Saturday, September 27, 2008

Traffic hell

I've just finished dinner at the Lazy Mekong Daze restaurant on the Mekong Riverfront in Kompong Cham with the Kizuna Bridge lit by headlights from the stream of traffic crossing it and an electrical storm off in the distance lighting up the night sky every few seconds. I'm here for 3 nights and have booked into the Mekong Hotel, not a place I've stayed in before but it'll suffice. The LP is right, you can play football inside its cavenous corridors, and my bathroom is the biggest I've ever seen in Cambodia. It took forever to get here though. I caught the Sorya bus at 8.55am from the Central Market and I kid you not, 3 hours later we had only just crossed the Japanese Bridge. The traffic was horrendous and to cap it all, the coach kept stalling and the driver had to turn off the air-con so as not to drain the battery. People were passing out before my eyes. Some even got off and jumped into a taxi. I finally rolled into Kompong Cham at 2.30pm, drenched in sweat and in a foul mood, like the rest of my fellow passengers. I had time to whizz around a few of the town's pagodas and to admire some of its fading French colonial & Chinese architecture that is much in evidence before dinner. Tomorrow I'm off for a long-distance trip if the weather holds up. The Mekong River itself is pretty high at the moment and much of the lowland areas in the vicinity are flooded. I hope my intended route is still doable. Okay, time to sign-off, til the next time.

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