Cycling Saigon to Phnom Penh
|
Roadside shelter, Cambodia
|
Cycling from Saigon to Phnom Penh.
Miracle rice, miracle irrigation, work, work, work – Vietnam is a verdant and vibrant advert for the earth’s fecundity. Doing! You cross the border into Cambodia and the green turns to brown. Mile upon mile in every direction, tough, unforgiving tillage. No rain for ages, no crops in sight, not a plant, not a worker; the contrast couldn’t be greater. This is Svey Rieng Province – one of Cambodia’s poorest at the best of times and now as raggedy-ass as could be. Look into any lean-to at the side of the road and you can see that, counting personal possessions on your fingers, you don’t get past your thumb. A cooking pot. OK, make that two: and a krama, the ubiquitous scarf-kerchief made familiar by the Khmer Rouge.
If Svey Rieng didn’t have enough problems then events of Year Zero plus 3 finished it off. It was at this time that Eastern KR forces, with Vietnamese help, were set to reject Angkar’s dogma and attempt to save the Khmer nation. Not only was this insurrection ruthlessly crushed but whole communities were shipped west and loyal cadres drafted in to all villages and towns. The region has never really recovered. In 1978, 60,000 villagers were moved out of the Parrot’s Beak and Fish-hook areas adjoining Vietnam. By April, 400 Eastern Zone cadres were being held in detention. Over the next two months so many cadres were sent to Phnom Penh for ‘processing’ that it could not cope, they were told, “Don’t interrogate them, just smash them.” If an Eastern Zone village was suspected of supporting rebels all the villagers were slaughtered. Hundreds of thousands were deported to the Central Zone. The death toll was more than 100,000 - perhaps as many as 250,000. Nobody will ever know. The KR leadership was by then gripped by paranoia with most of its energies directed towards internal party purges. Against this backdrop the Vietnam invasion force was building up with KR defecting across the border in droves. It was the beginning of the end for the Khmer Rouge and it was very much gathering pace. Poor Svey Rieng, its ghosts follow you along the road. Don’t look back.
Miracle rice, miracle irrigation, work, work, work – Vietnam is a verdant and vibrant advert for the earth’s fecundity. Doing! You cross the border into Cambodia and the green turns to brown. Mile upon mile in every direction, tough, unforgiving tillage. No rain for ages, no crops in sight, not a plant, not a worker; the contrast couldn’t be greater. This is Svey Rieng Province – one of Cambodia’s poorest at the best of times and now as raggedy-ass as could be. Look into any lean-to at the side of the road and you can see that, counting personal possessions on your fingers, you don’t get past your thumb. A cooking pot. OK, make that two: and a krama, the ubiquitous scarf-kerchief made familiar by the Khmer Rouge.
If Svey Rieng didn’t have enough problems then events of Year Zero plus 3 finished it off. It was at this time that Eastern KR forces, with Vietnamese help, were set to reject Angkar’s dogma and attempt to save the Khmer nation. Not only was this insurrection ruthlessly crushed but whole communities were shipped west and loyal cadres drafted in to all villages and towns. The region has never really recovered. In 1978, 60,000 villagers were moved out of the Parrot’s Beak and Fish-hook areas adjoining Vietnam. By April, 400 Eastern Zone cadres were being held in detention. Over the next two months so many cadres were sent to Phnom Penh for ‘processing’ that it could not cope, they were told, “Don’t interrogate them, just smash them.” If an Eastern Zone village was suspected of supporting rebels all the villagers were slaughtered. Hundreds of thousands were deported to the Central Zone. The death toll was more than 100,000 - perhaps as many as 250,000. Nobody will ever know. The KR leadership was by then gripped by paranoia with most of its energies directed towards internal party purges. Against this backdrop the Vietnam invasion force was building up with KR defecting across the border in droves. It was the beginning of the end for the Khmer Rouge and it was very much gathering pace. Poor Svey Rieng, its ghosts follow you along the road. Don’t look back.
Apart from the odd white Toyota Cressida which barrels down the crown of the road boiling a cloud of dust behind it, you might as well be the only person on the planet. In garish lycra, on a bike, you probably look as though you are from another planet. But you can’t have been the first to pootle along on a bike for the simple reason that every single child runs to the side of the road and yells, “Hello!” repeatedly. It is a bit like that experiment to prove the Doppler effect, the one with the trumpeters on the flatbed rail carriage – the hellos form a constant wall of sound whose pitch changes as you approach and as it recedes. Such is the density of hellos that can come from any direction – in the woods, from the well, out of the hammock, in back of the shack – that it becomes a hazard as you try to reciprocate with a wave. The local rule is: ‘do not stop shrieking hello until the foreigner waves’. Eager to join in, it would not take too much effort to fall over your handlebars as you attempted a double wave to both sides of road. Who taught them this? It doesn’t happen on Highway 2 south of PP. What a cheery lot, not two brass farthings to rub together but squeals of delight as their efforts are rewarded with a wave and a wobble as you cruise by. As you can imagine, when you stop for a drink, the little folks zoom up for a closer look but then go all shy – nary a word leaves their lips and mostly they study the floor earnestly. They must talk about such encounters for days.
HCMC to Svey Rieng is 112 kms. As usual the first four hours are very productive, it then becomes diminishing returns as average speed plummets, not helped by an increasingly strong headwind and steady drizzle. In Vietnam all motorbikers have hooded macs which are whipped out when it starts to rain, which is every day in two of the seasons. These macs cover the handlebars and lights like an apron out front. You can while away the hours by watching a puddle form in your apron before buffing it to the side of the road. Hours of fun. On a bike, your mental alertness fades in time as weariness sets in, to the point that your initial heightened state of awareness and hypersensitive senses are reduced to a happy contentedness at buffing your puddle over a passing car. “Whoa, just missed! G’her, g’her, g’her.”
The outskirts of Svey Rieng, regional hub that it is, presents an unexpected problem – a crossroads – nothing in the guidebook about this. I’ll ask a local. How many ways do you think there are of pronouncing Svey Rieng whilst pointing in one direction then another? (This is one kilometre from SR too with no other settlement within 50 kms of it.) Try some:
“Svay Rie-eng,” point – blank look.
“Svay Reeng,” point – blank look.
“Sway Ryeng,” point – blank look.
Try different people, I may have got a dud. Try 47 combinations. People start walking away: “There’s a nutter on a bike back there,” I can hear them saying. It’s actually S-vai Reuoon; before 100 Cambodians write in – OK, it isn’t quite that, I don’t know what it is. My entire Khmer vocab stops at ‘Sabaidee’ which is the same welcome greeting in Thai. (Mind you, I noticed that ‘Khmer’ was pronounced ‘K’mai’ with the cadence of ‘C’mon’ in Svey Rieng so I was clearly up against it from the start.) So, with the last 40 kms into a strong headwind and an average speed dropping to 15 kph for an overall 20.7 for the day it’s “C’mon SR, let all your delights wash over me….”
TBC
HCMC to Svey Rieng is 112 kms. As usual the first four hours are very productive, it then becomes diminishing returns as average speed plummets, not helped by an increasingly strong headwind and steady drizzle. In Vietnam all motorbikers have hooded macs which are whipped out when it starts to rain, which is every day in two of the seasons. These macs cover the handlebars and lights like an apron out front. You can while away the hours by watching a puddle form in your apron before buffing it to the side of the road. Hours of fun. On a bike, your mental alertness fades in time as weariness sets in, to the point that your initial heightened state of awareness and hypersensitive senses are reduced to a happy contentedness at buffing your puddle over a passing car. “Whoa, just missed! G’her, g’her, g’her.”
The outskirts of Svey Rieng, regional hub that it is, presents an unexpected problem – a crossroads – nothing in the guidebook about this. I’ll ask a local. How many ways do you think there are of pronouncing Svey Rieng whilst pointing in one direction then another? (This is one kilometre from SR too with no other settlement within 50 kms of it.) Try some:
“Svay Rie-eng,” point – blank look.
“Svay Reeng,” point – blank look.
“Sway Ryeng,” point – blank look.
Try different people, I may have got a dud. Try 47 combinations. People start walking away: “There’s a nutter on a bike back there,” I can hear them saying. It’s actually S-vai Reuoon; before 100 Cambodians write in – OK, it isn’t quite that, I don’t know what it is. My entire Khmer vocab stops at ‘Sabaidee’ which is the same welcome greeting in Thai. (Mind you, I noticed that ‘Khmer’ was pronounced ‘K’mai’ with the cadence of ‘C’mon’ in Svey Rieng so I was clearly up against it from the start.) So, with the last 40 kms into a strong headwind and an average speed dropping to 15 kph for an overall 20.7 for the day it’s “C’mon SR, let all your delights wash over me….”
TBC