Crazy travel stories: How we made it to Don Dhet

Don Dhet sunset

It was a beautiful morning when we woke up on Don Dhet in the 4000 Islands in Laos, so we had high hopes for an easier ride into Cambodia. The infrastructure in Laos and Cambodia isn’t the best, so the better the weather, the better timing you’ll have without any flooding or landslides or any other unwanted mishaps.
It was about 7:15 in the morning when we started to get ourselves packed and ready for the trip ahead. We took a boat from the islands to the mainland, waited there til about 9:45 to get our bus to the Cambodian border.
It took about 20 minutes or so to get there, and I will say, crossing the border by foot is so much less thrilling than landing in a new country. There’s just not the same rush of excitement you get when you’re flying over this new, mysterious land while all the anticipation builds up more and more as you wind your way through the airport until you finally step outside. Instead, you just get off the bus and walk across the border – nothing to it, really, at least in this instance. But, when we did get across, we had to wait for an extra hour or so after realizing that Molly’s backpack, to my fault, was left behind at the bus depot. Oops. Luckily the bus company was able to drive it over, obviously expecting a big reward of 5 USD.
When the backpack finally arrived, we all got onto a bus and started our drive to Siem Reap, Cambodia. What was expected to be about 12 hours with us arriving at around 11 p.m. turned into a 24 hour trip, with us arriving at around 6:30 a.m. the next day.
We started off on a pretty decent bus with an absolutely incredible ride. We passed what were basically floating villages. The rains are so bad from the wet season that these bamboo houses were on stilts and swimming in the floods, but the scenery was just spectacular. There were floating temples and people going around in boats and little kids swimming alongside their houses. The sunset was surreal - the colors were so strong and vivid it was as if the sky was on fire. I just felt so lucky and fortunate, and I wanted to call my dad at that moment and just say thank you.
At around 630 p.m., everyone bound for Siem Reap had to change to a much smaller bus. Aside from having no air con and thus having to drive with the door open, all seemed well at first glance. We seemed to be ‘on time (as much as can be expected in Asia)’, and making good progress toward our goal: arrive in Phonm Pehn for some dinner at around 9 p.m. We ate lunch around 1:30 p.m. and had some snacks to hold us over until we got there.
About an hour and a half into the ride, this smell of burning rubber started to saturate the air in the bus, and slowly it became stronger and stronger. Of course our driver didn’t pulled over or stop to check out what was going on until the smell became so bad that we all had our hands over our mouths to keep ourselves from losing consciousness because of the smell. To do so when the warning signs and the scent first started would make too much sense and be too practical – we are in Asia, remember.
So the bus driver pulls over, and a few of the boys get off the bus to see what’s going on. They come back on laughing and tell us all to get comfortable: The one tire literally melted off, and we had no good spare. You would think that it was early enough to call a backup bus to take us onward, but like I said before, this is Asia. It would make too much sense to do something like that.
Instead, this is what the driver decided to do:
He took off one of good tires on the other side of the bus and move it to the side where the tire had melted. So on one side of the bus we had two tires, on the other side of the bus we had one tire, and to top it off, whatever this solution was that the driver had come up with left us without any functioning brakes. There was also something about the bolts in the tires being strung together with aluminum – didn’t quite follow that one, but it ended up being a huge problem for us. The boys and the driver spent about an hour trying to get the one good tire off to switch to where we had the flat until they realized that they had been making it tighter the whole time and had to start over from the beginning. Ace.
The smell had been so bad on the inside of the bus that all the girls just went and sat on the side of the road right in front of our bus while the boys did the dirty work, and I mean d i r t y. They were sweating and taking off their shirts -no complaints there on my end, and their shorts became various shades of brown from all the mud and dirt. (Whatever it was they were doing also involved three grown men jumping several times on this long silver tool that was sticking out of the wheel.) It took about 2 hours for them to do all this re-arranging, but they finally ‘fixed’ it. We girls were asking questions, as we are all pretty clueless about mechanics, and the boys just told us not to look, not to ask questions and to just get on the bus.
These were the instructions we received from our bus driver: Everyone sit on the left hand side of the bus. This was the first sign that perhaps we were going to have some upcoming technical difficulties.
We started to drive, which was beyond comprehension unsafe, and made it about 50 meters before the bolts came out, the tires fell off and the bus went a little off the charts. It was almost 11 p.m. at this point, and the boys warned us that we had a long night ahead of us.
Of course calling for a back up bus still wasn’t even broached as an option – how could we even think of such an absurd solution to such a simple problem? We tried to come up with our own solution: Hitch hike our way to the next town, which was about 100 kilometers away. First we tried flagging down buses that passed us. Two actually stopped, but for some insane reason our driver screamed at them and would not let them get on the bus.. We aren’t quite sure why he wouldn’t let any other buses take us, as each time we tried he just consistently yelled them off. First sign that we should have picked up on that we were being held hostage.
The boys and the driver got back to work yet again, trying to fiddle with the wheels until they finally gave up and realizing it was a fruitless effort. They decided to join us on the side of the road, blanketed by millions of stars that were spread across the night sky.  There were a good range of us – 2 girls from Germany, we 4 girls from USA, Walter from Holland, 2 kids from the UK, one kid from Italy, 2 older guys from Spain, 2 kids from Japan and 1 kd from Korea – so we figured that if we were going to be stuck sleeping on the side of the road in God-knows-where, Cambodia, we might as well have a little fun. Keep in mind it was around about 10 hours since we had last eaten, none of us had any snacks left and no water. We were eventually given 3 water bottles to share amongst all those people.
So, we broke out a single bottle of wine someone had, the boys gathered some branches, made a fire and we sat around joking about the situation we found ourselves in.
At some point, the bus driver started encircling us in large tree branches, which we thought was his smart and intelligent way of keeping us safe from being run over by cars. I mean obviously tree branches are totally conspicuous in the pitch black, right?
We soon started to think that these branches weren’t a means of protection but instead were a makeshift prison; anytime someone tried to step outside the boundary and flag down a bus, the driver went absolutely nuts. We were trapped.
A few hours later, the driver told us to get on the bus once again. We didn’t ask questions. We just silently all prayed that it would work out. I fell asleep immediately upon sitting down on the seat, only to wake up maybe 30 minutes later to the tires falling off yet again. This time I just fell back asleep, woke up at around 6 a.m. still in the same exact spot where we last lost our tires. You would think I’m joking, but I am totally not kidding you.
We were on this road this little village that rose with the sun, and it was a beautiful sunrise after a long, hot and uncomfortable night. Everyone in the village was out and about – even the babies were up and running around, playing, sitting and staring out at all the foreigners on the side of the road. Everyone had a smile on and seemed so happy (excluded our bus company owners who were inconveniencedat having to spend the night trailing us and sleeping in their merecedes, which at one point we all devised a plan to steal).
Finally, after making us spend the night on the side of the road, the people decided to arrange for us another bus to come and pick us up and take us the remainder of the way to Siem Reap.
When we finally arrived in Siem Reap, we decided to treat ourselves to a good breakfast: a while 3 dollars for iced coffee, eggs and omletes and toast. Cambodian ATM’s actually dispense US dollars, so it makes my stomach hurt when I am fully aware I am breaching my 25 USD a day budget.
But to end my story, after a nice breakfast, Laura, Carel, Molly, Walter and I met up with our friend Philip from Germany, spent the day swimming in a rooftop hotel pool and ordering food that was a bit out of our price range – 4 USD for a sandwich. We figured we deserved to spoil ourselves just a little bit after the night we had.

The start of where it all went wrong….
Surviving roadside
Still didn’t have it quite figured out the next morning
Category: Asia, Laos

2 comments on “Crazy travel stories: How we made it to Don Dhet

  1. Only you Alex could enjoy a moment like this.
    Love Ya Dad

  2. I am sitting here going between, OMG, Oh shit, trying to stop my jaw from hitting the floor ans wondering what the heck the driver was thinking. But didn’t that encircling of tree branches make you think for one second Bar-b-que. But love relaxing in a roof top pool. I love your silver lining attitude.

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