Here, anything that can be equipped with wheels is. Anything that accelerates the transition from here to there is utilized to maximum possible impact. The wheel might be the single most prized tool in Cambodia.
Little kids ride bikes that I’d have trouble pedaling. Back and forth to school over the muddy pack of rocks that serves as a road, a six year old boy with an unflappable grin stands on the pedals of his rust brown bike, gripping the rubber handlebars high above his face with both arms stretched to their limits. The hard plastic bike seat threatens to poke him in the back of the neck each time he stands up to coast.
In a temple courtyard, a boy of four can’t even stand on two pedals at once. Grabbing the seat in one hand and the left handlebar in the other, he stands with his right foot on the downed pedal and pumps the bike across the ground like a scooter – 3, 4, 5 steps and he stands upright, supporting his full weight against the single pedal, tilting the bike sideways to achieve a vector equilibrium with his spindly arms. His inertia brings him in a slight circle, and he pumps his way around the gravel with his shirtless friends shouting encouragement.
Cambodia’s more remote corners are only accessible by dirt roads in various stages of construction, repair and natural degradation. Every wet season brings a deluge of mud across the country, and in the northeast province of Rattanakiri, the Mars Red dust that defines the landscape becomes a sweeping mudslide of infrastructure destruction. The roads offer unlimited employment opportunity for repair workers. As such, big, luxury busses are not the best choice. Their slow, lumbering bulk outweighs any comfort achieved with a more expensive ticket. The road is much more navigable in a large van, which is the favored choice for locals moving from place to place.
These rebuilt Japanese vans are outfitted with jacked-up rear suspension, additional rows of seats built up for extra storage space between cushion and floor, and roof-rack rope rigs for holding anything from chicken coops to generators to motorbikes. In a typical van, one that would be noticeably uncomfortable if all seats were filled – four rows of four, plus the two front seats, for a total of 18 tight spots – twenty five to thirty people are regularly jammed. Elbows and armpits find homes in the curves and soft corners of your sweaty neighbor. Enormous bags are stuffed and tied down in any available airspace. The cubic capacity of the van is filled, no matter the consequences. Comfort is not a factor for these people. It hasn’t been for their entire lives.
Two people sit in the driver’s seat. From a perch in the center of the second-to-last row it’s impossible to tell which one is at the controls, or if they have achieves some reliable hybrid driving team – one guy on the pedals while his friend mans the wheel. With an extra row of seats bolted to the floor, the space between cushions is far shorter than the average Western femur. To contort your body into your designated spot your feet rest atop the canvas bag of rice on the floor, just about butt-height. Your knees are at their extended limit, bent to 75 or 80 degrees and jammed into the leather cushion in front, hopefully bridging a gap between that seat’s vertical steel internal framing members.
After thirty minutes, the pain starts. It begins like a yawn – a mental itch – almost anxiety provoking, that you feel for some reason you can flex away. But your butt is not going to feel better. It hurts more and more as blood rushes to your lowest point, then pools there. You want it to go numb, isn’t that how bedsores start? But numb doesn’t come. It’s a swelling, almost tidal pain, which at its peak demands affirmation. The only solution is to brace yourself against the seats, front and back, and flex your quads in a half squat position, trying to support your butt in midair to relieve pressure for twenty or thirty seconds. Quickly, you realize that, as the largest human on the bus to begin with, you are now interfering in your neighbors’ personal space even more. Shamefully, you sit down to continue the bumpy torment.
This personal space qualm is not shared by the locals. Touching, bumping, coughing, sweating, they simply don’t register as offensive. It’s a Zen-like confident ease that quickly provokes jealousy. People that live in these conditions day in day out are cut from something hardier.
Is it with shame that we demand with seeming helplessness the comfort of an independent seat? Is it a product of our upbringing – everyone with their own seatbelt and their own air-conditioned little personal space with your GameBoy and pillow for the four-hour ride. Is it weird to be jealous of people with so much less? And to aggressively compare their mental fortitude to your own?
Complaints about the low cost van ride are nothing compared to what you see on the road. One of the more popular getups you see hurtling down the highway is a reconfigured lawnmower engine. It’s been ghetto-rigged to a set of tractor wheels – a single axle, two thunderous rubber wheels – and from the top of the motor sprout two long control handles, almost like the kind you would use on a snow blower. Below each rubber grip is a metal lever attached to a spring mechanism and a cable. Each lever actuates one wheel along an analog scale, so that once you get the feel of the machine, slight increases in pressure in one hand or the other results in a deft turning radius. This two-wheeled sputtering engine – with the pull starter that you have to yank on six or seven times to get it to turn over – is rigged to a set of ten-foot long wooden beams, extending diagonally back and mounting on a rickety wagon with its own single axle. The wagon is built up on the sides; huge slats of wood create a bed for carrying anything and everything. The driver sits at the front, as if driving a team of oxen. His feet dangle precipitously over the zooming asphalt as he crouches over his levered controls, directing the churning motor way out in front of him. In the wagon you find people, animals, suitcases, anything that people bring from one place to another. The strain on the lawnmower must be incredible. Often it’s driven by a young man in a ubiquitous garish trucker-style hat, a grin plastered on his face; he probably makes a good amount of money driving this wooden death trap up and down the highway.
And even that isn’t the most dangerous thing you see on the road. Every once in a while a pickup truck will pass. In the long bench seat a minimum of five people are squeezed on top of each other. In the bed, 15 to 20 people, grandmas and babies and everyone in between, are packed like cattle. Often the tailgate is left down and an intrepid and/or unlucky youth hangs out over the edge, bringing up the rear.
Sometimes, massive diesel cargo trucks carry their loads back and forth across different provinces. They also operate as makeshift taxis for hitchhikers with enough dough. Once, a quivering stack of hay was being flown down the bumpy highway, tied to the bed of a truck. It wasn’t the twine that held the load in place however; it was the two children perched on top, twenty feet above the ground, riding their spiky load down the road at 50 mph.
When you need to get somewhere, you find a way.
0 comments:
Post a Comment