Ok, here's the other one:

A Slight Delay: Crossing Cambodia in a Day.


"You wait 5 minutes", said the driver of our van, motioning for us to get out and stretch our legs. "But we've only just started driving?!", we muttered to one another as we carefully extracted ourselves from our sardine can on wheels. We were twenty minutes into our journey, not even at the edge of town yet, and our two teenage drivers had pulled us into a small Auto-Repair shop at the side of the road. As we stretched our legs, a man in overalls proceeded to remove various parts of the engine and hit them with a hammer and a scewdriver while all of the other local men squatted around and watched, smoking cigarettes and offering the occasional piece of technical wisdom. We asked what was going on and how long this was going to take, but the driver just shrugged us off before going back to watching the "mechanic" attacking the engine parts with a drill. I started to get the feeling this was going to be a rather long journey...

We had set off early that morning from the town of Sihanoukville on the south coast of Cambodia, deciding, after much deliberation, to take the overland bus option instead of the boat. We chose this option mainly because it set off two hours earlier and claimed to arrive at the thai border one hour before the boat. I was travelling in Cambodia with my (now ex) girlfriend, Selene, and two of her friends, Teresa and Ben. After nearly two weeks of exploring Ankor Wat and Pnom Phen, we had finally ended up at the beaches on the south coast, and left it rather late to get back to catch our flight home from Bangkok. We had to get to the thai border before 5pm, when it closed for the day, in order to get the night bus to Bangkok, and catch our flight the following day. We had studied the map, and it really didn't seem that far, so we were feeling fairly confident. Well, for the first 20 mins of the journey anyway...

After an hour of "stretching our legs" we went back to our drivers in the auto-repair shop, who were still busy dismantling our vehicle, and asked them once again when we would be leaving. One of them managed to tear himself away from the hammering and drilling long enough to say, "Maybe one hour more". Another hour?? This was ridiculous! We weren't even outside of the town limits yet and we had already wasted potentially 2 hours "fixing" a vehicle which they obviously already knew was broken when they'd picked us up! But what could we do? Well, nothing, obviously, so we went and had some suspicious looking fried rice from a dusty little food stall and waited...

After three hours, the drivers had decided that the van couldn't be fixed by hitting the various engine parts, and replaced them all back under the bonnet. So, the van was still broken (it kept jumping from 4th to 3rd gear whenever we picked up any speed), but at least we were moving again! For a while. We countinued driving into the middle of nowhere and gradually the "dust road" became a "mud track", which eventually became just "mud with tracks in it". Then we came to our first river crossing. Four fishing boats had been tied together and covered in planks to create a makeshift car-ferry, and after another long wait we boarded along with a few other vehicles. The other vehicles were all pick up trucks and apperared to belong to a wealthy family (in Cambodian terms this means someone who can afford new trainers for their children), who had filled the backs of the trucks with security guards wielding AK 47's. We all felt rather uncomfortable with all those guns around, and were glad when the ferry finally started to move.

Upon reaching the other side, we jumped ashore and waited for our van. All the other cars drove off up the dusty road, but our van remained unmoved. We had a flat battery! A few men started to gather round the van and attempted to "squat start" it. This involves getting a group of men to squat around the van and argue about the problem until it solves itself, and is not dissimilar to the method used in the auto-repair shop, although it involves less hammering and drilling. After thirty minutes of failed squat start attempts, a rather sizable queue of cars had built up trying to get back across the river in the opposite direction. Horns were being liberally applied to the situation in an attempt to get it moving, and eventually our group of squatting men decided to push the van out of the way. After another half an hour, to everyones surprise, the squat starting was actually sucessful and we were moving once more.

We managed two more boat ferry crossings without too much fuss, and apart from the usual 'sliding through mud next to thousand foot drops', the journey seemed to have taken a turn for the better. We were 30 mins from the border town of Ko Kong, and we had 1 hour until the border closed. It was starting to seem like we might make it after all! As we reached the bottom of yet another winding mountain mud-slide, we were amazed to see stretching out before us the biggest, widest, flattest stretch of "road" we had seen in Cambodia so far! We were saved! Finally the gods had smiled on us, and we all sat back to relax as the van enthusiastically took advantage of the level terrain in front of it and picked up speed. Then, without any warning, the van turned off the main road at high speed, careering onto a tiny mud track, and drove, or more to the point "dove", straight into a muddy puddle about 2 feet deep. The wheels spun, water sprayed, but the van wasn't going anywhere. The rear wheels weren't even touching the ground. We were screwed. The driver, who was about 19 and not exactly the brightest of men, continued to rev the engine and spin the wheels in the hope that this approach might suddenly work. I dont know, perhaps he thought if he spun the wheels for long enough he'd actually empty the puddle and we could drive away. Anyhow, we all got out and the squatting technique was employed once more. The local village, obviously very amused by the whole affair, came and joined the squatting. You'd think with this much squatting power it would be easy to move the van, but for some reason it just wasn't working. I tried suggesting we convert all the "squatting power" into "pushing power", but my suggestion was greeted with laughs and cries of "It cant be done!", so I shut my mouth.

Then our drivers came up with the wonderfully bad idea of trying to jack the van up by placing a small, hydraulic jack, underwater, in the soft mud. I tried to explain why this wouldn't work, but they continued anyway, convinced that by holding the jack under the opaque brown water and pumping vigourously, eventually something would happen. In fact, nothing happened. The jack didn't even extend, let alone lift the van! After about half an hour of watching the drivers try the jack in every angle concievable, it became apparant that the reason the villagers weren't helping us push the van was that we weren't paying them, and that the reason we weren't paying them was because the drivers were trying to save money. A little gentle persuasion was used and they finally relented, and after a bit of baragaining between our drivers and the villagers, finally the squatting men stood.

With everyone lifting and pushing, it didn't take long to get the van back on the road once more. This time we managed to move for about 2 minutes before coming to the next ferry crossing.

The ferry was undergoing repairs, and a guy wearing a welder's mask seemed to be trying to cut it in two. We asked him when the ferry would leave. "When I’ve finished this", he replied. "When will that be?", we asked. He answered with a shrug, flicked down his mask, and dissapeared behind a fountain of blue sparks. Accepting that we had missed the border, I bought a beer and a banana from a sweet old lady with a toothy grin, and sat down at the side of the road with all the other waiting people. After all, this was Cambodia, not Camden. Who was I to say things should run faster or smoother? Was I about to make a difference? No. So, having resigned ourselves to missing the border, and subsequently our flight home, we were finally able to relax and just enjoy the situation for what it was: a fantastic chance to experience a pace of life that was still dictated, not by timetables and deadlines, but by the number of delays you encountered.