I was on my motorbike one steamy Phnom Penh afternoon when a traffic policeman at an intersection sternly ordered me to stop and turn my bike off. Fair enough, I thought, I am a foreigner on a motorbike which makes me fair game for a shakedown. I settled in for a negotiation over how much this fabricated transgression would cost me and tried to recall how many US one dollar bills I had stuffed in my pocket on my way out of the house.
And then, everyone around me also stopped. As did the traffic on the three other sides of the intersection. Looking around I counted upwards of twenty police officers holding back traffic. It seemed as if the officers had just returned from a rubix cube party; such was the variety of uniforms they had on. There were sky blue shirt wearing traffic police, beige shirted city police, dark olive jumpsuited military police and plain old Royal Cambodian Armed Forces soldiers with ludicrously large assault rifles.
I wondered what the hell was going on. Phnom Penh's roads are a warzone at the best of times (I'll get to that later) but the presence of bona fide soldiers made the metaphor uncomfortably close to the truth. Perhaps I was witnessing a military coup? Shit, I left my SLR at home. And photos taken on my iphone would result in me being laughed out of the Photojournalist's Society. Again.
In the distance, a siren wailed. It got closer, at a speed unfathomable in Phnom Penh- the roads being more congested than an American trucker's arteries. Mao Tse Toung Blvd, the road that the siren was coming from, is one of the worst in the city. The siren's volume reached a climax as a monstrous motorcycle ridden by a stone faced policeman barreled into the intersection, followed closely by two pickup trucks filled with soldiers and a long line of brand new Mercedes S-Class cars, all with their headlights on. This is a big deal in Cambodia; it is genuinely illegal for regular folk to drive with their headlights on during the day*. This honour is reserved for government officials or, in this case, the President of China Hu Jintao. As the red flags with yellow stars fluttered on the sides of the speeding Mercedes I closed my eyes to appreciate the delicious aptness of the Chinese president speeding down a road in a foreign city named after Chairman Mao.
To say that Mr. Hu and his wife were welcome in Phnom Penh is something of an understatement.
Once the motorcade had passed the motley crew of law enforcement/armed forces men simply stepped aside, ignoring the the multitude of traffic code violations amongst those of us stopped at the intersection. I found out later that day that my headlights had been on the whole time. And I didn't have my Cambodian license on me at the time. In late February the same combination of offences had cost me US$6. And resulted in an obese, sweaty policeman holding my hand for 5 minutes. But that's another story.
So I took off and over-revved up to 4th gear and blasted straight through a left turn only lane, only to be pulled over again by a stern, angry traffic policeman. I sighed and mentally counted my singles again.
'You. Wait here,' he growled at me. I was done.
Another siren in the distance. Another motorcade. Another series of infractions ignored. That day, I felt invincible in the constant battle that is being a foreign motorcyclist on Cambodian roads. That was, until the President of Myanmar decided that going anti-clockwise around a traffic circle just wasn't his thing and (presumably) ordered his motorcade to go the other way. Directly at me. I screamed and swerved out of the way of the lead motorcyclist before pulling over, parking my bike and breathing deeply for a while.
Since then, all my journeys by motorbike have been extended by almost double, as the constant stream of important people (and one absurdly well protected South Korean school group) stop traffic around the city.
Why can't they play someplace else?
The hog. 110ccs of law abiding fun.
* It's worth noting, however, that there is no law against operating a motor vehicle without headlights at night.
