Traffic

I've always said it; South East Asia is one of the safest places in the world to travel. The only danger here is the traffic.

But not to downplay the issue, the traffic here IS abysmal! Some countries like China seem to be even more reckless, but frankly, the people here seem absolutely clueless at times, pulling into traffic without a backwards glance to see if another vehicle may be approaching from behind, careless of depestrians and disregarding rules of right of way. The only way to drive here seems to be to just trust in luck. However lady luck is fickle, and if you are unlucky, she may just be having a manicure or a fish foot massage at the critical moment. Therefore accidents occur.

Yesterday I had dinner at the White Rose in Battambang (excellent, comes highly recommended!) with three fellow travellers and we got to talking about traffic accidents. Of the four of us, all the others had spent some time in Cambodia and actually seen traffic accidents occur. Now the weird and thought raising thing is not that these accidents occured, but the behaviour of the surrounding people when they did. The people did - nothing, absolutely nothing, to help the victims of the accidents.

One of my dinner companions had gone to help a local girl lying in the street after being knocked off her motorbike - he said she had lain there for quite a while and despite a dense croud around her, nobody had helped her out of the busy street. Another dinner companion had seen an accident, where a car ran into a moto - and the driver of the motorbike lay with an obviously fractured arm in front of the car, but the driver of the car didn't even get out of his vehicle to see what had happened! Exhibit three and the third diner was a young Italian girl, working here for three months, who had herself been knocked down by a motorbike, when walking. The bike just speeded off leaving her with lying on the ground unable to get up by herself, groggy and slightly hysterical with a bad knock to her head - surrounded by a circle of people, none of whome helped her in any way. When she finally made it back to her office, a really nice local colleague was very worried about her and said he would drive her home since she obviously wasn't up to going on her own. As he was driving her, he knocked over a moto with three women on it - and didn't even stop the car, but just kept on talking and drove away!

Now, ever ready to create hypotheses, I think these stories give a clue to the whole Khmer Rouge situation. It seems like a ruthless minority (?) managed to execute and torture a silently accepting majority, who didn't give much of a show of resistance the whole time. Now, I admit I'm no historian, so maybe there was more resistance than I thought, but certainly I find the passivity of people when bad things are happening to others could be a clue to the riddle of the Khmer Rouge years.

Be that as it may, I continue my travels by road today, this time by bus to Kompong Chhnang (and no, I didn't just accidentally forget a vowel from this name).