As we are finding out road travel in Cambodia takes a long time. The roads are all single carriageways that are just big enough for coaches and lorries to pass each other as well the countless mopeds, hand tractors, bicycles, minivans and the like. When we booked and paid for our $7.5 tickets at the booking office, conveniently next door to our guest house, the booking clerk told us that the journey time for the 200km journey would be about four and a half hours. It was quite a cute moment though as crawling around on a blanket behind him was his sixth month old daughter. His wife looked on while eating a bowl of noodles.
Departing at exactly 1230, the allotted time, the first hour and a half of our journey involved us driving around the bus stations of Phnom Penh collecting passengers and then negotiating the rutted road out of the city. Most of Cambodia's main roads are sealed although several in the capital are not. This meant a very bumpy and extremely dusty journey out of the centre. We were sealed inside our aircon charabanc but it was the residents, traders and stall holders eking out an existence next to the dust clouds that I felt really sorry for.
To pass away some of the time on the journey the conductor played a couple of films. Lovely. The first dubbed in to Cambodian from the original Chinese involved certain dodgy characters driving early 1980s American cars and periodically trying to beat each other to a pulp via the medium of one martial art or another. The set piece ending, about forty minutes, saw the battle move into a warehouse where the the only stored goods were thousands of boxes of Camel cigarettes and several hundred live chickens wandering around thinking to themselves "Shouldn't we be in a scene from The Dukes of Hazard?" One particularly ferocious lady wearing scarlet leggings performed incredible feats of agility against a white guy wearing a navy blue shell suit jacket. He swung a big gold sword at her and consistently missed while she flailed with all limbs and consistently failed to land one on him either. The film ended with a freeze frame of her in mid air for some reason apparent only to the director. Some chickens may have been injured or emotionally scarred.
After a meal break the next cinematic offering was served. In this film, again dubbed out of Chinese with the words spoke by the same actors it seemed, the heroine sat down to look at something on her laptop while sitting on her bed. Clearly not an expert in Chinese ghost films she failed to notice a pair of very large hands appear from under the bed. The hands grabbed her ankles while she let out a very badly acted scream. Another hand, could it have been the bed monster's third arm, then proceeded to show that it was a monster of the modern era as it typed out a message on the laptop screen. I rather lost patience with this nonsense at that point but thought it only fair to read some of the English subtitles. The film had the desired effect of dulling my senses on the long journey but it had clearly forced the translator to turn to the bottle. What appeared in English bore little or no resemblance to what was going on on the screen. Shortly after the hand monster had typed its missive the heroine's boyfriend/brother entered and apparently said "You have a good heart. Always drink you milk." He then went on to ask her the question that many of us ask all the time "How are you friend? Always ah." And then there were more lactose related matters to be solved before our heroine and her, now female friend, set about committing a murder for a reason clear to someone in the know. I must check to see whether this film is for sale on Amazon.