The road to Seim Reap, life from the window

The trip to Seim Reap is a 6 hour 314K adventure. Actually the road is quite good and paved most all the way with very few sharp corners. What amazed me was how flat and open Cambodia is. There was not a hill to go up or down on the entire drive and just a minimal few to look at from the bus. Now about life outside the city, I can only tell you about what I surmised from the bus window but after 12 hour on the round trip, I have some pretty good ideas, so here I go. Soon as we crossed the bridge out of Phnom Phen the scenery changed, from urban to very rural, as we headed north, it was very reminiscent of heading out of Guayaquil in Ecuador with homes made from planks and bamboo. Most all the homes are right along the road, on both sides for most of the way; with rice and grain fields as far as you can see. Behind the homes the field start spattered with palm trees. Nearly all the farming is done by hand or livestock. Every house has a huge stack of hay to feed the animals. There were continuous oxen and water buffalo the entire trip, as well as older men riding two wheel carts pulled by a small horse. One can only assume you will see the livestock disappear and be replaced with small tractors as in Thailand, with the economy growing. The houses were the traditional Cambodian style very small on pilings with a steep ladder and livestock or hammocks strung underneath. You would see toddlers crawling up and down the ladders (a sight that would make any USA parent freak out). Clean water seems to be a real issue. Along the road are small stagnate ponds of very muddy water where you would see children playing and washing in. (did I mention VERY muddy water?) There were as many children as oxen. The children would be working in the fields digging in the mud or trying to catch fish in the mud. one the amazing things I saw was a six year old leading two oxen down the road. All in all the children seemed to be happy, lots of smiles and lots of playing. I also got a real since of community and family. I would love to have the time to stop and shoot a ton of photos and interview people along the way. The other thing that caught my eye were the over loaded vehicles, be it moped with five people on it or a moped with driver, 100ld bag of feed, and two full sized hogs, to the vans with 20 or more people inside and good stacked on top another six feet high and then of group of people on top of the goods, or the small trucks with over 40 people. Every vehicle is a MCI waiting to happen, It’s a good thing most of the speeds are low. So there it is a 12 hour bus ride condensed into one long paragraph

Andy