Travel Blog; Part One (of Four)

There I was after hour four on the bus through Cambodia’s remote frontier, linking my trip to the beautiful ancient ruins of Angkor Wat, to the next stage of my journey. I had grown weary of riding the bus by this point. Though the frontier is splendidly rural, unspoiled and certainly a joy to observe from the windows of a bus, I was ready to reach my destination, the capitol city Phnom Penh. That’s when my carriage to the capitol got caught in the worst traffic jam I’ve ever seen.(Including LA, Bangkok, and last December when Jason and I were vectored over Loveland pass on a Friday at midnight because of an accident in Eisenhower tunnel!) During the bus ride, I had been seated next to the only other traveler aboard, and while I was content to ride the jam out, he was not. After some confusion, a bit of translation, and lots of questions to the locals on the bus he determined with more than 50% certainty that we were about 7km from town, and it would take around four hours for our bus to clear the bottleneck of other buses, motorbikes, vans and cars, that were returning from a religious pilgrimage to the countryside by way of this one-lane, barley paved highway.

“Get off now, we’re walking,” he said. Playing the more than 50% odds and remembering my 5k ‘fun run’ times from my days in Stillwater enjoying the Juke Joint Jog, I figured it was worth a shot. So I got off and I walked, at breakneck speed jumping muddy ditches, dodging other Cambodian walkers, pushing and weaving through congested bottlenecks of motorbikes and moving horizontally through narrow breaks in bus traffic. At some point my 200 baht (6 USD) backpack straps broke and I had to tie a them into knots around the waste strap, but that only stopped our forward progress for a moment and after a bit of adapting, I had a bag that could be carried on my back again.

It was crazy! But it was a blast and in the end it worked. We reached the other side of the traffic jam in about an hour of speed walking with only a few bumps, bruises and burns from running into motorbike pedals and bus bumpers. I got the best cardio work-out since leaving the states. And I think in a few months my lungs might recover from the fumes as well. Definitely worth getting off the bus.