Day 61 27th jan
We're up early and down stairs for breakfast... The hotels lovely and so is the breakfast..... This was a very good find this hotel, and I'd be very happy to stay here again...
We sit down in the lobby with all our bags littered around us, and as per the Asian way, our collection time comes and goes.... 25 mins later we jumping into the back of a Tuk Tuk..... We'd been forgotten AGAIN !!!!
We're dropped of at the minivan company and join our awaiting van load of fellow passengers and without delay we're off....
We've got another 6hr journey ahead of us today to Siem Reap...
Today's minivan is a modern Ford Transit.... It's quite nice really.... The air con is better than it's been on previous trips so we're please...
We travel out of Phnom Penh for the last time along a road that's now becoming familiar.... We travel through the traffic for around an hour before grinding to a halt.... We'd used this road when we'd taken the Tuk Tuk to the Kings temples on top of the mountain, only this time there is much more police presents.... They stand by the roadside dressed in all there badge attire, whistle in hand pulling cars over for random checks.... We're not pulled over, but I notice that there are lots out on this road today and whilst stationary in the queue one comes and taps his baton on the drivers window..... Words are exchanged and he wonders off.... We don't know what the hold up is, but we assume its a crash of some description.... Locals walk the line of traffic selling fruit through the windows.... They struggle to reach the barely open coach windows, but with money at the other end they find a way....
After about ten minutes of being stationary a steady line of police cars start to pass us in the opposite direction.... We are not sure what to make of it, there's political unrest still taking place in Thailand and these countries boarder each other so we think its about that but then amongst the police cars a precession of white 4x4s start to pass and within these one passes with a guy stood half out of the sunroof waving at everyone as he passes..... His followed again by more 4x4s and what must be the whole of the Cambodian police force.....
It then filters through the van from the Cambodian drivers that we've just been passed by the present King......
Pretty much as soon as the last police car has passed we're all on the move again.... Thankfully we only need to travel another half mile along this now very busy road before turning off onto national highway 6 which leads directly to Siem Reap flowing a huge lake all the way...
The " Good Cambodian roads" soon diminish into nothing better than broken pot-holed tracks.... The surface is destroyed and progress is slow and bumpy as you crash from one grater to another.... The road is under a project of improvement and widening on a massive scale.... It's currently normal road width - one lane in each direction, and the road is still open for traffic, either side of this road are effectively two further roads that are cut directly into the red earth, these are two lane wide, which in effect turn the original road into a motorway wide road of three lanes for each direction with only the central two lanes having any Tarmac.... The old road is so poor that most drivers use the bright red dirt roads on either side.... This creates huge qualities of dust that drift in think red clouds across the entire area leaving visibility at a minimum..... Objects just appear out of the dust clouds... Truck come towards you and become visible when there 50 foot away.... People here often travel on the roofs or on the back of trucks, and judging by the look of the people passing us it's pretty hard to breath in the dust.... They've just wrapped themselves up like mummies in whatever they can find..... Sometimes the "new" dirt road surface can be a foot lower then the existing Tarmac road, so once off the original road, you stay off it until you can see its ok to rejoin.... Seeing the battered old Mitsubishi trucks driving across the dusty red dirt roads leaving as huge dust cloud behind with nothing but scrub land to either side of the road makes you feel like your in Africa.... White cows roam the surrounding land with leather skinned Shepard's somewhere in the distance.... I love it....
The Cambodians certainly know how to load there vehicle for maximum carrying.... We follow a Toyota Camry for a few miles that is carrying 9 people.... 5 in the back..... 4 in the front..... Toyota Camrys are common here, and I guess that's why..... Another common vehicle here is a van made by Ssangsong.... It's similar to the Toyota minivans we have been using all over Asia but older.... The tourists seem to travel in the more modern white Toyota minivans and the locals in these older Ssangsong minivans which are usually dark green..... They ram people into them in vast numbers, and if there is no seating space left inside then sitting in the boot with your legs handing out the back or simply sitting on the roof is deemed fine..... personal belongings end up in the roof under huge nets or simply hanging off the back, tied on with rope. Many have a metal loading bar attached to the back.... It is like an extraction of the rear bumper.... It's designed for carrying a motorbike widthways across the back of the van, with the rear door shut, but the locals have learnt that if they open the rear door of the van with is hinged at the top and put the front wheel of the bike inside and have the rear wheel hanging off the back then they can carry four or five bike at once and the open door creates more roof space so even more can be carried on top too.... It is not unusual to see vans that are loaded so high on the roof / rear door that there hight has been doubled, and there length then increase by about 5 or 6 foot as well by the extender bar and strapped on luggage.
We pass through a little town that must have a saw mill..... I notice a couple of these vans filled with lengths of wood so long that the lower ones dragged along the road behind, even with the bumper extender fitted... one particular van I noticed had stopped by the roadside and was in the process to pulling away.... The roadsides can be pretty bumpy, as was the case here, and when the van started to move forwards it slowly passed over one of these bumps which lifted both front wheels completely off the ground, and only as the speed gradually increased did the front wheels slowly come down and make contact with the road again.... Maybe 5 or 6 foot were passed at relatively slow speed on only the rear wheels.
We arrive into Siem Reap and get a Tuk Tuk to our hotel... It's located a little out of town on the way to Angkor Wat.... We were thinking of getting a couple of push bikes for when we head off to view Angkor Wat, but after a chat with the Tuk Tuk driver we learn that everything's pretty spread out, so we book him for a Tuk Tuk tour for early tomorrow morning....
We unpack our gear and head off to find something to eat.... It's been a long day doing nothing and we're pooped, we find a lovely restaurant around the corner from our hotel that deserves to be busier than it is.... We eat here before going back to the room for a early night ahead of our busy day tomorrow.