November 18, 2016
Over the border: An Loc to Snoul (Cambodia)
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RIDING past a school in Vietnam is like banging your fist on a hive. Except that the bees - children who run to greet Europeans on bikes - buzz with glee.
We were an hour before the border when it happened. Schools break early and the children walk out in groups in neat uniforms and disappear for lunch. The working day starts around 5am, to make the most of the light in an era when there was no electricity, and to escape the heat and humidity in summer. Schools start later than that but, since everybody expects to have eaten by noon, the mid-day break starts partway through the morning.
We caused disruption on a scale we have grown used to. We slapped high-fives with kids who'd learned it from television, because only westernised Vietnamese shake hands. We waved to others and raced some along the road on their bikes. Those who climbed in a coach leaned out the window to wave and smile again as they passed.
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The school and the rise to it marked the end of a long, busy but otherwise undemanding road that ran on to a plateau. The main traffic, not intending to leave the country, followed the main road right at the fork. We went left. The box-like shops, fruit stalls, bottle shops and houses and hovels began to thin and the countryside flattened and spread itself like a blanket. The rubber trees were behind us and the fields were full of... well, we didn't know, to be honest, because things grow here that don't grow in France.
A final cluster of shops and a ramshackle restaurant huddled in sight of the border. Bodies lounged in hammocks of netting put out by the restaurant owners for whoever wanted them. Some eyes were closed, some open, some bodies had one leg draped over the edge, dangling to the ground.
A round body in one hammock stirred enough to show it was alive and reached for a phone to take our picture one-handed. The owner smiled a lazy thanks and closed his eyes again.
A busy woman dressed in black, her face weary with work and age, greeted us in French. Not many people speak it - not many people speak anything but Vietnamese - but it's a hangover from when France ran Vietnam as a protectorate and by all accounts exploited the hell out of it. It was when people objected that a sequence of wars started: first an uprising against the French, then the rise of communism against the south and finally half a million American troops helping the south fend off the north.
Vietnam was the longest war America ever fought, which is curious when you remember America had no reason to turn up. It had no grudge with Vietnam; it simply believed, in the ethos of the time, that if Ho Chi Minh overthrew the dictator it supported in the south, all Asia would become communist as one domino fell after another.
They don't call it the Vietnam war in Vietnam, of course. They call it the American war. By all accounts there are war bores prepared to recount every metre won or lost. But most of the population isn't interested. The war is history, ancient history for many, and many Vietnamese can't understand why Americans don't forget about it as well. Why keep turning up in embroidered baseball caps and nylon jackets when it was they who lost?
Anyway, the restaurant was dark with a low ceiling, the floor tiled, the tables wood. Our French-speaking hostess wore black trousers with gentle flower patterns. She whipped the place into order and a young woman rose resentfully from her hammock to carry out her orders.
Outside, a man was roasting a pig over the gas flames of an electrically powered spit. A black dog lay beside him, pawing at the loose, red soil to reveal a cooler patch in which to lie.
The border building was what you'd hope of a people's socialist republic. It was a towering, majestic but solid building of red and glass, offices on three storeys and far more staff than the traffic could need.
The road divided as we got nearer and there was space to park 500 cars, with more space for buses. All the spaces were empty except for two trucks that looked not to have moved for a week. And there was a busload of Cambodians, giggling beside a waist-high marble pillar engraved "Viet Nam".
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A man of 23 but trying to look older greeted us with a dopy expression that suggested interrupted sleep. We left the bikes against a low wall and took our bags through a metallic hoop of the sort you see at airports. There was nobody else but a woman on a moped. She walked through the hoop as well. It didn't beep. I didn't like to point out that the plug was lying unconnected on the floor.
An older man studied our passports. He looked up from Steph's to ask "How old are you?" It was a test. But he asked in English and we answered in English. And since numbers are the hardest part of a language, he shrugged and handed back both passports with a wave to continue.
No man's land had to be crossed to reach the humbler offices of the Kingdom of Cambodia. First, a questionnaire at a side window in sight of the horizontal red and white pole that was missing on the Vietnamese side. Our man is smart in brown with card lapels and a good range of badges. After a long and uneasy study of our passports, he says "Vous n'avez pas de visa."
His whisper almost hints that, if we didn't tell anyone, he'd let us in anyway. It was more an apology than a problem.
"Non, pas encore," I say.
He waves us to a neighbouring window. A portly man asks us how long we want to stay. He gives us another form, white, while behind him his colleague is reading Wikipedia.
We pay our entry fee, he applies our visas, exactly straight, decorating their edges with rubber stamps. He then passes us back the way we'd come, where the original officer examines the work of the second before collecting photos of each of us and putting them in an envelope with the questionnaire and visa form.
"Ana-kum", we say, as though Khmer was a language that every gentlemen spoke even though he doesn't mention it. We'd just looked it up.
"Ana-kum", everyone in the office says at once, amused, before adding "Merci beaucoup".
We ride past Gold City, a gambler-less building in primary colours. And then, approaching Snoul, we break off at a monument to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. It was here, along this road, that the first stirrings came against a régime so awful that life expectancy for a man was 19 and for a woman only little better.
The Khmer Rouge wanted Cambodia to become a medieval agricultural cooperative. Everyone was turfed out of his house. The postal service and even money were scrapped. Teachers, anyone in glasses and certainly those who spoke a foreign language were bludgeoned to death as intellectuals. There was no room in Cambodia for intellectuals, real or imagined.
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Nobody knows how many the Khmer Rouge killed. Their destruction could have lasted longer. But they made the final mistake of crossing the border and Vietnam seized the chance and invaded.
They were awful, awful years. The years of the killing fields.
Today's ride: 67 km (42 miles)
Total: 237 km (147 miles)
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