In Transit

The bus to Siem Reap leaves at 7:30 from a makeshift, noisy bus station at the corner of two streets in central Phnom Penh crowded with sellers hawking water bottles, loaves of bread, and packaged snacks to travelers stuffing their luggage under buses. Female bus company employees are selling tickets for 18,000 riel ($4.50) from behind a tall desk, in front of which are handwritten timetables plastered on the wall.

The bus looks like an American tour bus – the kind used for long field trips back in high school – except a little smaller. As soon as it starts rolling north through the early morning rush of Phnom Penh, the TV at the front of the bus is flicked on and begins to show Khmer music videos at blasting volume. Most of the videos, which are home-movie quality, feature forlorn looking female artists flashbacking to the lovely days they used to have with their estranged lovers, who are shown pacing about looking equally morose about the separation.

In one video, a young village woman says goodbye to her boyfriend as he speeds off on his motorcycle, bound for some unknown location that perhaps the Khmer lyrics disclose. While she sits mournfully in the door frame of her home, two white men stop her lover along a dirt road, steal his motorcycle, and shoot him the head. In the next frame, she stumbles upon his body, waggles his head back in forth, and is shown weeping over him for a good two minutes.

Past the bridge at the northernmost end of Phnom Penh, the city gives way to still fairly urban houses and shops set on brownish-red dirt. Construction equipment sits idle in the early morning hour. Most of the vendors at the side of the road are selling all kinds of hats.

Shortly before a sign reading “Now entering Kompong Cham” province, the picture outside the window dissolves into rural Cambodia. Bright green fields stretching further than the eye can see – their vast openness interrupted only by tall palm tree-like trees and farmers with their heads wrapped in kormas (traditional red and white checkered scarves) – are interspersed with villages, wooden or thatched houses sitting on tall stilts.

For the six hour ride, I watch snapshots of single moments flash outside the window: People sitting in the shade on wooden beds or hammocks under their homes; bony, white cattle nuzzling their noses into tall piles of hay; a young boy drying off a toddler next to a rice paddy; young men playing volleyball in a dusty, open space; dozens of women with bins of the same round, spiky, green fruit, impassive at the side of the road; a tiny boy on a bicycle far too big peddling off the main road down a dirt lane I wish I could follow.

Somewhere in Kompong Thom province, the music videos switch off.

Strung up on many structures is the same advertisement for Sunsilk shampoo. Blue, wooden signs for the Cambodian People’s Party (the ruling party) appear regularly, sometimes with “people” spelled creatively (albeit phonetically) as “peopel.” Most of the homes have the same sort of staircase attached to their door-less entryway. Where one home has been pulled down, just the white and blue staircase remains, ascending to nowhere.

The bus stops at a few provincial stations, and occasionally at seemingly random homes or shops to pick up or drop off single passengers, who, after swinging their baggage into the under-compartment, have to jog to board the bus as it starts to pull away. It also stops twice for twenty minutes at the Cambodian version of the highway rest-stop: a large pavilion with one restaurant selling inexpensive Khmer food - like thick goose egg omelets with white rice - that customers take to eat at one of the pavilion’s nicely laid tables. On the pavilion’s outskirts sit vendors selling packaged snack food, sweat bread, fruit, boiled eggs, fried insects, and steamed buns - which, on the ride home, give me food poisoning and lead to a rather unfortunate incident the next day in which I throw up while on a moving motorcycle.

A beggar wanders amidst the stalls, attaching himself to buyers and hoping for their change. Along the dirt path leading to a bathroom tucked behind the pavilion, small beggar girls clamor for money. One woman gives a dollar to the first child, but waves away the next girls reaching out their tiny hands. As we climb on the bus, a man missing a leg – assumedly a land mine victim – has seated himself in the dust on a bit of cardboard by the bus door. To each person boarding the bus he smiles and extends his grey baseball cap. When the bus doors close he pockets the money, slaps his cap back on, picks up his cardboard, and hobbles away.