The following TripReport snippet is taken from 2003/12 Merlin - Spending the Holidays In Cambodia

ROADTRIP TO PP.

I thought it would be interesting to take a drive down to PP to see some of the countryside. In addition to stocking up on some supplies and checking out our car, I hit the books and motivated myself to learn some Khmer because we were going to travel through the heart of inner Cambodia. I was especially focused on learning the “honorific” way to say things in case we ran into guys with guns.

The roads are decent near Siem Reap, Kampong Chang and near PP, but the roads get progressively worse as you go out in between these big cities. Lots of obstacles on the roads, like pot holes, bicycles, pedestrians, farm animals, carts, roadkill, etc. Did you ever play the game “frogger” when you were a kid, then you can visualize all the crap that’s on the roads here. We avoided night driving as I heard that some Khmers don’t believe in using their headlights and there are very few, if any, street lights outside the cities. The biggest danger is by far the fricken crazy drivers, especially the large trucks full of people and cargo, as well as big buses that are constantly trying to pass each other on both sides of the highway. Khmers are impatient drivers (worse than Costa Ricans who have tailgating down to an art). These drivers don’t play chicken here, their game here is Russian Roulette with a single chamber gun – i.e. their truck.

There are periodic checkpoints along the main highway, which at first alarmed me a bit since these scruffy looking guys stand in the middle of a street with a makeshift roadblock. Since they had no uniforms or other badges of authority (My paranoid mind automatically thought “Khmer Rouge”). Turns out that these guys are harmless, Cambodia doesn’t have any tollbooths yet so these guys are the “Tollbooth”. I learned something interesting, uniforms are banned here unless you’re part of the army and stationed on a military base or the police; in fact, army guys that go off base have to change into their civilian clothes, obviously because people get spooked by guys in uniform due to their horrendous civil war past.

The other funny thing was when I was dozing off, and half asleep, my driver commented, nonchalantly, that “those [unintelligible] have guns…” Upon hearing the word “guns” I quickly awakened and asked what, where? The driver points to the trees and says, “trees have gum” – “gum trees”. Spare me the National Geographic nature stuff, I told him.

Originally, my driver and I allocated about 5-6 hours to get to PP. We departed at 9am and actually ended up arriving in PP about 5:30. The trip itself was truly an experience, and not for the faint of heart. Most of the delays were traffic near the big cities, and unexplained backlog for no apparent reason. I did see one accidents on the highway with a moped.

Would I recommend this road trip? Probably not. The dangers I noted with erratic drivers and the road conditions probably isn’t worth it. Take a flight from Siem Reap or, I read on other boards, there is a speedboat from Siem Reap to PP which might be more fun and safer (or maybe not).