Cambodia Diaries - 6 March 2010

Planes, trains and automobiles

In my view, you can tell an awful lot about a country by the way it conveys its people from A to B.  For example:

Germany – Wonderfully efficient, highly technical but if you were looking for faults, maybe a bit dour. Unless you are doing 180kph on an autobahn!

Japan – Makes Germany look amateurish with meticulous attention to detail and staffed by people zealous in ensuring their customer’s satisfaction.

France – Extremely fast and even stylish in parts but prone to tantrums and not giving a crap.

India – Mass chaos in harmonious movement.

Britain – The template upon which the rest of the world has now passed us by. It does work despite our moaning and the high charges. However, when it does go wrong, a plan B like passenger updates, are non-existent.

America – Hummer!

If this hunch is correct, then what of Cambodia? Well first off I may well be somewhat harsh on my American cousins. Whilst sat having a cuppa in a café overlooking my former running track on Hun Sen Park a few months back, I read in a newspaper that President Obama’s plans to regenerate the US rail network and having once sat on a train outside Houston for 8 hours without moving an inch, regenerating is one of the many words I could offer him.

But the irony of this moment was below me at street level, where 4x4 land cruiser vehicles, mainly with the word Lexus sprawled along the side of the vehicle and which are now de rigueur in Cambodia, regularly paraded past me.  In fact, on the day I left PP to start the long schlep to NYC, I counted four Hummers on the PP roads between my home and the airport - a journey of approximately 7 miles/11 kilometers.  On my first full day driving around Los Angeles, I went several hours before the city of angels managed to catch up with the city of the old lady on the hill in the Hummer stakes. (Especially ironic now that the Hummer’s demise is on the horizon).

Since I first came here in January 2006, the sheer number of these fuel guzzlers occupying the PP roads is nothing short of staggering and the changes in ‘road culture’ are almost seismic. The cyclo once the mainstay of transportation round these here parts is in such decline that now you will only see them used by older Cambodians and tourists. I’d say cyclo drivers are peddling on borrowed time and in another 10 years, Darwin’s theories on the survival of the fittest will see them consigned to history.

In fact in the vehicle equivalent of the food-chain that is the Cambodian road jungle, there is a pecking order of sorts and up until a few weeks ago, if you had asked me what the rules of engagement were, then I would have replied that the Cambodian Highway Code would be the thinnest book ever and even then, with only two rules that I could fathom.

• Big and by that I mean size and expense of the vehicle determines the right of way and,
• It is your job to ensure that I do not hit you! (Yes, you read it right)

However, there is indeed a law encapsulating the rules of the road, I am just not sure any of us have read it.

At that the bottom of the chain are us pedestrians who even the cyclo riders look down upon. PP is not a walking city with pavements often littered with 4x4 vehicles which means that you have to spend most of your time dodging between pavement-road-pavement. Not that the pavement is the sole sanctum of us pedestrians, with all that area for a handful of people to walk on and the roads being chocker-block, motorbikes and even cars if they can manage it, will regularly use the pavements and by ‘use’ I mean they will happily go against the grain of the traffic, pedestrian and internal combustion engine alike, to gain an inch and invariably get stuck a few yards on.

Despite the growth of the car, motorbikes currently remain the most popular form of transportation. Either privately owned or on the motodop which will carry as many on the back, front or even hanging off a motorbike if it can be done. It also doubles as a freighter and some sights defy the laws of physics as the bike is piled high and wide with goods.

The motodop in all its glory

2009 saw a real push to get people to wear crash helmets and one year on that policy has not been the unequivocal success that you would have hoped for and even those that do put something on their heads can’t quite bring themselves to tie the straps up.  Similarly, moves to make wing mirrors mandatory have met with a mixed response.  It is not uncommon to see the mirror itself pointing inward to afford the rider that all important look at their shirts or even for the mirrors to point down at the road.

Cambodia of all the countries I have been to, possibly bar the Vatican state, is the only country that does not have any form of publicly run transportation at all! Legend has it that when moves were made to start a bus company in PP, the locals were having none of that walk to a bus stop, standing around only to then find that when they got off the thing, they were not directly outside where they were going to.  Not when you can just sit on a motodop from quite literally, door to door.

My preferred mode of transportation is the tuk-tuk (a bike pulling a carriage), itself under threat from a rake of minicabs now prevalent in PP.  Spacious with aircon free depending on how fast you driver goes; it is the modern day equivalent of the sedan chair. My preferred tuk-tuk driver #1, Mr Seenar, is a reliable fellow and if sleeping were an Olympic event, he’d be a global phenomenon. His selling point is his safety, unparalled in this town as evidenced by the fact, that he does not jump lights and has a decidedly un-Khmer attitude to driving on his side of the road.

Another hard day at the office for Mr Seenar!

The price of safety is paid in slowness of motion. On one occasion I asked “Any chance of speeding up Mr Seenar?” as a middle aged woman on a bicycle overtook us. At which point he shot me the look from his wing mirror!

The ‘look’ like an elephant is hard to describe, but you will know it when you see one.  It often appears when a person is cut up on the roads and is thus commonplace.  It’s a glance of such contempt from which the person recoils from with another look of utter indifference as if to say, you’re not worth it…and which shoots you dead on the spot.    

The last remnants of the rail system died out last year when the PP to Battembang chugger ceased rolling. But a recent report has indicated that there are moves to reignite the system with some investment, all from overseas of course.  Strangely it could not attract enough customers prepared to endure the often 24 hours required to cover the 280kms distance. I guess the real nail in the coffin was the fact that the train only departed PP on Saturday mornings and left sometime on the Sunday for the return trip home.  The track does still get used however; some enterprising folks use the old hand-push carts to go up and down the track, only stopping when another cart is coming in the opposite direction whereupon one slows down, everyone dismounts to lift the cart off the track to allow the other to pass before resetting themselves and going on their way again.

To get around the country you can go by coach which fly along the road in a flurry of dust and air horns alerting all and sundry. You can if you like take a private taxi, as long as your interpretation of the word ‘taxi’ and ‘private’ included sharing it with anything up to seven other hardy souls, not including the driver. Much to my chagrin at not having my camera with me last week, such a taxi flew past me with an old lady sat quite comfortably in the boot with the lid up…not a care in the world and a lot more space then the poor sods inside.

Plenty of room on top

In fact, loading up bikes, cars, trucks and anything else is the name of the game, as is the inability to mirror, signal and maneuver. When you are ready to go, just pull out and let the rest of the road users on the King’s highway worry about it.  As I often say, “These people just do not see the dangers we do!” as another car hurtles up to you on the wrong side of the road with the driver dealing with the Nokia in the non-steering hand.

In the land of the left hand turn from the right hand lane the culture of sticking to your own lane is a relaxed one.  Thus far I have only witnessed once, a local actually indicating thanks when you have pulled in to let them and their 4x4 go past you.  And yet bizarrely if you’re on the main roads out of PP, the culture of the vehicle in front indicating to the cars behind when it ok to overtake or if there is a tricky bend coming up, exists.

The military police doubling up as traffic cops

But after a while you remove your hands from your face and find that amongst the chaotic nature of the road system and the big bully tactics of the 4x4s, somehow it manages to operate. For example, you get the hang of the fact that when you come to a roundabout, just carry on because those actually going round it at the time are the ones obliged to stop.

How, it works I just don’t know. Those sights that once held you spellbound now just don’t even register as anything other then normal. Occasionally  when an over laden lorry goes past you at great speed with a dozen people sat on the top, you wonder ‘what if’, but they all seem pretty relaxed with it.

Road traffic accidents have long since surpassed landmines as the biggest cause of death and injury in Cambodia.  The problem I feel is that not too long ago, Cambodians were mainly on push bikes and within a very short space of time, they have gone from ambling along at their own speed to flying along in vehicles often too big and powerful for the roads and sometimes their abilities.

But whereas the rest of the world is moving to more economically viable and eco-friendly vehicles, here that is the opposite. The love of the 4x4 is unbridled (as is the near Cambodian obsession with car washing) and the desire to own such a thing foremost in the minds of many.  It is not uncommon to be stuck in a place because with no one giving an inch, you become gridlocked and as you see PP develop, you can see where the bottlenecks are going to come and maybe this is an analogy for Cambodia’s future as well.

Sometimes, it just drives you quackers!

Cheers

JH