Tuesday, Jul 8, 2008
For adventurers headed overland to Angkor Wat, Cambodia's Route 6 is Disneyland gone bad.
May 18, 1999 | Our Cambodian truck driver, who says his name is "Mr. T," pulls the Nissan pickup to the side of the road and looks back at me expressionlessly. "You get out!" he says. As if to underscore this suggestion, he steps out of the truck himself, unzips his jeans and begins to urinate on the side of the road.
Since I welcome any chance to exit the jammed mini-cab, I follow suit.
I have been riding in Mr. T's truck long enough to know that he was not being rude with this curt demand. He was merely showing off his arsenal of English phrases, which also includes "I am Mr. T" and "You pay $6." Every 20 or so minutes, he turns around and says, "This road very bad, ha-ha!" The quip is meant to be a joke, but after two hours of slamming through the unending succession of potholes and washouts known as Cambodia Route 6, I'm not laughing.
Since Route 6 is the only passable road from the Thai border to the ancient Khmer monuments at Angkor Wat, it gets a surprisingly steady stream of tourist traffic. We are currently at the height of dry season, and the road is as brown and featureless as the Texas panhandle in winter. Each time a truck full of glassy-eyed travelers bounces past, I feel like I'm journeying through some sadistic antipode to Disneyland, where the only ride lasts six hours and is designed to underscore just how long, difficult and boring life can be.
As I void my bladder onto the Route 6 shoulder, I notice that my white-haired seatmate, Mr. Cham, is standing a few paces away, watching me. All dandied-up in a brown porkpie hat and a purple polo shirt, Mr. Cham looks like he's ready for an afternoon at the horse races. I half expect him to break into applause as I take my whiz. Once I'm finished, he hurries down the road to watch the other foreigner -- a middle-aged Belgian named Claude -- urinate. I'm beginning to suspect that Mr. Cham doesn't get out of the house much.
Mr. Cham and I have been smashed up against each other in the Nissan mini-cab all morning. For reasons I don't completely understand, I am sponsoring his ride. The first time I ever saw him was yesterday. He was wearing a black Bon Jovi T-shirt at the time, and had just stolen my sandals. My second encounter with him was this morning, when he showed up at my departure point from a town known as Opasat and informed my Cambodian hosts that I was to pay for his transit to Siem Reap. It seemed like an odd request at the time, but I went ahead and obliged him out of generic courtesy.
Mr. Cham has no personality and smells like a bag of stale Cool Ranch Doritos. If I had it to do all over again, I would have saved $3 back at the truck depot and made him ride in the back of the Nissan with the old women, the chickens and the bags of rice.
As I return to the truck from my toilet break, Mr. T rushes up to cut me off at the door. At first I think there's some sort of danger, but it turns out he's just looking for a chance to show off some more English. "You get in!" he says.
Get Salon in your mailbox!