South East Asia is known for it’s long and sometimes quite un-confortable means of transportation. When your first ride involves 15minutes of 3 persons and 4 huge backpacks riding a motorbike plus 4 hours minivan ride in Laos, jumping and bumping along with the chicken holes on the dusty road (actual chicken holes and sometimes just holes in the dust), you fear the worst for any other road trip in those countries.

Then, you try a flat boat trip on the Nam Ou river : 20 persons stored on really small benches growing more afraid (and wet) at each cataract crossing, 1 hour with the full sound of the motor in your ears. You wonder which one you feel is the most confortable and the safest between the boat and the minivan. You’re almost longing for a French TGV… and most of all, you dread your next road trips…

That’s when you discover that sometimes it’s good to start with a bad experience so any other experience can only feel better. On the way back for instance, you know you should make sure you’re not sitting at the back of the minivan and the trip is already much better.

Then you give it a try in other countries and you discover that actually Lao roads are the worst you’ve tried yet.

6 hours of Thaï bus are quite confortable except for the lack of toilets. Concrete road are soooo confortable !

1 hour of Thaï minivan feel like a luxury with all those new leather seats.

And 4 hours of Cambodian local minivan feel like the best experience ever when they offer you the front seat. Although it’s hard to be surrounded by people you can’t talk with and it feels bad to have a full seat for myself when 1 lady, 1 boy, 2 kids and an old man share barely two back seats between a whole load of boxes and packages… If only I could explain to them I can take a bag on my knees or a child….

At least it’s a true local experience where the driver puts on his own music (young Thaï or Cambodian kids singing some famous songs) or stops to load more stuff on the back and the top of the minivan or stops again in front of a house to pay a lady and pick up a fresh mango from her tree.

Cambodia is a really poor country but the roads I’ve travelled here so far are in much better shape than Lao ones, even the non-concreted ones.