May 10, 2011.
Well, you'll forgive the gap between my blogs - though I should say that I have been exceptionally busy, while Sander's lack of blogging is surely due to insatiable laziness. Or is it the other way around?
Having meant to spend 5 days in Phnom Penh, I can only smile and shrug when I tell you I spent two weeks there. Who could be surprised, with Ben as my host and an inexhaustible number of things to do, including my ultimate mission: buy the tuk-tuk. After shopping around for the perfect tuk-tuk, using Ben's contacts and friends of the OMB family, it occurred to me that if we did manage to (somehow) get a tuk-tuk across the Cambodia-Vietnamese border, neither Sander nor I was able to ride a motorbike big enough to pull it. Scooting about on a Vespa only qualifies one to wear a billowing white scarf and stylish sunglasses ... not to haul a metal cart filled with passengers. But! ... if Cambodia, with it's overladen trucks, swerving motodups, relentless potholes, and meandering road animals isn't the perfect place to learn, I don't know where is. How hard could it be? Plus, I had a good teacha'; one who had only been in ONE serious moto-related accident at the time this blog went to press. I vowed to be the only white person in SE Asia without a festering pipe burn on the inside if their right leg and set to it with Ben, my qualified teacha'. Thankfully, I had gotten most if my clutch-related swearing fits out if the way when Dad taught me to drive a manual car at home years ago, which made Ben's only job patience, not crowd control. On what could loosely be called a 'country road' outside Phnom Penh, Ben's fingers bruised my ribs while I worked to speed and we rode towards a fantastic looking storm cloud at the end of the highway. If I had had an internet connection when we pulled off the highway, with heavy tropical downpour only seconds away, I would have bought a big bike on eBay and had it shipped home immediately. I would buy an much cooler helmet to be sure, but riding a big bike is fantastic. We relaxed under a leaky canopy with some cool, albeit disgusting 'fruit' juice, while the street flooded. Seriously, it took me 10 minutes to put my finger on it, but this 'juice' tasted exactly like the milk left at the bottom of a bowl of Frosted Flakes. Having come from a house where we went through 4L of milk in a couple days because of the unholiness of cereal-contaminated milk, this says a lot. As suddenly as it started, the pouring rain abruptly stopped and the streets drained as quickly as they had filled. Ben drove us home, through Phnom Penh's mentally exhausting city traffic, where I promptly emailed my mom telling her what I had done and that it had ended safely all at once, thus avoiding any unnecessary maternal panic. Feeling like a master of the 250cc domain, I felt ready to explore the options for the border crossing. We planned a long weekend trip to the border, a simple task since May is Cambodia's month of public holidays, including but not limited to: the Kings birthday weekend, a couple Buddha days, and National Plough Day. I spent the week exploring Phnom Penh on foot, taking several amazing and memorable strolls, and adding some finishing touches to Ben's ever-changing bachelor flat. With his lady arriving within the next week, someone would have to clean the damn place, as well. The long weekend finally arrived and we headed to a small town near the border by the awesomely air-conditioned Cambodian bus fleet. To make a disappointing story simple, we discovered quickly that the only way to have a Khmer person take the tuk-tuk across was to register it to their name at the border, thus creating a world of problems for Sander and I, with a pile of mismatched ownership and registration paperwork. Deciding that two white people driving a tuk-tuk might attract more than a little attention from local law enforcement pretty much everywhere in Vietnam, I crossed this idea off the list. The only way it could be done would be to purchase the tuk-tuk and the bike (which by itself would have been difficult to get past officials), and head to the border with a pocket full of cash. But how much would they ask for? Needing to run the idea by Sander - the options being to give the unknown amount of cash to Vietnamese border officials on arrival or head to a different continent - we left the border area and tried to figure out what to do with ourselves for the rest of the King's birthday weekend. Having already left Phnom Penh, we decided to hit the beach and enjoy everything it had to offer: awesome rooms, cheap beer, and (for me) pounds and pounds of fresh mangoes from my 'fruit lady' (who made me pinky-swear that I would buy my mangoes from her, and her alone). No problem, fruit lady, you bring 'em ... I'll eat 'em.
To succinctly summarize the rest of my stay in Cambodia would be impossible. Like being anywhere familiar, you manage to accomplish so many things that are, especially in retrospect, difficult to describe since the time just seems to escape while you're busy enjoying it. Though my mission had failed: Sander and I will be excluding the Vietnamese tuk-tuk journey from this year's travel adventure, I merely blinked and more quickly than I had wanted, it was time to put my backpack back on. Plus, without me and my wily woman's intuition and knowledge of first aid, Sander was probably out of food and trapped at the bottom of a crevasse with both legs stuck in a bear's den.
Slaughter.
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