Extreme Bus Driving!
on Meg's Cambodian Adventures (Cambodia), 01/Oct/2008 01:55, 34 days ago
26thSeptemberTravelling in Cambodia is certainly different from that in Brighton! Yesterday I got on the bus for the 3 hour bus trip back to phnom penh to get my injections at ten, and then head straight back on the bus to make my Khmer lesson at noon… it was worth this effort as learning Khmer is not an easy task and so the prospect of missing a lesson was not an option! Brakes and indicators are not of high importance in Cambodia… neither is being on the right side of the road, the most important thing is the hooter. The bus hooted every time it overtook anything, be it a car, motorbike, bike or chicken which meant that most of the journey was interrupted with the hooter blaring. On the rare occasion that our bus was quiet something else was most certainly overtaking and so we didn’t really get a break from the hooting slowing downisn’t really done, even at junctions where it really is just a free for all and the only rule is that everyone has right of way, all the time, so you just have to swerve a lot! Saying that it works remarkably well, I haven’t seen one accident or case of road rage or traffic jams- maybe the restof the world has it wrong?!Darra, our Khmer teacher is bit of a living legend, made famous in’Red lights and Green lizards’ a book by Liz Anderson. He keeps our lessons funny by making lots of jokes and then collapsing in fits of giggles at himself and anyone else! One of his favourite sayings is ’Darra mayin panyaha j’rang, pipru dara mayin songsaa j’rang… darra puck whiskey j’rang!’. Meaning… Darra has many problems because he has many girlfriends… darra drinks a lot of whiskey… This sentence will amuse him eveytime he says it and his giggles are very contagious so Khmer lessons, despite being difficult, are funny! At night there are not many bars in kampong chamand everything closes at 9ish, so most nights we sit on the banks of the Mekong and have a 75cent beer and watching the floating houses in the moonlight…. We all knew this would be a tough life ;o)