Cambodia: transportation - wooden, metal, and gray/wrinkly/hairy.

Mom arranged for a hotel van to pick me up from the Phnom Penh airport [because I got in late, I spent the night there before continuing on to Kampong Thom the next day to meet her]. Mom warned me that the traffic was crazy there, but it's a different kind of crazy from Cairo. In Cairo, there are so many cars that the roads are just packed all the time and it can be hard to navigate - but in Phnom Penh, there are so many mopeds that the roads look clearer, but those little mopeds can just come out of nowhere, be all over the road, etc. Later in the trip I rode on the back of a moped in Phnom Penh [with Kolap driving - someone I trust!], and it was an exhilarating experience, to say the least.

The next morning I took the early bus to Siem Reap - the stop at Kampong Thom is actually only supposed to be a lunch break, so I paid for the full ticket and just hopped out at KT. Cambodians are really into karaoke - even at nine in the morning, they were playing music videos with text running across the bottom on the TV at the front of the bus. No one was singing along, but it was interesting to watch - and in a lot of restaurants, homes, etc., they just play those karaoke music videos [which pretty much always have to do with a pretty girl walking along with a handsome guy, or a pretty girl being split up from a handsome guy because of outside forces, or two pretty girls fighting over a handsome guy...] even though no one seems to actually sing along to them.

A lot of the roads we drove on throughout the trip were designated as national highways. It's a good thing someone told us, because we wouldn't have known otherwise. They're all two lanes - one lane going in each direction - and a good portion of them aren't even paved. There are houses and occasional little towns all along the side of the road, and everything is allowed on the road - buses, trucks, cars, mopeds, cattle, etc.

Pretty much every vehicle is loaded to the brim or carrying some interesting cargo - check out Mom's post on the students' blog for some good pictures.

Chris and Kat in a tuk tuk, Cambodia's taxi. It's a little open carriage attached to a moped and can usually fit four people, although we've been known to squeeze in a few more. They're usually a good time, but there can be some questionable moments - like when our drivers in Siem Reap made the joke-with-probably-a-fair-amount-of-truth in it that they had been drinking, or when we got in a parked tuk tuk and then the moped tipped over, making the carriage part jolt around and end up almost on its side. Another time it started raining really heavily, monsoon-style - that's when we discovered that most tuk tuks have canvas sides you can roll down and zip up...but we still felt bad for our driver out on the moped and a little concerned about the Little Moped That Could navigating streets that were quickly developing little floods.

From Kampong Thom to Siem Reap, we took a coach bus along with a group from Teachers Across Borders. We stopped at a temple on the way [the one where I got lost in the rain], and when I got back to the bus, I found out it had broken down. [The students decided that one of them was cursed, since pretty much every time he stepped into any kind of vehicle, it broke down.] The bus driver was trying to figure it out, and a bunch of people who live in the area came to watch. The little kids were especially amused by Chris, who is tall and gangly and was skipping around in a safari hat swinging an umbrella. He attracted more attention from a guy who squatted down and started touching the tattoo on Chris's leg. [photo from Mom]

While we were waiting for the bus to be fixed, we decided to give some business to the establishment selling drinks at the temple's entrance. We bought beer, one of the teachers brought out the whiskey they had [I need to party with teachers more often], and we all had a good time. We eventually got back on the road, but the bus company had sent another bus just in case, so we met up with that one somewhere in the middle of nowhere and moved all our luggage over. A couple of the guys tried to buy more beer from the store/house on the side of the road where we stopped, but they either didn't have any or had no idea what the guys were asking for. We didn't really need any more, anyway - we were having a fantastic enough time.

We also took a few boats. I went with three of the teachers to Tonle Sap River/Lake - more on that later - and our boat was a bucket of bolts [well...bucket of wood, really] and our driver was a laidback dude who sometimes drove with his foot. It was particularly worrying to go past other boats on the edge of the river with groups of people standing around them, bailing them out - or even bailing them out as they were actually being driven.

The boat to watch dolphins in the Mekong didn't seem particularly seaworthy, either, but we made it.

We were happily cruising along in our van when we heard a terrible sound and felt a terrible...feeling. Vireak pulled over, and this is what we saw when we got out.

While Samnang and Vireak changed the tire, we communed with the water buffalo and children watching us from the side of the road.

We couldn't say no to an elephant ride. The drivers actually sat right on the elephants' heads [in a way that looked precarious to us but seemed completely easy and natural to them] and guided them with mostly just their feet.

Ours was a bit of a dawdler and explorer, but that just made it more fun. Andy and Kat's joined us for a drink of water, then we both walked through the muck - a bit interesting when the elephant sinks in a little and gets that suction noise when it pulls its feet up and you're tilting forward in your sketchy seat the whole time.

This isn't actually a picture of this, but at one point our elephant wrapped its trunk around a large plant / small tree and, pulling it a little each time its handler counted, pulled it completely out on the count of three. The two have clearly been working together for quite a while.

Of course you'd expect to see any taxi driver in New York City sitting in his car and talking on his cell phone, but this just seems different somehow.