Another Year Older?

Day 85: Siem Reap (K) – Kratie (K). At preciously 1.36am the night sky was illuminated with hundreds as firecrackers as Cambodia marked the coming of the Khmer New Year. Like Christmas, Birthdays and the New Year all rolled into one this is the biggest event in the country's calendar. And at that precise moment all 15 million Cambodians officially became one year older, regardless of their 'actual' birth date.

Cambodia had been a constant source of pleasant surprises for Karen and me with the result that everywhere we had visited we had stayed a little longer than originally planned. Whilst that in itself didn't present a problem to us, it meant that if we wanted to make it across into Laos we needed to leave Siem Reap to it's New Year festivities and start the long trek North Easterly to the remote border crossing point at Dom Kralor.

Arriving at the bus station, we were still bleary eyed from the night before. Unsure of where we would end the day and how we were going to get there we boarded the first bus heading towards the gateway town of Kompong Cham where we hoped to get passage into rural east Cambodia.

We were not disappointed. Arriving at the little market town we were soon mobbed by a crowd of local people keen to sell us spaces on their minibuses to Mekong town of Kratie. Being New Years Day, prices were incredibly expensive (relatively) and so we spent the next half an hour bargaining hard until we finally settled on the price of $5 a seat. “Good price for you. Good price for me”, the minibus driver declared.

Taking the back roads, the next three hours proved to be a bumpy, dusty ride across unsealed roads through lazy villages and rich agricultural lands. As we had come to expect, the minibus was packed to the rafters – even more so as the local Khmer people were on the move celebrating the festivities with their families. Twenty or so people, a motorbike on the roof, bags of rice in the cabin, one flat tyre, a starter motor that necessitated the use of a lump hammer... – you get the picture.

An interesting addition to this journey though was the transport of eight 10 gallon plastic billy cans of gasoline. Too heavy to go on the roof, the driver stacked them on the floor of the cabin in the space where our feet would normally go. So there we sat with our feet on the fuel, our knees around our ears intoxicated by the fumes emanating from the leaking containers. Which in itself, we could probably handle. What was disturbing though was the fact that despite our explosive cargo our driver insisted on chain smoking an enormous roll-up for the journey's duration. How we didn't end up in outer space I'll never know!