Most people in the know, unless they are seeking a spiritual awakening, will not try attempting the seemingly impossible overland trip from Sihanoukville Cambodia to Bangkok Thailand in the rainy season. They will instead take the speed boat, lovingly named the vomit comet, on lumpy days, as it is faster and usually allot less adventurous. The boat would be my choice of travel, but with a relatively small category 5 typhoon battering central Vietnam, I had to do it to make to a scheduled flight out of Bangkok's new Suvarnabhumi Airport. Typhoons generally create a double whammy as the rivers were sure to rise, and I might be forced to backtrack to Phnom Penh and fly to Bangkok.
This trip started with great promise, with the sun shinning, and only one special couple arriving 15 minutes late. I felt maybe the travel spirits were on our side, with a large smile on my face all the way to the Sihanoukville city limit, where all the drivers were sitting on the side of the road pointing at our van and laughing uproariously. A short few minutes later, I noticed a passing driver franticly signaling for us to pull over, to discover our best bald tire was flat all ready!
As the trip had started so early, and being an industrious traveler, I decided to get some breakfast, and sought out a convenient roadside eatery, located only 10 meters from the van. I ordered some coffee, didn't have, so instead I got the special, rice soup, which just by coincidence, luckily for me, was the only thing on the menu. I started shoveling furiously to beat our F1 pit crew in training. Being the optimistic sort, I was hoping that I was in for a long ride before the next stop; I sought out the restroom of this fine roadside attraction, which was a truly natural wonder, a sapling in a swampy bog located next to a full pig pen, with the inhabitants happily grunting their raucous approval for my efforts. No doubt the pit vipers and poisonous spiders dripping from the trees were enjoying the show as well. No problem here with long lines waiting for the girls hanging out fussing with their makeup.
Off we go again, with no time or tire to spare, turning off the paved road and into the great behind. The road starts off in fairly good shape, with only a few potholes for the first 10 meters or so, and then we start to hit the rough stuff. Apparently our van has done the trip before, as the parts underneath keep on falling out of the makeshift braces that they have to hold them on. So we make frequent stops to apply a mixture of bailing wire and witchcraft to keep rolling down the road.
We make our first river crossings on homemade ferry contraptions that would bring a sentimental tear to the eye of any mad scientist, that shuttle back and forth across the brown goop. The scenery was so spectacular, that one of our passengers swooned, and slammed her head into the floor with a bass drum like thud. The girl laying there with her eyes glazed over was immediately set upon by her boyfriend who starts French kissing her, and some sex pat joins in as well, and starts having cheap sex with her breasts in a parody of CPR. I being trained in this sort of thing, observed that she was breathing, and commented that they should consider either stopping before they caused her chest to explode or implode from their ministrations, or get a hotel room, as they were embarrassing the locals, who are not very accustomed to the strange western customs of group orgies in public, on their ferries, in the middle of the day, but you could see some interest in this activity from the teenage boys, who were all ready queuing up, money and chickens in hand.
Over the river and through the woods, and into the troughs we go! Where our first spa treatments begin, where we, the paying passengers, get a first class mud bath pushing our very stuck van backwards and forwards, with various colored mud's and rocks flying everywhere. After only 10 minutes we get the van slewing in the correct direction. Like a mobile 2nd Woodstock, for the next 4 hours we get variations on a theme, we get stuck on hills going up, stuck on hills going down, we get stuck going around cars and vans all ready stuck, and stuck going around construction crews making the mud pits ever deeper, in a serious attempt to make the Guinness Book of World Records again, for largest manmade quagmire!
Amazingly only 3 hours later than what we were told, we arrive at the border looking like extras from a remake gone terribly wrong of Lord of the Flies. The Thai customs guys pointing at us, their version of the 4 o'clock follies, and burst into the very same laughs that we started our trip with. You have to love the value of the laughter on a Cambodian adventure like this, or you might want to take a cheap flight instead.
Fred Tittle has lived and worked in holiday vacation resorts his entire life, from the famous Lake Geneva Playboy Club in South East Wisconsin. Aspen Colorado where he was a rock jock for KSPN FM. Waikiki on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, where he learned to scuba dive and drive big motorcycles too fast, and now as a owner of EcoSea Dive in Sihanoukville Cambodia where he teaches PADI and SSI Scuba Diving and runs adventure tours. Fred's new project www.CheapCharliesHotels.com basically an excuse to travel Asia more with his lawyers. His website is www.ecosea.com.
