Video: Bamboo Tourist Trains: Cambodian National Transport
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
What should be tourist train? Something luxury, with perfectly clean toilets, smiling attendants, helpful flight attendants and a minimarket? Or a bamboo monster puffing with gasoline, stuffed to the eyeballs with smiling Khmers? The choice for any sane tourist is clear: of course, the second! because bamboo tourist train more interesting.
Cambodia, dilapidated by the madness of Pol Pot's bandits, and gradually getting on its feet under the influence of irregular investments from the West, until recently, could not be called a poor country. It was a beggar country. But, when the stomachs fail from hunger, an ineradicable ingenuity and ingenuity awakens in people: the need for invention is cunning. One of the funniest Cambodian fictions is local unique bamboo trains.
While Australians are developing fast magnetic levitation trains, double-decker carriages and Wi-Fi, Cambodians, unhappy with a loose (almost ethereal) train schedule, have focused on cheapness. Their homemade trains - these are wooden carts with a gasoline engine that can ride on rails without a schedule, semaphores, switches, but also without casualties: the speed is not the same. And when two trains that go in different directions meet, the passengers of the smaller "carriage" carry their transport in their arms, just like the Argonauts.
As you can imagine, originally these trains, called Khmers " norrie", were not tourist. They just transported people from village to village. But when tourism began to develop in Cambodia, visitors became very interested in local transport: leisurely (the fastest barely squeeze 40 km / h) bamboo" locomotives " country and get to know its inhabitants (and the Khmers are famous for their kindness and hospitality.) And two dollars, which tourists easily paid for travel, for Cambodians was equal to a monthly salary.
As a result, the Norris became Cambodia's trademark. However, now, fortunately, the country is clearly on its feet, and ordinary people find money to travel in normal wagons. Therefore, alas, unusual bamboo tourist trains go into the past; one of the last Norris travels from the capital, Phnom Penh, to the city of Battambang. If you are in Cambodia, do not miss the chance to ride it.
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