There must be some law in Cambodia about how early in the morning buses are to leave.
Also we had the fun of piling our baggage up high on some tuk-tuks and biding the tuk-tuks off to the bus station, which was only 500m away from our hotel, but why carry your bags if you don’t have to, particularly if the guide pays for the baggage transport. That is to say, Intrepid paid for the baggage transport after we paid them, so we’d already paid for it.
But at least they don’t mind coming to get you from your hotel on the way to the station. We had been in Kampong Cham for about 20 hours and spent maybe 8 of those asleep, but just the same I’d be happy to come back and hang out on a tobacco farm getting counting lessons from kids any day. And there’s more stuff to do around Kampong Cham that we didn’t get anywhere near; obviously there’d be some temples around the place somewhere to look at and further up the river there are a breed of fresh water dolphins that just go back and forth along the Mekong like gypsies.
So anyway there we were on another bus, reasonably comfortable one, though, when it comes to that, except that the air conditioning was set to arctic again. This makes it difficult to get to sleep. It makes it difficult to be anything other than rigidly alert. But when your guide speaks Khmer and can ask them to turn it off for a bit this isn’t so much of a problem. Due to the vagaries of roads we had to go back to Phnom Penh first, which was fine, except that we had to change buses there, and have a lunchbreak in the middle, so we wouldn’t be getting to Kampot until after 6pm. Maybe even 7pm, said Nak, because the road to Kampot can be very bumpy.
There must also be some laws about buses stopping at roadside spots, because again, just about half way along, we pulled up with some other buses going in our direction or in the opposite one, and first thing off the bus is that the 12-year old girl selling pineapple and things like that decides that a good sales technique would be to grab men by the arm and say ‘Oh this one is my boyfriend, you want pineapple?’ Luckily there was no one from World Vision or UNICEF watching, so I managed to avoid what would have been a rather inconvenient jail term.
So we had a nice running joke going where this girl’s friend then goes and grabs Jamie by the arm and says ‘Well this is my boyfriend’, and he then with typical British correctness says ‘I think I might be a bit old for you. How old are you? You’re 11. Yes, sorry, I am a bit old for you, sorry.’ At the roadside stop interested persons could once again avail themselves of fried tarantula (I don’t think it was battered or anything), and so a couple of interested persons decided that they would actually try it again just to make sure they didn’t like it.
Back on the bus I guess we must have either watched the wheels go round or perhaps gone to sleep for a bit; eventually we came across the huge concrete bridge that spans the Tonle Sap river. Not much later we were putting our bags into a luggage storage area at Phnom Penh station which didn’t have nearly enough space for this amount of luggage, so it just went in a pile in front of the counter. No surprise, really, as the bus station is really more like a carpark with an awning next to it. But a lot of buses do come and go. Near the bus station is the Central Market and the accompanying concrete/glass/modern shopping centre, which has a food court which is perfect for lunch for tourists.
I had my usual fried rice with vegetables and a fresh whole coconut with a straw stuck in the top of it, and then we zipped downstairs to transfer some cash at the internet cafe and then find an ATM to withdraw that cash down on the corner. All in time to be back at the bus station at 12.30 for our next bus. But that bus wasn’t leaving until 1.15pm so we ended up waiting around a little while. Along the edges of the plastic awning at Phnom Penh station some clever person has installed water spray jets, to dispense a cooling mist onto the ticket holders waiting patiently on lines of concrete benches. I made a mental note to avoid any possible means of inhaling or otherwise ingesting this mist, although no one at the station seemed to be coughing or have any noticeable black pustules on their bodies. But they typically grow in the armpits, don’t they?
On the bus I retrieved the Angkor Wat book and spent most of the afternoon reading through bits and pieces of that, remembering what it all looked like, picking up some details about the mythology that I had obviously missed while taking photos instead of listening to Nak, and Alice went back to sleep for a bit. Just before 4pm we stopped at the obligatory restaurant/car park type thing and invested in mangoes. It was just as well we stopped too, because my eyeballs were starting to float.
We switched seats for the afternoon shift and I continued reading while Alice had a good time poking the video camera out the bus window or taking pictures at random intervals, seeing as any concerted effort to get a photo from a moving bus had been proving ineffective for more or less the entire duration of our trip thus far. As we got closer to Kampot we saw that thing which is rather rare in Cambodia; mountains. The wide flat green rice fields now had something behind the coconut and palm trees poking up out of them.
In those mountains, somewhere, is the Bokor Hill station, which was a French colonial outpost but is now pretty much abandoned. Previous Intrepid itineraries have included a stopover at Bokor but the news is that the road is not in good enough condition. You can’t get up there. But you can wonder about how mystical it must be, in the fog and whatever, and you can also have a little giggle about the paragraph in the Intrepid booklet which explains that during the civil war before the Khmer Rouge took over, some of the old buildings were damaged. What’s funny about it is that most of the battle took place with the government soldiers holed up in the church while the Khmer Rouge based themselves in the casino.
After 5pm the long-awaited bumpy road came to pass, and we spent something like an hour nurdling up and down at about 20km an hour, over some small hills that looked like they should be on a ski course instead of a road. A couple of times the bus scraped over the top of a bump, but you get that with the big jobs. The sun wandered off to do other things and we rolled on into Kampot, with a majestic sunset happening out the left window of the bus. At the Kampot guesthouse we reconstituted our luggage and got shuffled off to various different rooms, in which we were amazed to discover, yet again, the presence of wireless internet. Cue frenzied uploading of photographs onto our website. At 7pm we went into the restaurant of the hotel, which just like in Siem Reap was housed in some open-air open-sided tropical huts, and just like in Seam Reap we waited a fair while for various parts of everybody’s dinners to arrive, and we invested in a bottle of wine and played cards for quite some time.
Greg
