The Magical Mystery Tour Part 1

The last several days have been spent on what we are now referrring to as the Magical Mystery tour. Myself and the 10 other health volunteers along with several members of Peace Corps staff are on an 8 day trip around Cambodia to see the what's what and who's who of Cambodian healthcare. We have been incredibly busy but the trip has been a lot of fun, a lot of information, and a lot of unexpected. I would like to focus this entry on Cambodian transportation. We began the trip on Tuesday the 8th of September on a 24 seater bus. Our first day was spent in and around Phnom Penh visting various organizations working with water sanitation and hygeine. Wednesday night we left Phnom Penh for Kampong Chnang (I think...) where we spent the night. Thursday was an epic day. We got up early thursday morning and borded our trusted form of Cambodian transportation, the bus. The bus took us to a random restaurant/shack in the middle of "East Jesus Nowhere" as one of my fellow volunteers would say. The group waited there in the pouring rain for a "train" to take us to our final destination; a village even further into "East Jesus Nowhere." There was a small bit of shock when we realized, after about 20 minutes, that we were not waiting for the "train" to arrive, we were in fact waiting for the "train" to be put together. This form of transportation,known as "the bamboo train" is little more than a peice of plywood and a tarp with a motor. All 22 or so of us piled on the train in our ponchos (still in the pouring rain) and it took off along the barely visible tracks (they were largely underwater and covered in various forms of vegetation). We were all having a pretty jolly time of it, going over bridges, dodging water buffalo and the sort, when our "driver" brought the whole thing to a rather abrupt stop. Naturally inquiries were made is to why we would stop the "train" in the middle of nowhere in the pouring rain about halfway to our destination. As it turns out a TRAIN was coming. Like a real one. A real big one. So, we had afew minutes to get 20+ people off the "train," take it apart, and move the "train" and people through a small creek to a location that would permit us to not "eat the big train for breakfast." When we finally arrived at our destination we packed 22 people into a pickup truck (a small one) and set off for our days activities. The Bamboo train is my new favorite method of transportation. We spent the afternoon sitting on on sessions aimed to provide mothers of malnourished infants with the information and tools necessary to care for their children and prevent avoidable illnesses. My favorite part of this was actually making sand drawings with a group of children in the back of one of the education sessions. We then took the bamboo train back, a far less eventful trip. As we boarded the bus there was a sense of release as we all crashed after a long day looking forward to nothing more than an easy ride to our next hotel. But, alas this is not how things go in Cambodia. Our trusty bus made it about 45 minutes before it decided it didn't want to work anymore. At this point we were about an hour and a half from our final destination and it was already getting dark. So what did we do? We had a technical session with our LCFs on the side of the road about Cambodian Holidays. I mean why waist time? Eventually we abandoned our bus on the side of the road and hopped one that passed us in route to Pursat. Needless to say, we all slept really well that night.