Mr Beem's Asian Journal
|
back to Phuket |
August 2003
There is little that can compare to riding a nice bike on a nice day, going somewhere that you have never been.
I left Phnom Penh a little after lunchtime, I had eaten a baguette and drank some iced tea at one of the roadside stalls for fifty cents and was looking forward to a quiet cruise down Highway four. The noon sun had a bit of a bite to it, so I had slip, slop, slapped my exposed bits and was in a nice mellow frame of mind. Phnom Penh is easy to navigate and all I had to do was follow the signs, the traffic is a little unconventional and the unwritten rules are harder to follow than those of American gridiron, but if you just go with the flow and expect the unexpected then you will get where you are going.
The City turned to Industrial which turned to big village which turned to rural in about twenty kilometres, so I wasn’t long before I was back in rice Paddy country…and miles of it. One of the unique things about Cambodian rice paddies is the fact that they are liberally dotted with sugar palms and in the broad flat expanse of the rice fields they stand out as being the main feature. The sap from the palm is harvested and then boiled down to a syrup, but I am not sure what the syrup is used for, I suspect some kind of rum drink I have never come across it so that’s just speculation on my part. I will make it a mission to find out.
Riding a motorcycle you are much more in tune with the weather than you would be driving a car or sitting in a bus, you tend to watch the horizon much more and your sense of smell and feel for air temperature are much keener, this is primarily because on a bike the weather affects you so much. So why is it then that you never put your wet weather gear on before it starts raining ? I don’t know if this is true for everyone but it certainly is for me, simply because I don’t want it to rain I somehow believe that it won’t. This is a hard thing to admit for someone who considers himself a logical person, but time and experience have proven this to be true. Contrary to the evidence in front of me I assume that it won’t rain and if it does it will only be a localised shower. And that is how several of my major drenching have started.
An hour out of Phnom Penh, it started to sprinkle, I just kept on riding think that I would soon pass through this little shower, by the time that I realised that it wasn’t just a shower I was already soaked so there was no point in stoping to put on the Batman Cape…so I just kept on going. The rain got worse and the wind picked up and I was down to about forty kilometres an hour, glasses and visor fogging up, and a major drum solo coming through the helmet.
Mr BeEm has all sorts of clever stuff in his list of features, Oil injected, fuel injected, electronic engine monitoring, Multi-octane fuel sensors, double overhead under-hangers etc, etc. One feature that came as standard was electrically heated handle Bar grips, they were included in the price so I didn’t care, but I certainly would never have thought of ordering them as an extra.
Well, about an hour out of Sihanoukville I turned on my handlebar heaters for the first time since I had bought the bike eighteen months previous, that is how cold my hands had become. Even with a pair of leather gloves on I could hardly feel my fingers. It is remarkable what a difference these little gadgets make, now if I could only get heated foot pegs I would be in business.
After getting a good lashing from the rain for three hours I started to descend the hill that lead down to the Port town of Sihanoukville This town is Cambodia’s main marine life line to the outside world and handles all its sea freight in and out. My first impression was that it could do with a little bit of TLC, the roads were patchy the footpaths almost none existent and for a town that was only forty five years old the town planners had a bit of explaining to do, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the place. It was spread out over a couple of miles with lots of gaps in between and all in all the town needed a good hair cut and a shave. Mind you it was pissing down rain and I was freezing cold.
I booked into a nice hotel right next to the Port and got a room with Ocean views and all the good things for ten USD, which I thought was pretty fair. I took a nice long hot shower, ordered a pot of coffee and sat in my room watching the rain pour down and the wind blow, grateful to be inside and out of the storm.
Next day, was a bit of a late start, I spent the morning in bed listening to the wind blow and the rain lash against my window. In the afternoon the sun made an appearance so I jumped on the bike and had another look around town. I went to the Supermarket, they advertised in the local tourist brochure that they could organise Visas for Vietnam and do extensions for Cambodian Visas, so I went and had a chat with them. They asked where I had just come from and then spotted the bike, when I told them about the trip, they were doing back flips in disbelief, personally I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, they kept saying such a big bike and you come so far. I was touched by their enthusiasium, even if was a little over done. When I asked about Scuba diving they said that I should go upstairs and speak to an American guy called Fred, he could organise a trip.
To be honest I didn’t really want to do a trip, the thought of paying to go for a dive is like… a dentist paying someone to let him pull their teeth out – or something like that… you know what I mean…highly unlikely. But they insisted that I go up and see Fred – so I did.
As it turned out Fred was a good guy and when I told him that I used to run a dive business in PNG he wanted to buy me a coffee and have a chat. He had been in business for a year and was finding it hard going, I told him about some of the ups and downs that happened to me in Rabaul and that seemed to make him feel better, and gave him a few laughs. It was nice for me to have someone to talk to and he enjoyed having someone who understood his pain…so we spent the rest of the day together.
The up shot of that was that we came to an arrangement where I would trade Fred, twenty years experience in the dive business for a room a some beer money. I got somewhere to hang out and catch up on all those little things that I keep putting off, and a base from which to explore the rest of the coast. Fred gets unlimited access to one off the best dive operators of our time.. that seems fair to me.
The other nice thing about it was that I got to work with some Cambodians which even with a Bike and all the doors that it opens, it is still a hard thing to organise. I got to work with boat builders, designers, sign writers, and hotels and restaurants, all because I was helping a guy out. That was the real pay off for me, that and getting a look inside the Cambodian expatriate community.
