Plus Up the Gas: Driving in Cambodia
Flights into Cambodia often arrive late at night. People coming from the US typically spend more than 24 hours traveling. On my first trip to this country, Missionaries Helen Camarce and Patrick Booth met me at the airport and hustled me off to my hotel. Disoriented and exhausted, I glanced out the window of the GBGM-Cambodia Highlander and locked eyes with a bicyclist in the next lane straining to tow a huge trailer loaded with sugarcane. I wondered if I was hallucinating and asked Patrick, “Do they allow bicycles on the highway?” As he passed the farmer, he replied, “They allow anything with wheels on the highway.”
Patrick chauffeured me around the whole two weeks I spent in Phnom Penh. Despite his calm, disciplined approach to the road, I never really stopped fearing for my life. I didn’t worry about Patrick’s driving, but I can’t say the same about the other drivers. Over six million motorcycles and one million cars clog the roads of this country; twenty-five years ago, that number was closer to 200,000 motorcycles and 60,000 cars. (Tuk-tuks and remorques count as motorcycles for the purposes of this data.) Nothing prepared Cambodia for such a precipitous increase in the number of vehicles on the road, and the infrastructure cannot accommodate today’s traffic volume. I started worrying about what Tom and I would do for transportation once we moved here.
There are grounds for horriblizing. The alarming number of Cambodian traffic fatalities led the United Nations Development Program to conduct a study in conjunction with the Cambodian National Road Safety Committee in 2019. The study found that an average of 5.4 people die in traffic accidents each day, making that the leading cause of death in this country whose population was about 15 million in 2019. The number of accidents isn’t the only issue. Equally concerning, the report found that it takes more than an hour for most victims to be transported to a hospital after an accident. I had trouble finding reliable statistics from more recent years, but most sources indicate only meager improvements since the UN/NRSC study.
One thing that makes driving in Cambodia dangerous is the limited enforcement of drunk driving laws. As Patrick and I passed a very elaborate KTV (Karaoke) bar one evening, he warned me to be especially careful driving near bars. Patrons leave under the influence of alcohol, and if someone has a wreck involving a drunk driver, there is no guarantee that the drunk driver will be the one held at fault. Bars sprout on every corner, so I can’t say Patrick’s advice reassured me.
Another thing that makes driving in Cambodia dangerous is speeding. I planned to explain that Cambodia does not use speed limit signs since I didn’t think I had seen any. But after some research, I learned what to look for: a white circle surrounded by a red frame with a large black number inside the frame. Nothing else. That number represents the maximum speed limit in kilometers per hour. In urban areas, according to the Ministry of Public Works and Transport, the speed limit is usually 40 to 50 kilometers per hour or 25 to 31 miles per hour. It’s 60 to 100 km/h (37 to 62 mph) on the highways. Speeding in the city doesn’t usually seem to be a problem because the congested traffic curtails it.
As far as I can see, however, nothing curtails speeding on the highways, which leads directly to another major cause of traffic accidents: ignoring traffic rules. The transport ministry cites “failure to respect right-of-way,” “improper lane changes,” and “risky overtaking” as leading causes of accidents. People commit these violations as they try to get somewhere quickly, and I can understand the temptations they face. Tuk-tuks— with a maximum speed of about 30 mph— share the two lane highways with bicycles, motorcycles, Toyotas, 18-wheelers, and cross-country busses. The other day, I saw a man trudging down the highway pulling a big cart full of coconuts behind him as he walked. The shoulder of the road becomes the de facto “slow lane,” but nothing prevents faster vehicles from pulling onto the shoulder to pass. And since little road marking paint indicates lanes, drivers never really know which lane they are in anyway. Faster vehicles sometimes pull into the opposing traffic lane to pass while flashing their lights to warn oncoming vehicles to pull over to the shoulder where hopefully they won’t run a tuk-tuk off the road. Sometimes if traffic backs up on one side of the road, motorcycles simply drive the wrong way on the other side of the road.
Traffic circles abound. And if you think people in Scott can’t use a traffic circle, you need to see the Cambodians try to use one. The lack of road marking paint contributes to their failure. The one between our house and Phnom Penh winds up being about four lanes wide with every driver trying to get from the inside lane to the outside lane. We actually saw a tuk-tuk driving against the traffic in the roundabout the other day. Patrick’s solution to all this crazy driving: always use your turn signals, drive slowly and deliberately, and never let them see you cry. Well, he didn’t say that. But he should have because I can tell that driving in Cambodia will make me cry.
To complicate matters, Hope Vocational School, where I am assigned as the Head, is out in the “provinces.” Most of the students attend night classes from 5:30-7:00 pm. On my first visit, Patrick and Rev. Paul Kong, the GBGM liaison for Asia, told me that I would not be able to stay at school past about 5:00 pm even if I had my own car. The road back to Phnom Penh is too dangerous after dark, they said. There are no street lights, and the big truck traffic increases after dark. And as a westerner, I might become a target for petty crime or worse if I remained after dark. How can I administer a school if I leave campus before classes start? I decided to employ the Scarlet O’Hara approach to that problem and figure it out once I moved here permanently. Easier said than done.
I found a wonderful apartment in a neighborhood about ten miles from the school. It’s about seven miles to one of the hospitals where Tom hopes to work and about ten miles to the other hospital. If those were the distances in Lafayette or Baton Rouge, it would be nothing. I drove twenty miles each way to get to ESA from our home in Maurice, and Tom drove fourteen miles each way to Womens and Childrens Hospital. But if you’ve read this far, you know that driving in Phnom Penh is nothing like driving in Lafayette. It takes me at least thirty minutes in a car to get from our apartment to the school. It takes Tom at least thirty minutes to get to one hospital and at least forty-five minutes to get to the other one. On Mondays, we start the day at the GBGM-Cambodia offices, and it takes us almost an hour to get there.
The first couple of weeks we were here, we relied on GRAB (Asian UBER) to get us where we wanted to go, but we didn’t think that was a sustainable solution. One night, I couldn’t get a car to come pick me up after school at 7:00 pm, and I had to take a tuk-tuk home in the dark. I was spending $20 a day on transportation, and without a car, Tom would be spending even more. Neither hospital is near the school either, so it almost looked like we would eventually need two cars to make it to our respective jobs.
Just the thought of getting one car overwhelmed me, much less getting two. We would have to obtain Cambodian drivers licenses. Furthermore, because Cambodians do not manufacture cars, the extra high prices of cars reflect the country’s extra high import taxes. (And that was before Trump’s trade war. No telling what it will be like now.) A brand new Kia Seltos cost $35,000 in Cambodia last February; I think I could have gotten a similar car in the US then for about $28,000. We could buy used cars, but Patrick told me how difficult obtaining reliable repairs can be. And used cars aren’t cheap either. We would also have insurance concerns because Cambodians are not required to have car insurance, and purchasing insurance is a complicated and expensive process. In addition, a gallon of gasoline can set you back more than $4 here. And we would have to drive the cars once we bought, insured, and fueled them.
We hired a driver. As I read this, I realize that I’ve written over a thousand words to try to justify that decision. Missionaries shouldn’t have chauffeurs, should they? But here we are. Vannak doesn’t wear a uniform, and his immaculate, dark green car is a late model Camry with a cherry red interior, not a black limousine. But it has air conditioning, and he gets us where we need to go Monday-Friday. We pay him a monthly salary, and we pay for the gas. When the car needs fuel, he asks, “Can we plus up the gas?” before he takes us to the station. While we wait for Tom to get his license and hospital privileges sorted out, Vannak spends a lot of time sitting around. But once Tom start’s working, he’ll be on the road all day. And he is a fabulous driver. The other day, Vannak apologized for driving slowly. I laughed. He’s just our speed.
