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Tuk-tuks well travelled

23rd April, 2017

When in Cambodia I wondered where were the choked roads? The mad leap-frogging along narrow roads with someone hanging out the door touting for business? Stops made seemingly at the driver’s whim… the impossibility of making your way from the back of the bus before it is off and away and you are carried well beyond where you wanted to get off?

Yes, there are minibuses that travel between the main cities and towns, even air conditioned coaches, but they are relatively few and run perhaps twice a day. To get anywhere in Cambodia you need to use that class of vehicle somewhere between a taxi and a small goods carrying utility, the tuk tuk. Not the tuk-tuks of India or Sri Lanka, those thought bubbles on wheels hatched from scooters and lemons, but longish surreys with fringes on top and a modified scooter instead of a horse.

Padded benches, open sides, a maximum speed of maybe 30k.p.h on a good road, they are a perfect way to ride from temple to temple in Siem Reap. You think, oh, yeah, Angkor Wat; but when you get there you realise there is so much more than that and that walking from site to site in the heat is a penance too great for this pilgrim. So, hire a tuk-tuk for the day with a driver who knows the best times to take you to a particular temple – like the delightful Banteay Srei showing off its pink tinged delicate and intricate sandstone carvings best in the early morning or late evening. Or where to drop you off and collect you when you want to traverse the length of a temple like the Preah Khan with its long low central corridor that opens up every now and then into a high vaulted room off which small temples branch and not have to walk all the way back again. Or who knows the spot from which at any time of day to have the best view of the monumental heads of the Bayon whose smiles easily compete with the Mona Lisa for inscrutability.

And you will certainly need a tuk-tuk for exploring the countryside outside of the main tourist towns. At Kratie, a five to seven-hour coach trip depending on the state of the road and the weather, you take a tuk-tuk along the main highway now become a narrow, patched asphalt road between fields of peanuts, radish, low bushes of beans and ponds where someone is gathering spent lotus blossoms to sell by the roadside for the snack ready traveller to prise the seeds from. Your destination is the Kratie rapids, the last of the rapids on this stretch of the Mekong, gentle enough in the dry season as they swirl around grassed sand islands and playground for the rare small, snub-nosed Irrawaddy dolphin.

At Kompong Chan, a couple of hours up the road form Phnom Penh on the highway to Laos, the tuk-tuk ride to take is along the high bank of the Mekong. Through fields of corn and tobacco and a seemingly endless strip of townships where street markets spill onto roadways; vegetables, fruit, an abundance of pond and river fish and bivalves, creating a health inspector’s nightmare as traffic belches exhaust fumes and lifts up dust in small whirlwinds. Your destination here is the Wat Maha Leap, last working wooden pagoda in Cambodia, a spacious serene single room with pillars of black lacquered wood painted with extravagant gold leaf floral and mythical motifs, a high vaulted ceiling with three superb pastel narrative paintings, and a surprisingly almost mosque-like tiled floor. The grounds feature one of those curiosities of many Cambodian temples, a sort of concrete sculpture garden of Hindu gods, wild animals, tableau from the Buddha’s life and the occasional inexplicable sculpture of, say, local fruit.

South West of Phnom Penh, head for Kampot, a growing tourist destination for those wanting to escape the sprawl and smoggy air of Phnom Penh on the one hand and the over-hyped resorts of Sihanoukville on the other. The French colonial quarter here is compact and still a mix of functional residential dwellings – open doors giving tantalising views into front rooms crowded with furniture and shrines and children playing on polished concrete floors, from terraces graced by ancient bougainvillea a-flower in orange, saffron, cerise – and others repurposed as cafes, restaurants, bookshops, clothing shops. The tuk tuk ride to do here is a day trip that takes in the salt pans on the edge of town (sounds boring but is actually quite fascinating), one of the pepper farms springing up in the hinterland (Kampot pepper now prized as a gourmet terroir product), down to the crab market at Kep for lunch either in the market itself from one of the stalls barbecuing all kinds of river and seafood or in one of the many restaurants that front the river here, and finally to the Phnom Chhnogk limestone caves with its small brick Cham temple, pre-dating Angkor, and its famous lingam formed by a natural stalactite.

All this is there to be explored by you… and your fantastic and adaptable Cambodian tuk tuk.

Drop me a line at anthea@travelyourway.com.au for a FREE DREAM SESSION where together we will craft your ultimate Cambodian getaway tuk tuk style.

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