The ‘Road’ to Nowhere

The following morning I secured myself a spot in another pick-up that had seen better days. The tunes of choice were a nasty brand of cheap Asian techno, which had me grimacing for about as long as it took to get out of town. The dusty, rocky trail that led to Choam Ksant was the worst approximation of a road I have ever seen. I can’t imagine the possibilities of traversing its length in the wet season – probably akin to cycling across Morecambe Bay just after the tide’s gone out – but it was arduous enough in the dry. We spent most of the journey leaning hard one way or the other as our driver skilfully negotiated the thin top edges of ruts left by the huge Russian army transports used to take the logs down to the lake. There were too many bone-jarring crunches and brain-reverberating bounces to recount…and we did, of course, get the inevitable flat tyre. This was changed with well-practised alacrity by the mechanic (a vital addition, it seems, to any pick-up journey) and we eventually covered the 62km in a little over 3½ hours.
Choam Ksant, being only 20km from the Thai border, is an important trading post containing – and I quote – ‘a thriving market’. On arrival, it resembled nothing so much as the Skywalker’s moisture farm in Star Wars…an almost lifeless dustbowl. Avoiding the dubious hospitality of the Sok San Guesthouse (apparently, nothing more than a brothel for the nearby army base), I was left with the Heng Heng Guest House – my room being a cowshed with mosquito net and private bathroom. Mr. Wiep, the owner, was a rakish, likely-lad with gold chains and a silk shirt. He seemed to know that I wanted to go to the mountain temple (after all, what the hell else is there to do out there!) and offered to take me for, what seemed a reasonable 15$. The LP had warned of an horrendous, sandy, rocky ox track, taking 3 hours to get to the temple, followed by a dangerous, difficult-to-find path up the mountain, requiring your driver’s local knowledge to guide you away from any minefields. They suggested 10$ plus petrol was a good price and I felt 15$ including petrol was fine.
As the final part of my pilgrimage was to take a full day, there was nothing to do but read and sleep until the morning. In the evening Mr. Wiep took me to a place where I could get a bite to eat – no restaurants as such in this town! – and, fortunately (so it seemed), there was a lovely chap called Rin, who spoke excellent English. Through this intermediary, Mr. Wiep was trying to persuade me to spend more money by riding the bike all the way up to the temple and then, instead of returning to Choam Ksant, he was offering to take me west to a town called Anlong Veng, from whence it would only be a few hours to Siem Reap. Two things saved me from this intended scam. Firstly, I was mad-keen to make the hike up the mountain after my recent idleness and, secondly, after my experiences in the pick-up and the arse-deadening long-distance riding in Vietnam, there was no way I was riding a bike any further than necessary. Seeing that he wasn’t getting anywhere, he left me to enjoy my noodles and a few cans of Crown beer with Rin and a couple of other lads: Losa and Mao.