Taro's Travels

A Minor Alignment of Patterns...

So I check out of my hotel, dump my bag next door (where I'll be picked up for the overnighter to Pakse), and walk up the street... and there's Jim, who's in town for a day before heading over the bridge to Thailand to meet a friend from Bangkok. 20 seconds later and I would have missed him. He mentioned that when he makes it down to Cambodia he'd be taking the recently-opened border crossing from Chong Jom, Thailand, to O Smach, Cambodia. I looked at his map (he has a more recent Shoestring Guide than I). The route would shave at least a day off the trip - it was hundreds of kilometres shorter to Angkor Wat, and required far less backtracking. Later I studied my Cambodia guide... and the route is listed in there.

To Pakse

There are little mysteries that crop up while travelling. For example, were the pair who didn't return when we stopped at 1am at Tha Khaek meant to (the bus crew ran around frantically trying to find them)? And was the guy seated behind me really watching porn on his PDA (it certainly sounded like it)? I sat next to near-Parisian Yann, who had decided not to even stay the night in Vientiane. He'd been travelling for a couple of months, having spent about five weeks in (mostly northern) India, and will eventually make it to Australia, for an extended stay with relatives in Normanhurst and Gunnedah. At 06:00 we egressed.

The Three-Country Day

I'm making more snap decisions than I normally would - using the O Smach route and thus skipping Si Phan Don, the 4000 islands of Southern Laos, for instance. My thought was that I'd stop in Pakse for a day and then leave the next, but it was a small town and though there were pre-Ankor Wat ruins, I have a week of Ankor Wat. In about a second after being asked by a tuktuk driver where I was going, therefore, I decided that I'd get as far as I could that day and replied "Vang Tao". He drove me to the bus station where an 08:30 bus took me through border towns Vang Tao (Laos) and Chong Mek (Thailand), and all the way to Ubon Ratchathani. From there another bus took me eastwards to Surin, home of the "elephant roundup".

In Surin there are (and I'll quote my Shoestring Guide here) "elephant races, fights, tugs-of-war and anything else you can think of to do with a hundred elephants. If you've ever had an urge to see a lot of elephants at one time, this is a chance to get it out of your system". While I believe that Bronson will soon be announcing a late-November trip to Thailand, I didn't feel like waiting there for four months, so a minute after arriving I was on an overcrowded minibus to Chong Jom. Two hours later I crossed the Cambodian border. It was around 17:30 and I was the only backpacker there.

Vientiane to Pakse: Trees in shadow, stars overhead through window reflections, sheet lightning on the distant horizon, oncoming headlights, wooden houses with their outside workareas lit harshly by fluorescent energy saver globes, flooded paddocks at dawn.

Pakse: A sleepy town, which was reasonable as sensible people were asleep. Even the reasonably-large market adjacent to the bus station was only starting to get set up by the time the bus left.

Pakse to Ubon Ratchathani: Flooded paddocks in morning light, flooded paddies in morning light, water buffalo and cows, stilt picnic huts on a lake.

Ubon Ratchathani to Surin: Flooded paddocks in morning light, Milla Jovovitch, flooded paddies in morning light, Milla Jovovitch, water buffalo, Milla Jovovitch, flooded kitchen with zombie monster battering in the door, Milla Jovovitch... Milla Jovovitch.

Surin: In the three minutes I was there, it appeared to be a a town entirely devoid of elephants. Here's a picture of Surin with a picture of no elephants.

Surin to Chong Jom: Ant-like spider trekking back and forth on the window, trees in afternoon shadow, concrete buildings, trees, wooden buildings, trees, passing cars, clouds overhead.

There was an immediate noticeable difference in the landscapes of Cambodia and Thailand. The Thai side had many more trees than the Cambodian one, which hosted a red dirt road far wider than the surfaced one on the Thai side. The road was in remarkably good condition. On either side of this road, conveniently sited to lure as many Thais as possible, was a "resort"; I believe this designation was to be interpreted as "casino plus hotel". It was around 17:30 and I was the only backpacker there. Siem Reap would have to wait until the morning; I could go little further that day. Beyond the checkpoint at the bottom of the slope the dirt road continued over a hill to a dirt-roaded village. Here, at a hefty price, overly-basic accommodation was had. The stop was a productive one, though, since I learnt a little Khmae from Kon, the guesthouse's cleaner. Across the road there was what I initially thought was a bar - what sounded like karaoke, and motorbikes pulling up. It was, apparently, a massage parlour; its workers Vietnamese.

My employer would apparently like to know about "contacts with foreign nationals", which is a big ask for a backpacker on a 14 month tour. In the interests of partial disclosure I should state that in the period covered by this post, I feel thoroughly non-compromised by contact with a foreign national: A fellow passenger in the tuktuk to Pakse's Bus Station was a Cambodian working at the Vientiane embassy - he was going down via the Si Phan Don route, though, so he stayed in the tuktuk when I got out.

To SiEm ReAp By RoAd

I was the only backpacker there this morning, too, but my driver had little trouble in rounding up passengers, mostly to Phnom Penh. The first one picked up was the Chief of Tourist Police for the checkpoint, though having stayed on Khao San Road I was not entirely reassured when he showed me his ID. The trip was listed in my guide as taking five to seven hours. This didn't look promising; it is wet season after all. But, with the driver and I in the front and three adults and a child jammed into the back, we made the trip eastward along a somewhat bumpy dirt road. An hour and a half later we hit surfaced road - we were a kilometre from Anlong Veng, 70km north of Siem Reap. We'll be there in another hour, I thought.

O foolish... stop that.

Anlong Veng used to be the last major stronghold of the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot lived and died here, though it's rumoured that he faked his death. Less than a decade back it was absolutely a no-go zone. It's still a frontier town. The major roads and the border crossings (there's another north of Anlong Veng) major roads to here are only recently bulldozed through. We picked up another passenger there; the driver and I in the front, and four adults and a child jammed into the back.

South of Anlong Vieng, to everyone's disappointment, the surfaced road vanished - we were back on dirt again. This was not the pleasant undulating motorway that the first leg had been. It seemed that a multitude of heavy vehicles used this road. Deep wheelgouges cut into the middle of the muddy track. An abandoned truck listed leftwards in the mire, a tow cable still attached to its front. Potholes, puddles, and patches of sludge made the track treacherous. In some of the worst places boards had been laid; in others a stick in the mud warned drivers away. In drier regions the road felt corrugated.

For the next couple of hours, the car (with the driver and I in the front and four adults and a vomiting child in the back) juddered and weaved - trying to miss the worst of the potholes by hitting smaller ones. We finally hit surfaced road again north of Banteay Srei. The landscape - paddies going back kilometres looked entirely unlike Thailand; probably due to the trees and bushes that grow between the fields. It did, however, look very much like parts of "Vietnam" you see in some war movies - probably because they were filmed in Cambodia and not *cough* Hawaii.

The surfaced road continued as far as Siem Reap, where the car stopped. I egressed and found myself accommodation.