I drove the Vespa to the office today and it wasn't until I got here and reached up to take off my helmet that I realized I'd forgotten to put it on.
Luckily, it is only a 3 block drive. So no cops to pull me over and get their $1.50 "fine".
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Monday, May 4, 2009
Driving in Phnom Penh
Within the first minutes of arriving in Phnom Penh one is struck dumb by the driving habits. There are the outward signs of a traffic law-abiding society: traffic lights (that helpfully count down the time until they change); signage with the dos and don'ts (one way street, no left turn, etc.). But this is all completely superseded by the basic two rules of Cambodia driving: 1) you can do anything you want as long as you do it slowly; and, 2) it is very bad form to have to completely stop.
Up to a certain level of traffic flow this actually works fairly well. To give one example, if you are driving down a busy street and you want to turn left under the quaint notion of traffic law, you need to go up to the point where the 2 streets intersect, stop, and wait for a sufficient break in the oncoming traffic to make the left turn. The way Cambodians see it, if there is a break in the traffic (more on their definition of a break later) anytime you are within a few hundred yards of where you want to turn left it makes much more sense to cross over there, from where you slowly drive against traffic, pinned up against the left curb of the street (that would be the wrong curb for those of you having trouble picturing this move) until you arrive at the street where you wanted to go left, at which point you turn left.
The most amazing part of this is that it will engender absolutely no negative reactions from anybody, including any policeman whom happens to be standing by eying traffic to see who he can cite (pronounced "bribe") for a helmet violation. No horns honking, no raised middle fingers, no looks of exasperation, nothing, just traffic as usual.
Thinking this logic through you can see the favored way of turning left on to a boulevard if you come up on to it from a smaller side street. No stopping to wait for a break in traffic, which would break the cardinal rule of Cambodia driving (no stopping). Instead, you immediately turn left going into oncoming traffic, and drive slowly until the opportunity comes to tack over to the proper side of the road. This has a sort of elegance when you are driving a motorbike, as you don't disturb the oncoming traffic that much and it only has to adjust slightly to flow around you. But people in Land Cruisers do this. Imagine that you were driving down Rockville Pike (or El Camino, of whatever serves as a busy 4 lane street in your neck of the woods), in the slow lane, minding your own business, and then, magically, coming out of a small side street, a full-size 4x4 was all of a sudden driving right at you (albeit slowly). Remember, you are not allowed to honk your horn.
Up to a certain point of traffic density this has a certain Buddhist balletic quality to it. Go with the flow, adjust to the flow, and make a new flow. It reminds me of nothing more than watching water currents go around boulders and fallen logs. You see someone a head of you wants to do something, and you adjust to allow him to do it. Pedestrian street crossings take particular faith in this ability to adjust, as you are essentially putting your life in the faith that the oncoming Lexus 470 will slow down, move over the center line to go around you, and not run you down.
But this balletic quality can, and frequently does, come to a complete stop, when too many car and motos try to share the same piece of road. Since the first thing that anybody does when there way is blocked is to drive around it, even if that takes you across the center line, and the second thing that happens is that all the space behind you will fill up with people doing the same thing, it is easy to see what happens when everybody acts like this and there is literally no room to move. Everything stops, completely and absolutely. Face to face, usually on a diagonal tangent across the road (you'll have to sketch this to see how it works, it is like a problem in thermodynamics). Motos get through for a little while, like water leaking at a faucet, but eventually even they get boxed in, and then everybody moves into disengagement mode, which translates essentially to every small vehicle doing whatever it can to get out (driving up walkways, sidewalks, etc.) and every car trying to turn around is a series of microscopic movement 3 point turns which take a good 10 minutes to execute.
And eventually traffic moves again, for a little while.
On the Vespa I try and stay on the side streets, you have to be more careful at every intersection, but there are fewer blockages.
Up to a certain level of traffic flow this actually works fairly well. To give one example, if you are driving down a busy street and you want to turn left under the quaint notion of traffic law, you need to go up to the point where the 2 streets intersect, stop, and wait for a sufficient break in the oncoming traffic to make the left turn. The way Cambodians see it, if there is a break in the traffic (more on their definition of a break later) anytime you are within a few hundred yards of where you want to turn left it makes much more sense to cross over there, from where you slowly drive against traffic, pinned up against the left curb of the street (that would be the wrong curb for those of you having trouble picturing this move) until you arrive at the street where you wanted to go left, at which point you turn left.
The most amazing part of this is that it will engender absolutely no negative reactions from anybody, including any policeman whom happens to be standing by eying traffic to see who he can cite (pronounced "bribe") for a helmet violation. No horns honking, no raised middle fingers, no looks of exasperation, nothing, just traffic as usual.
Thinking this logic through you can see the favored way of turning left on to a boulevard if you come up on to it from a smaller side street. No stopping to wait for a break in traffic, which would break the cardinal rule of Cambodia driving (no stopping). Instead, you immediately turn left going into oncoming traffic, and drive slowly until the opportunity comes to tack over to the proper side of the road. This has a sort of elegance when you are driving a motorbike, as you don't disturb the oncoming traffic that much and it only has to adjust slightly to flow around you. But people in Land Cruisers do this. Imagine that you were driving down Rockville Pike (or El Camino, of whatever serves as a busy 4 lane street in your neck of the woods), in the slow lane, minding your own business, and then, magically, coming out of a small side street, a full-size 4x4 was all of a sudden driving right at you (albeit slowly). Remember, you are not allowed to honk your horn.
Up to a certain point of traffic density this has a certain Buddhist balletic quality to it. Go with the flow, adjust to the flow, and make a new flow. It reminds me of nothing more than watching water currents go around boulders and fallen logs. You see someone a head of you wants to do something, and you adjust to allow him to do it. Pedestrian street crossings take particular faith in this ability to adjust, as you are essentially putting your life in the faith that the oncoming Lexus 470 will slow down, move over the center line to go around you, and not run you down.
But this balletic quality can, and frequently does, come to a complete stop, when too many car and motos try to share the same piece of road. Since the first thing that anybody does when there way is blocked is to drive around it, even if that takes you across the center line, and the second thing that happens is that all the space behind you will fill up with people doing the same thing, it is easy to see what happens when everybody acts like this and there is literally no room to move. Everything stops, completely and absolutely. Face to face, usually on a diagonal tangent across the road (you'll have to sketch this to see how it works, it is like a problem in thermodynamics). Motos get through for a little while, like water leaking at a faucet, but eventually even they get boxed in, and then everybody moves into disengagement mode, which translates essentially to every small vehicle doing whatever it can to get out (driving up walkways, sidewalks, etc.) and every car trying to turn around is a series of microscopic movement 3 point turns which take a good 10 minutes to execute.
And eventually traffic moves again, for a little while.
On the Vespa I try and stay on the side streets, you have to be more careful at every intersection, but there are fewer blockages.
Raining Now
April was supposed to be the hot and dry month, with the rains coming in the later part of May. As in any agricultural society, the timing and content of the rains are closely watched and much discussed, even by people who haven't farmed in their lives. The rains came early this year, the first downpours coming in mid-April, a month or so early. So now everybody is convinced that they started too early and thus will end early and the crops will be meager. It is tough to be a farmer, God (from whatever provenance) is rarely supportive.
But when it rains here, it really rains.
We live near the Royal Palace, which lies in a low-lying area of Phnom Penh. So we have learned that the streets around us flood with some regularity. We were battered last week by a ferocious thunderstorm that must have dumped three or four inches of rain over the course of couple of hours in the late afternoon. I had a perfect view of all of this out of the windows of my 4th floor office, and I could watch the street in front of the office slowly fill up with water. Half a block down to the right where the street hits the Royal Palace wall, the water was at least 18 inches deep. Cars pushed small waves in front of them and one in ten died. Motos did no better, and faced the double hazard of running into small potholes unseen below the water, sending the rider a tumble.
Norodom Blvd, the big street between the office and our house, was not underwater but was essentially a parking lot; filled with frustrated drivers driven off of the smaller, sodden side streets. At dusk, not wanting to navigate in the dark, I mounted the Vespa to drive the 3 blocks home (walking would have meant unavoidably wading through a foot or so of water). I did fine at first, edging up the left side of the normally two-way street now turned one-way by the all consuming desire for higher ground, water up to the foot platform of the Vespa, held off from coming over my feet by the bow wave formed by moving forward. I was within 10 yards (maybe meters) of dry road (heading up to Norodom) when I was brutally cut off by a frustrated car and I had to stop and put my foot down in a foot of water. After that I cut through the stopped cars, drove through two bank parking lots, and traversed the flooded street in front of our house (water lapping at the gate) and got home.
All in all, quite a bit of fun.
But when it rains here, it really rains.
We live near the Royal Palace, which lies in a low-lying area of Phnom Penh. So we have learned that the streets around us flood with some regularity. We were battered last week by a ferocious thunderstorm that must have dumped three or four inches of rain over the course of couple of hours in the late afternoon. I had a perfect view of all of this out of the windows of my 4th floor office, and I could watch the street in front of the office slowly fill up with water. Half a block down to the right where the street hits the Royal Palace wall, the water was at least 18 inches deep. Cars pushed small waves in front of them and one in ten died. Motos did no better, and faced the double hazard of running into small potholes unseen below the water, sending the rider a tumble.
Norodom Blvd, the big street between the office and our house, was not underwater but was essentially a parking lot; filled with frustrated drivers driven off of the smaller, sodden side streets. At dusk, not wanting to navigate in the dark, I mounted the Vespa to drive the 3 blocks home (walking would have meant unavoidably wading through a foot or so of water). I did fine at first, edging up the left side of the normally two-way street now turned one-way by the all consuming desire for higher ground, water up to the foot platform of the Vespa, held off from coming over my feet by the bow wave formed by moving forward. I was within 10 yards (maybe meters) of dry road (heading up to Norodom) when I was brutally cut off by a frustrated car and I had to stop and put my foot down in a foot of water. After that I cut through the stopped cars, drove through two bank parking lots, and traversed the flooded street in front of our house (water lapping at the gate) and got home.
All in all, quite a bit of fun.
Status Update
Another few weeks have passed in a blur of activity hard to decode after the fact. One thing is for sure, the day to day mechanics of running a large project (reviewing and signing travel authorizations and bank reconciliations, signing checks, logging on and sending electronic payments, dealing with personnel issues, ad nauseum) take a lot of time, and when you add in the task of trying to lead the somewhat cumbersome project technically, and to change its structure and outputs in a pretty significant way, the days just flow by. Or, "the days are just packed", to quote Calvin.
We still do not have our car or our belongings, now sitting in Sianhoukville Port for the past 6 weeks. From what we can decipher post mortem, the company hired by the American shipper to clear the container here in Cambodia was simply incompetent. As in they had no idea what they were doing. So we have hired another, we'll see. As such we are only using a few rooms of the house. Our bedroom is pretty well furnished other than a few dressers we'll add when the shipment finally arrives. We have bought a teak patio set that now sits at the base of the stairs and is where we take our meals. The living room has one teak and rattan lounge chair, which will also eventually end up outside on the porch, where one person can read under the fan.
Considering how much furniture we shipped over, the change that will occur upon delivery of the container will be marked.
We still do not have our car or our belongings, now sitting in Sianhoukville Port for the past 6 weeks. From what we can decipher post mortem, the company hired by the American shipper to clear the container here in Cambodia was simply incompetent. As in they had no idea what they were doing. So we have hired another, we'll see. As such we are only using a few rooms of the house. Our bedroom is pretty well furnished other than a few dressers we'll add when the shipment finally arrives. We have bought a teak patio set that now sits at the base of the stairs and is where we take our meals. The living room has one teak and rattan lounge chair, which will also eventually end up outside on the porch, where one person can read under the fan.
Considering how much furniture we shipped over, the change that will occur upon delivery of the container will be marked.
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