Friday, January 18, 2008

Six hours on the Dancing Road: "Terrifying and incredibly fun!"

Haley Edwards
Seattle Times staff reporter (Washington, USA)

CAMBODIA — The best way to get from Thailand to Cambodia is to take the Dancing Road, a deeply-cratered one-lane dirt road, stretching from the Thai border into the dusty expanse of northwest Cambodia.

It's named the Dancing Road for the way that people jitterbug around their cars while hurtling at top speed over potholes large enough to hide an entire cow.

It takes roughly six hours to negotiate 150 kilometers, from the border to the next biggest city, Siem Reap. But the potholes, craters, dirt moguls and ATV-style jumps (really, our bus got at least two feet of air over some of these) are hardly the biggest obstacle. Every kilometer or two, the road just ends.

There's a little orange "Detour" sign, written in the elegant Cambodian script, behind which is a 20-foot cliff. Cement drums are piled up on either side of the road at these junctures, indicating that the man-made gorges will, at some point, be filled in as drainage ditches. But, for now, they're just another reason for the bus driver to pull the e-brake, crank into a four-wheel drift and skid around a hairpin turn, all the while narrowly missing the herds of cows, auto-rickshaws ("tuk tuks"), motorcycles ("motos"), stray dogs and throngs of children in impossibly white school uniforms who crowd the sides of the road.

It's part terrifying, part incredibly fun.

Stevie and I first experienced the Dancing Road on a public bus, and, while none of the other passengers really spoke most of the time (it was nearly impossibly to hear over the deafening creaking of our 70s-era school bus), everyone on the bus leaned into the aisle and peered out the front window, just to watch the show. To scream. To pray. Sometimes, the whole bus would break into hysterical laughter after narrowly avoiding broadsiding a cow, or swerving to avoid a man on a bicycle carrying over 400 mangos in a fishing net on his back, or after the driver slammed on the brakes and all of us smushed up against the seat in front of us, our luggage skittering down the center aisles like skipping stones.

But for anyone who's ever ridden in a developing nation — or on the streets of Rome, for that matter — the Dancing Road would be old hat. It's chaotic and death-defying, sure, but it's what's on either side of the road that makes it unique to Cambodia:

Thatch houses balance on stilts (not because of floods, but to keep the home cool) as its occupants sleep in hammocks underneath.

Impossibly green rice paddies unfurl in every direction, the water flashing silver in the bright sunlight, and then end, abruptly, and the landscape turns into the dusty yellow-red of desert. Palm tree forests dot the landscape, looking like something out of Dr. Suess. Kids wear blue surgical masks with their blue-and-white school uniforms, to avoid the dust. Billboards remind children not to touch landmines. Craters from American bombs still pockmark the fields. Men with no arms, no legs and no faces beg at rest stops, their livelihoods stolen by the landmines that, 30 years later, still lie in wait in these rice fields.

"Gas stations" — old 2-liter bottles of Pepsi, filled with petrol — simmer in the sun. Ranch-style gates, the kind you might see in Texas, line the side of the road, leading to temples ("wats"), too far down the dusty paths to see.

Thirty-five men cram into the bed of a single pickup truck (really, 35 seems impossible; it's not), red-checkered cloths (a traditional Khmer cloth) wrapped around their faces.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you don't know why the "dancing Road" never have been fixed, please be known that, for every flying ticket of any airline from Bang Kok to Siem Reap, $50.00 share goes to the CPP pocket.

Anonymous said...

Would someone translate this article and forward it to our strong man PM.

Anonymous said...

You are right 1:36am.After 1997 coup Hun Sen first thing sign an open sky with Thai Airline to fly direct to Siem Rep.I don't know how much Hun Sen got with this deal.5 years ago I have an experiences with this dancing road.It's shaking like you shake roulette.I asked my cousin living at Poy Pet they said Khmer Government sign an agreement not to do anything with this road for 10 years.Tourists want to travel by road Thai always advice not take a risk,no security and the road is very bad.It take 12 hrs at least to get to Siem Rep,if you take airplane it just 45 minutes.It is fair enough to take an airplane. Sok An also do the same as Hun Sen.Any agreement with any fly direct to Siem Rep,Sok An get $5.00 a heads.You see how they get rich so easy.Look the whole country don't have an airline.