Driving a Car in Cambodia Update

It’s been a couple years since I bored you in the Bayon Pearnik with my long winded tales of car ownership in Cambodia. (I get paid by the word so need to pack them in… actually not true, my articles are nearly always the same length whether or not I’m not receiving compensation.) As a old friend has commented: I was bored silly hearing about your car, but I still read every word.

 
Well, it’s still no fun driving in Cambodia, and especially Phnom Penh. Lately I park the car when I arrive from Kampot and don’t turn the key again until I’m ready to leave about a week later. Negotiating city streets is a manic exercise in staying focused while obstacles that you need to avoid are coming at you from all directions.

 
As I’m approaching fogeyhood and easily distracted, the results can be catastrophic… I’m exaggerating but you know what I mean. For instance, a while back driving very slowly in traffic I took my eyes off the road for a second and - What the hell? – there was a teenager on a bicycle who had come from nowhere to cut me off with inches to spare. As a result of that incident and many other similar ones I forcefully try to discipline myself to concentrate all my mental capacity on the road ahead, and when I’m in the city to drive very slowly.

 
Fortunately I rarely have a reason to drive in the city. It’s not often my life takes me very far from home and so I walk nearly everywhere. Phnom Penh really is the kind of place where that can happen, depending of course, on your location; I pretty much can do 99% of what I need to and 90% of what I want to within a half-hour’s walk from my place by the museum. A half hour hoofing it comes to about 1 1/2 miles or almost 2 kilometers. Spatially the city is excellent for walking; however, the actual act itself is quite nasty: the sidewalks are generally blocked so you are forced to share the street with all manner of vehicles, big and small; some driving very fast and recklessly. But still, it’s exercise and the air isn’t that bad, mostly dust, and obviously it’s cheap. I also generally try to stay on streets like Norodom or by the river where unfettered sidewalks make walking a lot safer and more pleasant.

 
If it’s more than a couple miles – 3 k’s – and I’m not in the mood to walk that far I’ll take a tuk-tuk; I’m obsessively anti-motorbike, so tuk-tuks are my major mode of hired transportation. I once regularly took a cyclo, during peak hour no less, but it feels not much safer than a motorbike. In fact, I once saw a cyclo that was overturned after being hit by a moto. What a mess, it was carrying three people just out of Calmette Hospital, some holding up their infusions and all probably moaning even before they abruptly found themselves splattered on the ground.

 
I’ll probably get behind metered-taxis once there are more of them around, even though I like the idea of riding in a Phnom Penh style three-wheeler more than an air-con taxi. So we’re left with tuk-tuks. My problem there is threefold. For one, I don’t like bargaining or getting ripped off, so I avoid using them. They also aren’t very safe though, of course, a lot better than motorbikes. A motorbike could turn one over if it hit hard enough. Lastly, a few years back, on the way to the airport I was in a tuk-tuk that ran over a guy’s legs. He was a motodop driving too close to a car that made a sudden stop. He was unable to avoid hitting the edge of the car’s bumper and fell into the street right into our path. We were also too close and couldn’t avoid piling on his woes by running right over him; Tuk-tuks aren’t that heavy but he was already hurting, so we didn’t help a bit, and, needless to say, the driver didn’t stop. So when it comes down to it I’d rather be on my feet and in control.

 
Getting back to the car; while in the city it has little value for me, going back and forth to Kampot is a completely different matter. The taxi/minibus stand is near Mao Tse Tung near the Intercontinental and about 4 kilometers from my house, so it’s either an hour’s walk or a $2 to $3 tuk-tuk ride. And once you are there you never know how long it’ll take before your vehicle leaves. I had ridden a minibus once before so I thought I’d try it to Kampot. I got on a bus that was nearly full so I thought it would leave before long. Unfortunately he wasn’t departing until he had a least a few guys riding on top. After about half hour we still hadn’t left and my back was already hurting from sitting all cramped up so I gave up on that one. The minibus costs 10,000 riel.

 
The taxi costs 5 dollars. For that you get all scrunched up two to a front bucket seat or four to the back seat. It’s tolerable but I really don’t like it and besides a lot of those drivers are worse than me on the road, and that’s saying a lot. With highway 3, the direct route to Kampot, all torn up in the process of being reconstructed, it now probably takes 2 1/2 to 3 hours for the trip. When the new highway is finished it’ll be a very fast ride, easily less than two hours for the speedier drivers.

 
The bus also costs five bucks, but in contrast, takes an average of 5 hours; even so I still far prefer it to the taxi. I made the trip about 5 times a month for about 6 months before I got my car. Fastest time clocked was 4 hours 10 minutes, slowest was close to six and a half hours – excruciatingly slow. When I first visited Kampot about five years ago there were no buses on that route, today there are four lines serving the city. One big advantage for me is that the bus stations are a lot closer to my house and so never a problem for walking.

 
However, it still takes time to get there and you often have to go early to get your preferred seat: for me that means just in front of the back wheels for a smooth ride (you never want to be in the back seat) and to stay as far away as possible from the driver and his horn and the TV constantly playing Khmer karaoke. Also I like to be on the shady side of the vehicle so I can look out the window. Since I always take the afternoon bus, that means driver’s side down to KP, passenger side up to PP.

 
There are two reasons why the bus is so slow. One is that they take on and drop off passengers anyplace on the route. If it’s a busy time and the bus is full this happens quite often. Coming into Kampot sometimes the bus will stop 4 or 5 times in the last 500 meters before the bus station (drives me crazy). The main reason though is that the bus takes the long way around on highway 31 which goes through Kampong Trach and then makes a detour to Kep. This adds about 40 kilometers to the trip, compared to the direct route on highway 3. But route 3 has a lot fewer people living along it so running a bus there would not be feasible, a least not yet. If I were going once a month or so I could easily tolerate it, but four or five times becomes a decided and maddening chore.

Until they started tearing up route 3, it was very narrow in places: you could never have a two big vehicles, bus or truck, without one driving mostly on the shoulder. Since I’m able to calculate very closely I know how close I can come. One of those very narrow sections I can just barely stay on the pavement while passing a big truck. But those kinds of situations are always a bit risky. What if there’s a big chunk missing on the side of the road and I’m moving fast to try to get around him? It’s happened many times.

 
Once, while passing a big truck it started to move into my space forcing me half on the road and half on the shoulder, which was quite a bit below the level of the road and I was scraping bottom. I wrecked an oil pan once, a transmission pan another time and more than once damaged my exhaust system. I also  crumpled the panel below the front bumper more than a couple times and regularly gave the suspension a battering.

 
I’m trying to reform; to slow down, relax. It’s not been easy; in fact, I’m reminded of my experience driving a cab in New York in the sixties. When I told friends I was going to drive a taxi they asked me if I would be like the typical crazy driver. No way, I said, I was going to be safe and sane. Well, the safe part lasted about 20 minutes and after that I was challenging the best of them. One time, as I was going about 70mph over one of the East River bridges late at night, I turned around to converse with an especially beautiful woman until she started to scream… I was on the other side of the roadway about to crash into the bridge structure. And there were plenty of near escapes like that one.

 
One reason I thought I could handle driving here in Cambodia is that you can go very slowly and no-one objects. That works in the city for me but not on the road. On the road, you may be stuck behind a row of big lumbering trucks so overloaded they can barely do 25mph - 40 kph -  but you can also see a clear road ahead so you really want to get around the blockage. But there may be motorcycles coming at you or a three wheeler or bicycles or pedestrians or cows. There could be an ox driven cart, hand cart or remarque – a long wooden trailer pulled by a 150cc motorbike. There could be one cylinder diesel tractors or slow moving homemade trucks, not to mention all manner of pickups, cars, buses and trucks. Everybody nonchalantly going at their own pace. You can have cows rushing out into the road, seemingly from nowhere, motorbikes that move into your lane to avoid some obstacle hidden to you without looking, or not caring if they do look, motorbikes that cut you off while turning onto the road without checking if anybody is coming: once a cop got nearly creamed after such a maneuver.

 
The contrast to driving in America is stark. There you stay in your lane, keep a safe distance and watch for brake lights. If you are on a two-lane highway you don’t pass unless you have a very clear road ahead, partly because everyone is driving fast so you have a lot less leeway and partly that if you came as close as you do here you’d scare the shit out of drivers coming at you.

 
Here being stuck behind a vehicle crawling along drives me to take a lot of chances, which on rare occasions, means forcing motorbikes and occasionally larger vehicles off the road. If I was on a motorbike with drivers coming as close to me as I come to them, I’d freak, I couldn’t handle it. Sometimes wanting to pass I see a slow moving vehicle coming and move out knowing I have lots of space, but then somebody heading in my direction had the same idea. Braking and getting back in your lane can be tricky at times so I usually floor it, leading to deft maneuvers and lots of close calls, not to mention some freaked out drivers, most are used to it and handle it easily.

 
Though I’m a good driver and confident of my actions, I’m often too close for real comfort. The definition of the word accident is an unpleasant event that happens unexpectedly and causes damage. No matter how good you are, you never know what the other driver will do. The faster you go, the less able you are to correct for the wayward actions of others.

 
Recently I gave a ride to friends for the second time. I mentioned that I was being a lot more cautious; She said she had been looking forward to an exciting ride.

 
I’ve discovered that I can chill if I smoke a little green stuff before I depart: I just feel calm and relaxed and totally unconcerned about the extra ten or fifteen minutes the trip takes. And less tense when I arrive.

 
To be continued.