Quit our jobs, sold our home and everything in it, gone riding...

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We've seen so many of these colourful tents on our way through Cambodia

People in formal attire file into the tent, and we figure it out: it's a wedding! We've timed our arrival in SE Asia for the dry season, which is also the peak season for weddings in Cambodia. All those tents were people getting married! It's like June in North America!

And just when that thought crossed our minds, you know, the idea that we arrived in time for dry season... it started raining.

Argh. Back into our sausage suits! :(

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A couple of hours into our rain ride, we stopped in Kampong Thom for lunch

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Saw someone familiar at the booth. The sign above reads, "Psychiatric Help: 5¢"
 
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Had some yummy fried rice as we waited out the rains from inside the restaurant

The rains continue as we hop back on our motorcycles and continue southwards.

It's another two hours of wet roads till we arrive at our destination for the evening. The tiny town of Kampong Cham.

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We are actually staying on the outskirts of Kampong Cham

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The hostel where we've booked lets us park next to their scooters and their Christmas tree, which is right next to their Buddhist altar! :)
 
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The view from the rooftop terrace of our hostel

I really liked staying in this rural village far from the big cities. In fact, I am liking Cambodia a lot more than Thailand. It's a lot less touristy here, and I like observing local people going about their day-to-day life, without feeling that everything was centered around accommodating the tourism industry.

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Kampong Cham is right next to the Mekong River. We watch fishermen out on their wooden work boats.

Not to say that there is no tourism here. Just in this area alone, Mekong River cruises are a very popular tourist attraction, from day excursions on simple sampans to week-long holidays on huge, modern luxury liners.

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Watching the neighbourhood kids play with some balloons
 
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Neda liked the bright co-ordinated pyjamas that all the ladies wore when they were out shopping in the market

Then I looked at our mud-stained riding suits and wondered how these ladies didn't get their pyjamas dirty while scootering through the wet roads?!?

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Not the most people I've seen on a scooter at one time... By far...

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Getting ready to leave Kampong Cham the next morning. Roads are still a bit wet.
 
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Neda liked the bright co-ordinated pyjamas that all the ladies wore when they were out shopping in the market

Then I looked at our mud-stained riding suits and wondered how these ladies didn't get their pyjamas dirty while scootering through the wet roads?!?

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Not the most people I've seen on a scooter at one time... By far...

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Getting ready to leave Kampong Cham the next morning. Roads are still a bit wet.
 
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On our ride out of town, we see more houses on stilts

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I didn't know what crops these were until I did some Internet research. These are water hyacinths, and they're not a crop, they're a weed.

Although they look quite pretty, this fast-growing species are everywhere, invading the waterways and making it difficult for boats to pass. The oars of passing boats chop up the plants, propagating them further. Water hyacinth harvesting is mainly like plucking weeds from your garden, but there are some companies that pay Cambodian women for the stems of the plant. They dry them and make wicker-like handbags and other accessories.

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Invasion of the water hyacinths!
 
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South of Kampong Cham is an odd structure. A bridge stretching across the Mekong River made entirely out of bamboo!

We have stopped in Kampong Cham specifically to see and ride this bridge.

Every year, at the start of the dry season, villagers construct this 1km long bridge entirely out of bamboo to cross the calm waters of the Mekong River to the island of Koh Paen. From scratch! Since we're here at the start of dry season, this bridge is probably only a couple of weeks old. It is quite a marvel of engineering.

Bamboo is quite plentiful in Cambodia and is very strong.

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Here, a horse draws a heavy load across the bridge, but we saw cars and even large trucks crossing!

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Our turn! I follow Neda as she slowly descends down the muddy path (because of all the recent rains) to the shore where the bamboo bridge begins

Holy crap, what an experience! The minute our wheels hit the bamboo, it felt like we were riding on a waterbed. There's two distinct sensations as you make your way across the narrow pathway: 1) the clackety sound as the bamboo creaks under your bike and 2) an undulating sensation as the bridge sags underneath you, and you can feel the same sag when other vehicles pass by you as well. Very unsettling!
 
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At several points in the bridge, they've built pull-outs to allow larger vehicles to get by

The bridge is not only for transportation. We have to dodge scooters parked haphazardly along the length of the bridge, it's owners just abandoned them to go fishing off the side of the bridge or to go diving into the Mekong, hunting for cockels.

Is it safe? *shrug* There are no guardrails. And I've read reports of some less skilled riders who've lost control and dumped their scooters and motorcycles into the Mekong River. But it seems to be fairly sturdy and if you're going slow enough, no reason to go over the edge by accident...

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Totally enjoying such a unique way of crossing the river

This bridge is not a permanent fixture. In June, when the rainy season arrives, the waters of the Mekong River will rise and become more turbulent. Either the villagers will dismantle the bridge, or more often than not, the Mekong will do the job for them, washing it away. Hopefully there will be nobody on the bridge when that happens. However, I've read that by June, six months of wear and tear on the bamboo will make it a risky proposition to cross anyway, turbulent river or not! :)

And then another six month wait, until construction will begin anew on the next Bamboo Bridge of Kampong Cham.
 
[video=youtube;RkrXkKb_hDc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkrXkKb_hDc[/video]
What's it like riding on a bridge made entirely out of bamboo? Here's a short video of the obstacles you'll face

2018 Addendum: We've just found out that the time we visited was the final year for the bamboo bridge. They've just completed construction on a permanent concrete bridge about 2 kms north of the bamboo bridge. A Google Maps picture shows the site of the old bridge vs the new one:

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The annual construction of the bamboo bridge has been going on for decades, but now it looks like modern times have caught up to Kampong Cham and have won out over the old ways. It's a shame because I think the bridge brought a lot of curious visitors to the area, and now hotels and restaurants in town will suffer for it.

Normally the Mekong River washes away the bamboo bridge every June. We're so glad to have gotten a chance to ride on it before the tides of history washed it away for good.
 
Riceburner said:
Here I thought today's posts were more updates....read these already on RideDOT.com. :( moar!!!




Nooooooo.....the suspense......
Click to expand...


There's a new catch-up game in town: GTAM to catch up with RideDot.com
 
Updated from http://www.RideDOT.com/rtw/383.html

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We are journeying south, towards the capital city of Cambodia, Phnom Penh.

Some of the interesting things we see along the way:

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We thought we carried a lot of stuff on our BMWs. This guy is wider than the truck in front of him!

We don't need any signs to realize when we were approaching the city limits. The urban density explodes all of a sudden and we find ourselves surrounded in the hot Cambodian afternoon's traffic stew, thousands of cars with even more tiny scooters thrown in the mix with large trucks. And us, in the middle, being stirred, jostled and bullied by all manner of vehicles.

In the hierarchy of bad traffic, Phnom Penh ranks right up there with the worst. Two-wheelers are definitely the third-class citizens of the road, being cut off and honked at by cars and trucks. Maybe it was because we had spent so much time in the smaller city of Chiang Mai, but we miss the relative calm and politeness of Thai traffic. Even downtown Bangkok was not as bad as this!

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Our first stop: Visa Run Duties

We had entered Thailand on a one-month visa exemption and left right when it expired. When we return, our plan is to stay in Thailand for as long as we can, so we are applying for a two-month visa at the Royal Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh, and then extending it for another month when we are in Chiang Mai. That should give us three months total. And we definitely need that uninterrupted rest!

Unfortunately we had read that the Thai embassy in Phnom Penh was very difficult to deal with because they receive so many border runners from Thailand. In order to by-pass all the hassles, we were encouraged to use fixers. In all of our border crossings, we had never employed fixers, but with all the research we had done, it seemed justified in this case.

Our fixer thumbed through our passports, noting all of our Thai entry stamps. Thankfully, we were under the limit that would arouse suspicion from the Thai embassy. As of last year, the new limit is two back-to-back border runs via land per calendar year. We had only done one in Laos last year so we were safe.

The Thai government seems to be cracking down on long-term tourists in their country. Unfortunately, we want to be two of those long-term tourists...

It's such a screwy situation: The Thai border regulations require that our bikes return back to the country very soon. Just not the people who rode them out! They have to beg to be let back in.

Our fixer told us to return in 48 hours for the final verdict on whether we'd be let back in the country or not.

Just like the name of our fixer above, we are keeping our fingers crossed.
 
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We got a wonderful room on the roof-top. This was our view!

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On our street, there are a few restaurants which we sampled over the next couple of days. This roof-top place was one of our favorites

One of the things we wanted to visit in Phnom Penh was the Genocide Museum. It's located right downtown and was only 10-minutes away from our hotel, so we quickly hopped on the bikes and made our way over.

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Barbed wire lined the walls surrounded the Tuol Sleng High School

I had just recently watched the movie, "The Killing Fields", and I had done a lot of reading about the history of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot's paranoiac genocide of his own people. I went in with a lot of information.

Once this new communist government seized power in 1975, they villainized anything to do with the old regime. Anyone having anything to do with the former government, merchants, doctors, teachers and intellectuals were imprisoned and labeled enemies of the state. Schools and hospitals were closed down. City dwellers were expelled out into the countryside. The idea was to turn everyone in Cambodia into farmers to realize the communist dream of equality. The problem was, nobody knew how to farm and many people in country starved to death as a result.

Hundreds of thousands of "enemies of the state" were sent to torture prisons to confess to crimes of sedition, spying and undermining the new government. This meant anyone who showed any intellectual leanings: a higher education, the ability to speak a foreign language, even those who wore glasses, were sent to these prisons.

In the movie, The Killing Fields, the main character had to pretend to be simple-minded to escape being imprisoned.
 
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One such prison was Tuol Sleng High School, notoriously renamed Security Prison 21 (S-21) by the Khmer Rouge

This facility held 1,500 people at a time, to be starved and tortured until they confessed to being a spy. Once a confession was extracted, they were sent to The Killing Fields to be exterminated.

An estimated 3 million died during the Khmer Rouge's reign between 1975 and 1979.

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A bedframe where prisoners were shackled to and tortured until they confessed

Some paintings on the walls showed the types of torture methods the Khmer Rouge used. Electric shocks were administered to prisoners tongues, their fingernails pulled out with clamps, organs were cut out of the body while the prisoner was alive. Dried pools of blood had congealed beneath these beds when the torture prison was liberated.

I found it deeply ironic that such atrocities were committed on the high-school's cheery yellow checkerboard floor. It felt so incongruent.

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A crude and gruesome diorama outside on the former school's grounds depicting torture

Over 17,000 people passed through Tuol Sleng's gates. And only seven known survived.

Many of them were Cambodian, some Vietnamese, a handful of westerners. Of them, a young American Kerry Hamill, was captured when his yacht sailed into Cambodian waters in 1978. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge kept detailed accounts on everyone they tortured and killed. Hamill was recorded as confessing to serving under Colonel Sanders. He used his home telephone number as his CIA operative number and listed close friends and family as CIA contacts. Hamill's wry confession while under torture was a reminder that the KR needed the flimsiest of reasons to kill their prisoners, no matter if they were innocent or not.
 
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Barbed wire covering the prisoners rooms, preventing escape or suicide

Pol Pot grew increasingly paranoid of anyone who would threaten his new regime. Even high-ranking members of his own cadre were eventually imprisoned, tortured and killed. Towards the end of the regime most of the prisoners were members of the Khmer Rouge itself, suspected of being enemies within the organization.

Crazy.

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Part of the torture was being imprisoned in standing cells, unable to sit or lie down

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A memorial plaque with some of the victim's names in Tuol Sleng

The sign on the memorial stupa reads, "Never will we forget the crimes committed during the Democratic Kampuchea regime".
 
The next day, we visit another site: the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre. It's about 17kms south of Phnom Penh.

Prisoners that had confessed in the torture camps around the country were then taken out to the countryside to be exterminated - "Smashed" in Khmer Rouge parlance, for the preferred method of bashing victims to death with ox-cart axles to save bullets - and buried in mass graves.

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Choeung Ek used to be an orchard but is now the site of over 8,000 bodies

Huge depressions in the ground mark where bodies have been dug up. Sometimes during a hard rainfall, more bodies will still be discovered.

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This was a part of the ground where 450 bodies alone were discovered

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Visitors have left thousands of colourful prayer bracelets to remember and honour the dead
 
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This tree was the most depressing part of the genocidal centre

Part of the KR's policy was to immediately kill children and infants of suspected spies, for fear they would grow up and retaliate against the state. In keeping with the regime's policy of saving bullets, babies were held by their feet and their heads were repeatedly swung against the tree until they died.

Oh my god, that was so disgusting, disturbing and depressing.

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A large Buddhist Stupa is erected on the grounds

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Inside are over 5,000 skulls of the bodies unearthed at Choeung Ek, categorized by sex and age
 
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Also are recovered fragments of bone, categorized into acrylic boxes

Evidence of the regime's violence on these skeletons are labeled, "Evidence of bullet", "Evidence of iron tool (impalement)", "Evidence of tooth treatment (dental torture)".

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The dead stare back at us, both as a reminder and a warning against anything like this happening again
 
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