Duct tape saves the day... again

It wouldn't be a trip without a breakdown of some kind. We watched the minutes tick by at the Battambang bus station, aka the Battambang gas station, surrounded by hawkers and beggars of every kind. Our 9:30 bus to Siem Reap finally pulled in at around 10:00. Instead of a new, air conditioned tourist bus with toilet, it turned out to be an old, air conditioned locals bus sans toilet. They needed the space, I guess, for all the motorbikes and giant sacks of rice they stored under the seats. Through faded curtains we spotted what looked like a couple of empty seats. Once on, the driver shooed away a little girl who was resting there and told us to sit there. The girl went back to sitting on the floor in the aisle with her family. And several other families.

After sitting there for about 20 minutes without leaving - the bus was packed full after all so that didn't make sense - I went out to stretch. Turned out the engine door in the back was propped open and one of the bus driver's assistants was elbow deep inside prying and twisting away. Figures. I always seem to experience at least one mechanical failure of some kind on every trip. Meanwhile, the crowd of food vendors was growing. Ladies carrying giant baskets of food on their heads, wandering in to feed the hungry delayed. Patrick took pictures of the fare - doughnuts, Belgian waffles, whole red-roasted birds on a stick, tiny river clams, fried grasshoppers. It's the river clams that get me. I mean, as I understand it, a clam is basically just a filter... it sits there at the bottom, water flows past it, and it filters out what it wants. It's a river liver.

River clams live in river mud. And mud is about all that's left in the rivers in Cambodia during the dry season. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. Since people live, wash, bathe and dump garbage in that same trickle that passes for a river, it's a hard enough sell to eat fish that lived there, let alone clams, but what do I know?

Anyway, it seemed like it might be a long trip so I bought us two Belgian waffles. Fortunately, though, someone brought the bus driver's assistant the critical mechanic's tool he was apparently missing - a roll of duct tape. "Five minutes," he told me when I asked for our updated ETD. OK, only one hour behind schedule. As it turned out, they must factor that in when they calculate the schedule times because we somehow rolled into Siem Reap pretty much right on time.