Country Roads Take Me Home

Ratanakiri province is a jungle forest populated by ethnic minority hill tribes. It is spectacular in its beauty and makes the perfect salve for a contused will. I'm adding some older entries that I neglected to add previously, so look back a week or so for new old stuff.

Compared to the battered network of craters that is Highway 7, the road to Bin Lung is idyllic. It's graded dirt, peppered with a few deep, hard to see potholes, but by motorbike it's easily negotiated. Forty kilometers east of Stung Trueng it drops from sparsely forested hillside into a wide patchwork valley of rice farms and cattle grazing. Climbing up again, the road narrows and is encroached by dense, breathing jungle. Every thirty kilometers or so there is a shift like this. An unending terrain parade that keeps the first time visitors guessing. Bin Lung is the center of a fairly active tourist trade. The main attractions are the ethnic hill people, the volcanic lake, and a slew of overhyped underfed waterfalls.

Upon entering the town itself, I headed to the market for lunch. Cambodians close it down around noon, making noodles a rare find afterwards. I saw a few Land Cruisers with NGO logos parked outside a tin shack restaurant just off the market and decided to stop there. It was Chinese food. Just fire and a wok and an old man, but he was busting out some delicious grub and the place smelled fantastic. Spicy crispy beef with garlic and baby bok choy pretty much did me up. The old cook could give a shit though, he was sweating up a storm over an open flame, letting the better part of his perspiration flavor the dishes.

My hotel, which I discovered on a posted ad in an internet shop in Phnom Penh, was called Yaklom Hill Resort and was owned by a very knowledgeable Khmer man whose name I forget almost immediately upon first hearing it. He was trying to get me to go on all these tours to see waterfalls and cemeteries and stuff, but the look on my face made him change tack. Or you could just sit around and enjoy Yaklom, he said.

I was still feeling pretty tentative after my ass kicking illness so I spent the first two days enjoying Yaklom from my porch. I read a Russian prison memoir by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and some vaguely new agey journey-of-self-discovery book by Paulo Coehlo. There just isn't a lot of selection for reading material out here. Nonetheless, this is exactly what I needed. The days were warm and humid, somewhere in the 90's I'd estimate and my utter lack of activity gave my guts a chance to settle down and rehydrate.

On the third day in the mountains I took a ride out to some remote village on a really fun road. Without my bags and gear on the back I was free to go all out and slip and slide and generally to tear it up X-games style. I thought I was so pro until I totally ate it on a turn, going to fast, locking up my front brakes and completely losing my traction. The bike layed down and slid into the foliage and a flock of kids ran out to point fingers and laugh at me. It's good to crash. I'm defintely beginning to understand where the envelope is on that bike. It doesn't like loose dirt on hard roads. Soft dirt is great - plenty of traction, but the front tire tends to lose grip when the ground is too firm and covered in gravel or sand.

After a couple of hours I reached a riverside village where the road ended into a T junction. I turned right and drove through the small town for about 500 meters, eventually arriving at the local Buddhist temple. Like many small hamlets out here, there are more materials in the main temple building than there are in all the other village homes combined. A typical home out here looks like it could be constructed in about a week by five guys. They are simple but sturdy and they are perfectly suited for the environment. Living in a concrete house out here would be pure misery. A house in the jungle needs pores. It needs the wind to flow through it and the water to drain out of it. During the 150km journey from Stung Treung to Ban Lung I didn't see one pane of glass.

Coming back to town I took a detour into a rubber plantation. Rubber trees are big. For some reason I thought rubber trees were not trees at all but something more like bamboo - stalks or something. The plantation was cool because each tree is constantly producing sap. The bark is stripped off in a spiral so that the sap from the bottom four inches follows the spiral down and into a white plastic bucket waiting patiently at the bottom of the tree. As the tree grows, the spiral is cut further so that the drainage spout forever remains two or three feet off the ground. Thousands and thousands of trees stand in rows, slowly bleeding their white rubbery sap. The plantation road got smaller and smaller until it turned into nothing more than a footpath. I was sure it would loop around and end up on a larger road, but it dead ended at a small house. Lolling in the house was a family. They eyed me lazily if not nonchalantly upon my arrival. I think it was just to hot for them to be surprised that a stinky, sweaty white guy just roared onto your propery 5km from anywhere and sheepishly smiled at them. They smiled back. We had a language problem. I said T'gnai k'dau. T'gnai k'dau nah. Which basically means, it's hot today - damn hot! They all nodded knowingly. I pointed forward to where the footpath turned into an animal trail and questioningly asked, "Bin Lung?" The man flipped a U with his finger and jabbed in the opposite direction indicating that I had hit a dead end. I pressed my palms together and politely said goodbye with a choong riep sua. They opted out of the reciprocal gesture and offered me a heavy lidded nod instead.

At the resort I met a stream of travelers coming and going. First was an energetic group of gin+tonic loving Brits who helped to revive my spirits. One of them, a woman named Charlie was considering buying a cashew farm after being offered one. She had all the economics worked out and all of our pleading couldn't dissuade her. She seemed to have completely forgot the whole scheme by the next day. Another in the group was a guy whose name I forgot (god I suck at names) who along with his friends back home had invented a slew of really good slang words. I forgot most of them, but one was "kingali" which means something like evil. For an example use in context his girlfriend demonstrated: "kingali, dah-ling, kingali." They were a hoot and they were gone the next day.

A Frenchman named Phillipe was there with his family and some friends. They were a cool group and they were really enjoying their time there. Phillipe offered to help me when bike selling time came and he gave me his number. French people are cool man, I don't care what network television says.

The last group I met was a pair of Irish girls and an English guy. Super nice folks and after a few meals with them I knew they were solidly good people. British and Irish people are so witty and I love to hear the banter that inevitably erupts from a few bottles of Angkor beer.

I hauled ass on the road back to Stung Treung, averaging 60km/hr and sometimes hitting 90. That was a wild ride. You just never know when a pig or a child or a lumber truck is going to charge out into the road. I met up with my new pals here and tomorrow, when they start south I'll be going the opposite direction.

The road to the Laos border is 60km long and apparently takes four and a half hours. It must be all sand, because I can't imagine averaging only 15km/hour for that long. Hopefully I'll be able to catch a boat up the Mekong instead. Laos means a new language, a new culture, new scenery, new customs, and perhaps most significantly a new sticker for my helmet.