Wednesday, June 7: The Bridge and an Arduous Journey

Hello from Cambodia! We’ve been moving around constantly over the past two days, but now we are here in Siem Reap, the base camp for Cambodia’s famous Angkor temples built during the Khmer Empire. Getting here was quite the journey, with lots of stories to tell!
First, on Monday we rented a taxicab for the day to get out of the city and visit Kanchanaburi. Our driver was great, buying us little Thai snacks all along the way—deep fried plantains, peanuts roasted in oils, and even the miniature glass bottles of Red Bull that are popular here. Katelyn, we thought of you! Our driver made big muscles and said “Red Bull, mmm, make you big and strong.” You should put him in a commercial or something!
I think it’s easy to forget about most of the Pacific Theatre of War in the US, where the European front gets a lot more attention, but Thailand was the site of Japanese occupation through the entire war. Japan had dreams as ambitious as Germany to rule all of Asia with a vast new empire. To facilitate their control, they decided to construct the Thai-Burma Railway connecting the two countries. There was an endless supply of labor with hundreds of thousands of POWs, and they were all promptly put to work. The labor was brutal, with thousands dying. The biggest victims were the conscripted Chinese and Asian forces, but the British and Australians suffered heavily as well. There is a POW cemetery here, immaculately maintained and featuring thousands of graves marked by simple headstones, as well as a nice museum.
After learning all about the bridge, we were able to walk over the bridge and hike awhile on the railway. The bridge soared across the water and the land afterwards was thick jungle—certainly unforgiving. It’s easy to see why so many thousands died working in the oven-like heat.
For our own respite from the sun, we decided to head to the nearby national park. The area is famous for its caves and waterfalls, and the one our driver selected was stunning. In a land where liability waivers and release forms have not yet arrived, we were able to scramble around the falls, and Jim and I even climbed straight up the rock face to dangle over the edge—it’s quite a picture (to be posted soon)! The waterfalls had carved some deep caves into the rocks, but there seemed to be little exploration of the landmarks, with the exception of a giant Buddha placed right in the mouth of one of the caves.
Arriving back in town, we finally experienced the full force of Bangkok’s traffic. It took over an hour to inch our way across ten kilometers of heavy traffic, as cars changed lanes arbitrarily, ignored road signs and dividers, and even chose to travel the wrong way when it seemed convenient. All the time, the motorcycle taxis (where you can hop on the back of a motorcycle and pay just a few baht for a ride across the city) zoomed in and out of the traffic jams and threatened to send their passengers flying.
We spent our last night in a quaint guesthouse a few minutes outside of the Khao San Road Backpacking Ghetto. (Thanks Zack—never would have found it without you!) We had a good time exploring the neighborhood, and for the first time, as white guys, we were back in the majority. It certainly didn’t feel like the rest of the city!
Yesterday morning we left the city for good, beginning the long trek to eventually conclude in Ho Chi Minh City. We left the hostel shortly after 8:00, and again were immediately accosted by the crazy city traffic. We arrived at the northern bus station just before 9:00 and sprinted onto the bus—a first classer bound for the Aranyaprathet border. We rolled smoothly across the countryside for the next five hours, pulling into the small border town where my parents spent several months working in refugee camps for the Cambodians. There’s not much there now. I don’t know what it was like then, but now it is just the very hot, hot sun beating down on the market stalls where Cambodian sellers pay to peddle their wares across the border. We ate lunch and then began the trip across. For all the warnings, it went pretty smoothly as we stamped out of Thailand and into Cambodia. For a developing country, the immigration process was quite sophisticated, if extremely disorganized, as digital photos were taken of us and our visas were entered into their computers. The border shuttle deposited us at the transportation depot in Poipet, Cambodia, where we hired a Toyota Camry (at the hugely inflated government price of $60!) and began the second long journey into Siem Reap.
The change from Thailand to Cambodia was immediate and startlingly obvious. Cambodia is very much a developing country, and the border town was the seediest place I have seen in the world, full of brothels, markets, naked children and dirty animals running around, sellers with their trinkets, and bumpy, rocky, dusty roads. In fact, the most pervasive feature of the landscape was probably the dust. Throughout the four hour journey, a thick layer of red dust seemed to choke the atmosphere, uniformly spreading its thick coat over everything. Some call the road from Poipet to Siem Reap the worst road in the world. The distinction is well-deserved! The four hour journey was a challenge course to avoid the largest rocks and potholes, bouncing over and around ones that still threatened to flatten a tire or ruin the suspension. We bumped and bounced, jolted and careened across the country, gritting our teeth and watching the minutes (all 240 of them) tick by. Bridges were especially cause for concern, as they were made just wide enough for one vehicle, and even then exact navigation and a bit of luck were necessary. Usually planks were laid across the surface to offer reinforcement, but many of the bridges were simply out, with paths constructed around them through the drainage canals. We wondered what kind of accident was required to close the bridges for repair. As we began to approach Siem Reap, a storm rolled in just as the sun was setting. Already the traffic was haphazard—we shared National Highway 6 with large herds of animals, children playing, large trucks carrying twenty or more people, cargo carriers with oil or other supplies, clouds of bicycles and motorbikes, and the occasional Lexus or other luxury vehicle zooming by. The procedure for passing was to lean on one’s horn and hope for the best. How would this work after dark? I’m still not sure what the answer to that was. After two near misses with large trucks and motorbikes simultaneously, I just closed my eyes and squeezed them tight. Somehow, though, we made it, arriving just after 7, eleven hours after we left Bangkok. What a trip!