Wanna know one thing I’ll no longer take for granted when I get back to Texas? Roads.
The roads in Cambodia made for some seriously adventurous driving. This video shows the main “highway” between Kampot and Sihanoukville, where we caught the plane to Siem Reap. There wasn’t much traffic when I took this video, but imagine driving a road like this where all the traffic in both directions (cars, motorbikes, large trucks carrying precariously balanced loads – lumber for example), continuously zig zag back and forth in order to find the easiest route through the ruts and potholes. It’s pretty chaotic, and some drivers go WAY too fast. It’s worse at night when you can only see the headlights of the oncoming traffic (no street lights here!). It’s difficult at a distance to tell what you’re looking at. Is that an oncoming car or two motorbikes spaced in such a way that it just looks like an oncoming car? Is that a car being passed by two motorbikes or a lumber truck? Further, Cambodian rice farmers, who still employ slash and burn farming techniques, burn their rice fields at night, which creates a thick fog that distorts your vision and severely reduces visibility. Yikes!
It took us two hours to drive the 60 or so miles from Kampot to Sihanoukville, with bumps like this all along the way. It took us 6+ hours to drive from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh on a similarly potted road with MUCH more traffic – a drive I will not soon forget.
Thank goodness, we reached all of our destinations in one piece. But, to be sure, driving in Cambodia is a dangerous thing to do right now. My white knuckles are still getting their color back.