What to expect on a Cambodian work trip

I want to tell you about some of the things that happen when I go to the provinces with work. I have been on two of these trips now, seven days in total and I will try and give you an idea of all the interesting things that happen, in no particular order. It is really quite hard to represent some of these situations, but I will try to represent them here as accurately as possible to give you an idea.

The roads – on average I found that you would almost run over three cows per day and perhaps one dog. The chickens often came close, but wouldn't really venture out onto the road. The cows sort of lazily stroll across the road, oblivious to the huge trucks overloaded with potatoes or other heavy goods.

The next challenge on the roads was the surface, or lack of. At certain points the tarmac would disappear as you drove along, creating large red dust clouds which make it very difficult to see. If you are unlucky enough not to have air-con (we didn’t for our first trip) this results in you having to have the windows down and therefore inhaling plenty of dust. Face masks are a compulsory counterpart on any out-of-city trip. At some points we were thrown to the roof of the truck, whilst flying over bumps in the road – or craters! The road works that pop up along the way divert you onto the side of the road, with very little room for two-way traffic and in some cases a very steep camber with a pool of water 20 feet below.

Another safety issue is the close shaves. The main roads have one lane of traffic in each direction, which means there is a lot of overtaking. However, this issue is made more complicated by the continuous stream of motorbikes and other possible traffic such as horse carts, weird tractor type vehicles and often school children on bikes. As a 4x4 speeds past to overtake a large truck, the truck swerves out to avoid a cyclist or some such, all whilst the on-coming traffic is in a similar position of overtaking, leading to a very close shave – as nobody wants to give in. All vehicles beep their horn in this situation, to make everyone else they are aware they are there, which doesn’t help at all. I was sharply in-taking my breath quite regularly, especially on the earlier trips, but you sort of get used to it.

Overloading – pretty much every vehicle is overloaded. You would not believe how many people and items will fit on one moped. Luggage can really be way over the sides with about four passengers behind the driver. Then there are the trucks which are packed full of produce, the boots are often open to allow for produce hanging out the back and the roofs are off to keep piling stuff in, on top. There can then be people even higher, teetering over the edge. The minibuses are jam-packed full of people, sitting on top of each other, with chickens and there are regularly mopeds tied onto the back. I even saw a moped hanging off the back with a woman sat on it, effectively not even in the minibus at all – incredible!

The overloading leads me on to when we were following a sugar cane truck that was so overloaded that every bump in the road (frequent) would lead to a stick of sugar cane falling off the back. Our truck and another car ended up doing a yo-yo of picking up sugar cane, then driving past them whilst they picked up the next one, and then grabbing the next lot. It was pretty hilarious, with shouting out the window, motorbike drivers getting involved and a lot of running about chasing sugar cane for about 20 minutes.

Khmer Meetings with government officials – Everyone fumbles about over where to sit and chairs are moved around, it seems aimlessly. It can often begin with awkward silence and then formal introductions, give an explanation of what they are doing, statistics and how good they are. Everyone’s phone will ring at least once with a garish ringtone and they will answer the call. Cover their mouth but made no difference, this includes if they were the person currently speaking during the meeting, or translating! Everyone would start to get anxious if the meeting ran into lunch or dinner time, which can be as extensive as 11.30am to 2pm.