Tippy Shippy

Sometimes, traveling the way I am, uninformed decisions need to be made. A coin was flipped a couple days ago and this is what happened.

There is a man in Stung Treung named Mr. T. I asked him if he pitied the fool that tried to get him on an airplane, and he shook his head no, so apparently there's no relation to our favorite A-Teammate. Anyway, he knows just about every logistical detail concerned with moving in and around Stung Treung. I needed to get to Cambodia and so I asked him whether it was better to go by boat or to take the road. He said the bike would only fit on the slow boat, which takes 5 hours. The road on the other hand takes 4 hours, but since it's only fifty kilometers, the conditions must be very, very bad. He said the road was mostly sand. He also said that sometimes the slow boats breakdown or sink, unable to fight the upstream currents of the Mekong. I deliberated for a day, constantly flip-flopping my decision, inventing strange justifications for one way over the other. Finally I decided that the boat, no matter how treacherous, would be more interesting than driving 10km/hr through sand for four hours.

Mr. T told me to meet him at six in the morning so that we could secure a place on the popular slow boat. We met at his restaurant and proceded to the dock together to negotiate a price. The dock isn't actually a dock. It's a jetty. The boats crowd up along the jetty, balancing between the rocks that jut out from the sides. I was a bit confused. Mr. T was talking to a man on a boat that couldn't possibly take my bike. Ah, but anything is possible in Cambodia. I have stopped fighting it. If they say the bike can go on the boat, then I believe. The boat is about four feet wide, two feet deep and thirty feet long. It is constructed of wood and looked to be about one hundred years old. Many of the nails holding the hull to the ribs were sticking out allowing small trickles of water to seep in, enlarging the already too large puddle sloshing beneath the floorboards.

Time came to load the bike. Pan pried a floorboard from the boat and made a ramp from the jetty to the rim of the hull. One man jumped into the water and held the boat steady, to keep it from rocking sideways as the bike was rolled on. The bike weighs at least four hundred pounds. Four men (actually three men and a kid) wheeled, lifted, balanced, rotated and eventually positioned the bike onto the boat. I was impressed. They tied the bike with rope to keep it erect and along the centerline of the ship.

The boats leave when they are full. My boat's first mate, a twelve-year-old kid named Pan (or something vaguely similar) estimated that we would leave at eight. At nine thirty I estimated that we were full. Then a motorcyle came up, dropping off a woman and child and two huge baskets of tobacco. We were already laden with hundreds of pounds of rice, numerous boxes of motorbike parts, laundry soap, flour, several bags of butchered meat, and about twenty passengers. No luggage though. I decided to sit on the roof, fearing the sun less than the claustrophobia below. At ten we finally left the jetty. The boat was full - I will vouche for that fact.

Sometimes terms like fast and slow are misleading when it comes to travel options. That was not the case here. Fast boats are thin, needle-like boats with huge engines bolted onto their rears. They haul ass down the river, making a deafening racket and spraying exhaust and water behind them in a dragster-like display of brute force over hydrodynamics. The slow boat plods. It's engine comes from a vintage gas mower and it idles at roughly one revolution per second. There is never a feeling of acceleration on the slow boat. On several occasions the current overpowered us and unable to swim against it, we tacked instead. We tacked in a motorboat. It wasn't too bad though. I had a book and every ten minutes I would peek out of the pages to note any changes in scenery.

The Mekong is a beautiful river. The stretch we traveled was boiling with currents. Huge whirlpools formed where small islands disrupted the flow and forced water to speed up through naturally formed channels. The boatman was very adept at riding the right flows and avoiding the wrong ones. In some sections the boat was pushed around like a little lincoln log and I was sweating the idea that one of these sideways jars would capsize us. People below kept moving around, adding to the general feeling of imbalance. I was rolling around on the roof in vain attempting to counter the ballast changes below. A thunderstorm came overhead for an hour or so, drenching the boat and quaking the sky with frequent, violent lightning. You know that trick where you count the seconds from the flash to the sound of thunder. It was like, one. Flash, and then BOOOOOMCRAAACK-GRRRRR.

We neared the border and began offloading our passengers and cargo at small stops on both sides of the river. Usually it was just a mud bank with a house sitting high above. Pan would throw the cargo overboard into the mud and help some woman or man off the ship. After five or six stops the boat was empty. The boat stops first on the Cambodian side of the river. I was worried because this border crossing is not officially open to tourists. Under those conditions anything could happen - and after a seven hour boat ride the last thing I wanted to do was bust a U-turn. Moment of truth. I ran up the bank (about 5 meters high) and into the empty customs and immigration office. A man emerged from the next hut, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, dressed only in his blue knockoff Tommy Hilfiger boxer-briefs. He gave me some forms to fill out and he stamped my passport. I told him about the motorcycle and he gave me another form and sent me to yet another office in the three hut complex. Forms, money, forms, money. Five dollars, three forms and six rubber stamps later I was back in the boat.

We crossed the river to the Lao side and pulled up sideways along the shore. This side had a small sandy beach and the problem of unloading the bike suddenly became obvious to our limited crew of two and a half. If anyone deserved a hernia it was us. We heaved and bent and twisted and forgot to use our leg muscles. Somehow we got the bike out of the boat and onto the sand without dropping it into the water. The three of us took a small self-congratulatory rest afterwards, letting the profuse perspiration soak into our clothes. I offered my thanks and a heartfelt goodbye. They sort of nodded, started up the lawn mower and putted away.

From the beach there was no easy way to get the bike upto the road. Oh, you should have seen me. I had it in first gear, revving away, spraying sand and dirt and climbing a precariously loose trail which snaked between two overhanging dwellings. A group of Lao people gathered to watch. They were really rooting me on I think. I mean, they were laughing their asses off too, but they seemed pretty stoked for me when I made it to the top. In hindsight I think it would have been cooler if I didn't take two pitstops along the 50 foot journey to regain my composure.

The Lao side of the border was even easier than the Cambodian side. Once I found the immigration officer (out of uniform, drinking a beer and watching football with a group of out-of-work tour guides) he walked me to the immigration booth, stamped my passport, took my money and hurried back to his game. "What about my motorcycle?" He just waved his hand, like shoo! A local guide watched the whole thing and gave me directions to Don Ket, a little island on the Mekong that's popular with tourists.

On the way to the island I rode a small section of Laos' National Highway 13. Oh, it was heaven! Paved! And in superb condition - no potholes, no landslides, no overgrowth. Riding to Vientiene was going to be an entirely different proposition from Cambodia where paved roads are more rare than ATMs.

Don Ket is an idyllic place. I heard there were people that had been there for months. This would be difficult as the island is very small and there isn't much to do there except float in the river and drink Beer Lao. Travelers are coming and going in the little dugout river taxis, like a stream of ants with high-tech backpacks. My little room was just a bed and a mosquito net, but it had a hammock out front on the porch overlooking the river. I ate some noodles, talked to some Aussies, read by candlelight and fell asleep early.