Road Stuff

This is the pinnacle of success for Cambodians. If you are an upper civil servant it is a must. Your upfront salary could be as little as $ 500 a month but you can still buy an L by other means such as having other business interests and by how others below you appreciating  your patronage.

Very useful in Cambodian traffic and traffic jams as below. Fancy walking across that at night..scary !

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Crossing the streets here is a challenge as the idea of rules of the road is a flexible concept. By enlarge the motor cyclists will flow around you if you cross the street in a slow, purposeful and confident manner. The Lexus driver assumes you shouldn’t be there so it is more prudent to trust the flow instinct of the small man on the motor cyclist rather than the big one in the motoring icon.

The following fruit says it all

Being a VSO we are expected to be part of the people so the motor cycle is going to be our mode of transport and so on Saturday 16^th (my father would have been 100 if he had stayed around) we had motorcycle training. This took place at the village of Soklaing one of the Cambodians working at the VSO office in Phnom Penh.  Here are some shots of our day in his house, village and suburbs. 

Being Cambodia food and hospitality are to the foremost. Food glorious food  or foo as they would pronounce it as people from this part of the world don’t finish word with explosive consonants like we do, they swallow them.

These are the 3 rules of the road according to Adam our Australian instructor (who loves motorbiking here)

1                     Cambodians drive on the right hand side of the road unless they don’t feel like it

2                     Traffic lights should be obeyed sometimes but remember that 10 sec before green is the same as green and 10 sec after red is the same as green

3                     All other rules are optional

Caroline the Kenyan queen (in the group photo) among us had the most exciting day as she struggled to stay on the bike and had to opt to be a pillion rider. Overall it was our most exciting and exhausting ( temp = 38 deg) day of the training to date. And a lot of the credit has to go to our two seated hosts, Soklaing and his lovely wife (who works for Tiger beer and needless to say it wasn't a tiger free day.