last weekend, i spent 8 hours in the back seat of a ford ranger with three other women, eating sweets, lamenting my numbed limbs, and watching my life flash before my eyes... i think it may have been my last southeast asian road trip.
don't get me wrong, it was a nice trip, and a lovely invitation on the part of my khmer teacher. the company was fantastic, and i'm happy to have seen sihanoukville, cambodia's premier beach destination, and from what i understand, its seediest, most crime-ridden city. i can't say i was all that impressed with the beach itself (this is what happens when you live in australia - you become a beach snob), but it was a fine place to relax for a few hours.
it's just that the destination hardly justified the trip... i don't know if you processed this when i mentioned it above, but i was sharing the back seat of a ford ranger with three other women. AND! i was riding bitch. sharing it, actually, with my new friend, mai. i couldn't feel my backside after 15 minutes. it didn't matter really, as we were all happily noshing on rambutan and mangosteen, two super sweet, crazy delicious seasian fruits. about an hour or so in, we stopped at a cambodian truck stop for coffee with sweetened condensed milk. i didn't really want any, but desperately wanting to feel my feet again, i went with. and i took some in the end, since i'm crap at asserting myself with asian women. it's a strange phenomenon - they tell me i need something, and i immediately acquiesce. i wisely declined any ice in mine, however, as i've read that while the water in phnom penh is award-winningly safe, such is definitely not the case outside the city limits. but i realized that without ice, which cuts the milk as it melts, i couldn't finish it. too bloody sweet. so i ended up holding it in my lap for the next hour, until we stopped for more fruit and i could sneak out and dump it. but just as i'd rid myself of the coffee, they stuck a piece of candied pineapple in my hand: "yes, eat it, older sister." i don't normally consume this much sugar in a week or more! but i took two bites to be polite, wrapped the rest in a napkin, and spent the rest of the trip wondering about diabetes.
mai
well, wondering about diabetes, white knuckling the passenger seat in front of me, and praying i didn't become a road statistic. the national highway between phnom penh and sihanouk is well paved, which meant our driver (and every other driver on the road) could travel at faster speeds. the speed poses a problem only because it's a two-lane highway serving motorbikes, tuk-tuks, dogs, pedestrians, "vip" buses, mini-buses, trucks, both big and small, cows, and fancy new cars driven by men who may or may not have been drinking beer at lunch, and if our driver can be taken as an example, who are checking their text messages and listening to their ipods while driving. and the cambodians, not unlike the vietnamese, drive like maniacs. i stopped counting the number of times we played chicken with an oncoming car (to say nothing of the poor motorbikes) shortly after leaving the city. we were, ourselves, run onto the shoulder two or three times as others misjudged the distance needed to pass slower moving vehicle. there aren't many statistics on road accidents available here, but one asian news source i found quotes 1,591 deaths recorded between january and october, 2012.
with all the cars here now, and the relative lack of driver education or traffic laws (by my count, 1 in 10 motorbikes is driving without headlights at night, and no one seems to care), it's just not worth it to me anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment