a woman with a piercingly loud voice who dominates the conversation the entire way. I can't understand a word of it, though it's clear that the topic gives the woman cause for great surprise and offense. By the time I get in it's 9:30 at night. When I stumble out of the truck, my feet feel like they have ten pound weights attached to them - all the mud that had collected in them made them heavier and heavier, but I never noticed the cumulative effect. I find a hostel, and, shockingly, my bag, and am relieved beyond words to take a shower. The water in the shower turns a dark, dusty red.
The next few days in Sen Monorom are great. The seven tourists all eventually find each other and hang out in various configurations. There's nothing like trying circumstances to build friendships, nothing like a crisis to bring people together.
