Michael Batson

Roads in Cambodia have come a long way since my first visit in 2004. The main land entry point from Thailand at Poipet for example, was along a dirt road badly rutted, virtually impassable in the wet with rudimentary one-lane bridges comprised of bare metal frames laid roughly across waterways. Vehicles inched on to them one wheel at a time. Then there was the road to Koh Kong, geographically one of Cambodia’s most isolated towns, located at the south-western tip of the country across the Cardamom Mountains. A proper road hadn’t yet been built. In the wet, land transport edged its way through mud. Vehicles often had to stop, the passengers forced to alight to lighten the load, or to move boulders out of the way or to push, the wheels buried axle-deep in mud. Progress was slow and painful. The rivers were crossed by rudimentary ferry, there being no bridges. My first trip from there in 2006 was rough and ready, but it was also an adventure in a time not seen again, or so I thought.

At Sre Ambel, the road to Koh Kong leaves the highway to Sihanoukville, the country’s solitary deepwater port. National Route 4 stemmed from the early 1960s, when USAID constructed a highway on the old French-built colonial route. In the intervening years the road had been poorly maintained, and thanks to shortcuts taken by US engineers, hadn’t been properly constructed in the first place. Heavily laden trucks with insecure loads from the port crawled along at a snail’s pace. There were few services, travel at night was inherently dangerous, and you were never getting anywhere in a hurry. Now there’s a billion-dollar expressway to Sihanoukville allowing motorway speeds through automated tolls gates, roadside services, and public safety display boards with the distance travelled counted off by markers the whole way. To Koh Kong however the road is once again under construction, having come almost full circle in the last 20 years.

In some art shops in Phnom Penh, you can find a map for sale of towns and cities in Cambodia laid out like the iconic London Tube map, Harry Beck’s schematic design of underground railway stations. Looking at the map Koh Kong appears as the most isolated town in the country. Khemarak Phoumin (known widely as Koh Kong) is the capital and largest town in Koh Koh Province located at the mouth of the Kah Bpow River. The town (sometimes optimistically called a city) is 138kms (or 148kms depending on your source) along Route 48. The road to Kph Kong takes through the Cardamom Mountains (the Krâvanh Mountains) and across five rivers.

The main purpose of going to Koh Kong for most travelers isn’t the town itself, it’s for travel to Thailand, the town lying smack on the route to and from the southern-most border crossing with Cambodia’s larger neighbour to the west. Koh Kong (there’s also an island with that name not far away) long had a reputation as a “wild west” frontier town. Because of the area’s isolation, border location, the jungle and the mountains, Koh Kong was one of the last vestiges of the Khmer Rouge (actually Khmers Rouges, but the plural version was dropped over time), who were still active in the region late last century. At one point they fired rocket-propelled grenades through a casino because, according to the local police chief, the management failed to pay the group protection money.

Options travelling by road to Koh Kong are limited. Unless you’re going by private car or taxi there’s just one bus company regularly plying the route and it’s Virak Buntham. As with the roads here they seem to have come a long way too over the years. Like a lot of transport operators here they had a well-deserved dodgy reputation, and some may argue, they still have. Once upon a time you bought bus ticket from a travel agent or guest house but things have moved online. Or you went to the bus station by central market, the marvelous Phsar Thmei, but sadly the bus station is now a remnant of its former self. The authorities have sought to move buses out of the city to ease traffic congestion, though it must be said buses have contributed little to that problem.

I went to the Virak Buntham office as I had questions online couldn’t answer. Besides, I’ve already seen first-hand what confusion buying a ticket online can cause, what with passengers turning up at the wrong bus depot only to find they’re supposed to be somewhere else and with just minutes to get there. Their bus station is on Rue France (Street 47) near the Japanese Bridge where there are a number of bus companies located. I wanted to go to Trat in Thailand so Koh Kong was just the furthest point in Cambodia on that route. I knew from previous trips that the bus drops you in Koh Kong, which is a few miles from the border itself, though on one occasion the bus took me to the actual border. For the Thai portion of the journey to Trat, there’s a Thai minivan you organise yourself once you get there.

When I asked staff what happens once you’re at the border, confusion reigned. “There’s a boat”. “A boat to Trat?” “Yes”. “Where does it go from and how long does it take?” There was a pause. Looks were exchanged. “One hour”. It’s 90kms to Trat by road and the town is inland on a river, which would mean the “boat” would have to be travelling at some rate of knots to make it in that time. Perhaps they meant the island of Koh Kong near to the town? More looks being exchanged. “It goes to Trat”. I was unconvinced. Part of the issue was the staff selling the tickets have likely never made the trip themselves. I decided to plunge on in and bought a ticket using my credit card. That’s another change in Cambodia, cash in a cash-based society is still everywhere but plastic and scanning payment for many, are in.

Once upon a time I read a statistic that of the then 30 or so bus companies then operating in Cambodia only one had not been involved in at least one fatal crash, and it wasn’t Virak Buntham. Mekong Express was the solitary exception to the crash rule and the pinnacle others aspired to. I don’t see them around anymore. The Virak bus station is a fairly modern affair. There’s a ticket office, freight section, waiting area and coffee for sale. My bus, what is referred to in these parts as a coaster, was scheduled to leave at 7:30am for the five-hour trip to Koh Kong, or was it six hours? I was told to be there at 7:15am and not to be late. Virak’s fleet are decked out in an orange and white livery. The vehicles all look to be in good order. They enter from Street 47, load up, and depart out onto Preah Botum Sorliavong (Street 75). A coaster is bigger than a minivan but smaller than a full-size bus. They seem to be the most frequently used public transport vehicles for national road travel in Cambodia these days which is a pity as I prefer the comparative safety of the full-size bus. You’ve got less chance of dying in a crash in one of those. Coasters have little room for luggage. At the rear there’s a compartment which can fit a couple of bags but everything else, including freight, goes inside with the passengers.

Even though the Virak bus depot is open air, sitting about there for too long can be injurious to your health. Buses are invariably parked up with their motors running. There being little air movement under cover the place quickly fills up with diesel fumes, which probably means the staff, especially those at the freight counter, are slowly being poisoned. The coaster left 15 minutes late and took an hour to clear Phnom Penh. The new expressway begins northwest of the city’s airport. Our bus made its way slowly along Russian Boulevard, the main road to the airport stopping along the way to pick up passengers and a comfort stop at a petrol station barely 20 minutes after leaving the depot. This was also a chance for the driver to get dressed. After another stop beyond the airport entrance, we turned north, the driver avoiding main roads and instead taking short cuts down side streets before again stopping at a services for another comfort stop about 10 minutes after the first one. We tehn carried on north driving for about 10 minutes past a number of thc city’s dry ports; container depots, with trucks running east and west loading and offloading their loads.

Then it was onto the expressway. The toll gates are automated. Once you hit the expressway there’s no stopping. Where once traffic stuttered along roads with one lane in each direction dodging all manner of vehicles and Third World roadside furniture, there is a four-lane dual carriageway (two lanes in each direction) complete with crash barriers, giant electronic displays with road safety messages, a permanent count of the distance, and roadside services all on a perfect road surface with hardly any vehicles. The official statistics claim 10,000 vehicles a day use the expressway but it’s hard to see where they all are. For the two hours we spent on the road I reckon I saw about 100 vehicles. A large part of the reason for there being so little traffic on the new expressway is cost. A two-way trip between Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville on the new expressway will cost USD24 for a family car and USD120 for a big truck. Somewhat Ironic given the railway from Sihanoukville was rehabilitated a few years ago by Toll Australia precisely to remove much of the heavy road traffic so freight like containers could all be moved by rail. That hasn’t really happened on the old road and now you can move freight on the toll road.

The new expressway runs for 187kms through four provinces: Kandal, Kampong Speu, Koh Kong, Preah Sihanouk. Built as a public-private partnership (or PPP) between the Cambodian government and the China Road and Bridge Corporation, the Chinese state-owned construction and engineering firm that has built infrastructure projects across the globe, at accost of USD1897 million. A PPP is a complex form of financing where all the government does upfront is specify that it wants a building and then contracts a private-sector consortium, in this case a branch of the Chinese government, to do everything else. How China does these projects is quite mind-blowing, not least for the speed of construction and their scale. They manage everything and fly in their own workforces, which rankles with the locals often desperate for jobs. This they did when turning Sihanoukville from a quiet port town into a gambling mecca over just a couple short years.

While there’s a great new road linking the capital with the coast, most people making the trip, go by the old route; a two-tiered mode of travel. The expressway is categorised as a BOT, or build-operate-transfer model, and to-date is the largest single project under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Known in China as the One Belt One Road and sometimes referred to as the New Silk Road, this is a global infrastructure development strategy begun by China in 2013 to invest in more than 150 countries and international organisations. The BRI is composed of six urban development land corridors linked by road, rail, energy, and digital infrastructure and the Maritime Silk Road linked by the development of ports. Cambodia gets infrastructure but China gets warm water ports, a friendly government, and a deepwater naval base in return.

The new expressway criss-crosses the old National Route 4 in numerous places. Gazing across the countryside you see much more traffic on the old road than you see on the new one. The first proper road from Phnom Penh to the coast was built by the French, who had built some excellent roads in Indochina designed of course, to protect their own interests. At that time, you could drive anywhere in Cambodia especially during the dry season. Most of the roads were passable, traffic was light, and the distances weren’t great. However, in the wet season travel could be an issue. French military engineers designed and built the main roads in Indochina, principally of course to maintain rule in their colonial possessions. French roads traditionally are lined by trees. In France this was to conceal troop movements but in Indochina, with its tropical heat, it also served to provide shade.

After Cambodia’s independence in 1953 the French government withdrew much of its official aid and support. With tensions building towards the Second Indochina War and the global tensions of the Cold War playing out in the region, the US decided to build what was called the “American Highway” what is now National Route 4. This was back when Cambodia’s only deepwater port was still called Kompong Som, before Sihanouk named it for himself. Before the port’s and city's foundation works of 1955, the port of Kompong Som must have been only of regional significance due to the lack of navigable waterways connecting it with the kingdom's settlement centres. At that time, in the 1960s with war brewing in neighbouring Vietnam and in Laos, Cambodia remained neutral, and it being the height of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union were competing with each other among non-aligned countries, Cambodia being one. The Soviet Union was then building the Soviet-Khmer Friendship Hospital in Phnom Penh, which at 500-beds when completed would be the largest hospital in Southeast Asia. The Americans looked around for what they could offer and decided on upgrading the road to the coast as a quick win for hearts and minds, not least their own prestige, and as a road already existed, they wanted to finish this project before the Russians could finish theirs. To ensure they finished first, the Americans cheated, or at the very least, they took shortcuts and the work was never properly finished.

Unlike the French road, where their military engineers took the time to calculate the requirements for drainage and raised the roads above the plain, the Americans didn’t bother. The Americans duly won the race to be the first to complete their respective project but because they hadn’t done the proper preparation work, when the first wet season came along problems with the road quickly arose. Apparently, the problem came when the consulting engineers, who were supposed to monitor the project, got into cahoots with the contractors who were building it. Even before the road was finished, it started falling apart, and become impassable in some places.”. Whereas the hospital completed in 1960, is still operating today as the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital.

One of the worst affected stretches of the road was at Phnom Pech Nil, a mountain pass in the Cardamom jungle where the highway left the central plains and headed downhill toward the sea. On a ridge overlooking the highway Prince Sihanouk had built a “summer palace” because it was several hundred kilometres high and there was a cool breeze even at noontime. The prince went there quite often and sometimes invited foreign diplomats along for the weekend. Unfortunately, the villa also overlooked the worst deteriorating part of the “Khmer-American Friendship Highway”. The USAID contractors had not calculated the drainage properly or perhaps had tried to cut the mounting cost by using inadequate culverts. As a result, one whole side of the highway was sliding down a slope into the forest and only constant maintenance kept the road open. Some miles further down the road USAID had a big construction camp but the patch-up effort was hopeless; the whole section would have to be rebuilt. That meant big bucks and with Sihanouk’s mounting anti-American tirades, no one wanted to commit the money. The entrance to the villa was beyond the point where the road started to go bad. So, every time the prince went to Pech Nil he bumped along and saw the road washing away. It was quite symbolic, actually, for it was often said that the road was deteriorating au fur et a mesure de (at the same rate as) Khmer-American relations.

Our coaster rolled along at a steady 75kph, the Cambodian countryside on view rolling by. There are few hills in Cambodia and those there are, at least for me coming from a mountainous country, are rather unimposing. What is a feature of geography is that most of the hills seem to have been mined. On one side there’s trees and then around the back as it comes into view is the scarring of excavators. As there being few other sources of bedrock for roading, engineers need to drill out whatever available sources there are, so most of the hills have been chopped in half. And to build a billion-dollar expressway has taken thousands of cubic tonnes of bedrock so on view that appears to be where it’s come from.

Most of all on show when travelling by road in Cambodia are the local driving practices. Figures for 2024 from the National Road Safety Committee report a 14% reduction in traffic accidents compared to the previous year. According to the committee's report, Cambodia recorded 2,844 traffic accidents in 2024, with 57% occurring at night. These accidents claimed 1,509 lives and left 3,720 people injured, including 2,273 who sustained serious injuries. This ranks Cambodia at about 66th globally for road traffic fatalities per 100,000 population. These are only reported accidents, no statistics exist for those that go unreported, and reported or not, that does little to make me feel safe.

That said I have to say our driver wasn’t too bad. I’ve seen worse. Seated behind him was a trainee from what I could tell, learning the ropes and the route. Once we left the expressway it was back on Third World roads. Near the Sre Ambel bridge is a restaurant that all the buses to and from Koh Kong stop at. Facilities here haven’t changed since I first stopped there in 2007 (it was dark on my first trip in 2006, so that trip didn’t count). There were passengers from three coasters all using the toilets and eating. The toilets are a row of stalls with reservoirs and ladles for manual flushing. Because none of the walls meet the ceiling, or in some cases, the floor, there’s a cacophony of noise associated with ablutions some mercifully masked by the electronica of mobile phones. Hygiene is rudimentary. The plaque on the bridge, and every bridge in Koh Kong province displays the flags of Thailand and Cambodia, the former having paid for the work.

From Sre Ambel the road is under construction. Sometimes it’s down to one-lane. Though it’s one-lane only, the traffic is still moving in both directions. This is regardless of whether there is roadworks underwayor not. Vehicles just drive through them. The roadworks don’t stop for vehicles. The vehicles don’t stop for the roadworks. Dump trucks come rolling along straight at other vehicles. Earth moving machinery and steam rollers just carry on regardless. Vehicles don’t reduce speed or make any allowances for being in a work zone they also carry on regardless. All this is conducted under a huge cloud of dust that chokes all and covers everything. The answer to poor visibility from drivers is to drive as close as possible to the vehicle in front. This presumably is an attempt to keep sight of them, but then allows for no stopping time or distance. The chances of getting side-swiped by a grader are high as they can't see you either and as there's no traffic control, just carry on working. For long stretches there are no other vehicles travelling or working. it's just the road construction in its various phases of completion. There are pot holes, corrugations aplenty, trenches, sudden drops into forest as there's no road shoulder, lanes at different levels, one a metre higher than the other. Vehicles and their drivers just make stuff up, even more than is usual in Cambodia.

Overtaking is arguably the most dangerous manoeuver possible while driving a vehicle which just puts it on a long list of dangers when travelling by road in Cambodia. To complete overtaking safely requires certain steps performed in a particular order. In Cambodia however, the standard operating procedure is usually to wait until you’re approaching the brow of a hill before pulling out into the lane of oncoming traffic, or near a blind corner. Once you’ve done this ensure you’re in the wrong gear so that you don’t have enough momentum or speed and therefore take much longer to pass vehicles than you should therefore increasing the likelihood of a head-on crash. On the road to Koh Kong throw into the mix road works and works’ vehicles, often large slow-moving ones, the sort you definitely wouldn’t want to hit and the dangers are heightened considerably. Not all the large construction vehicles are slow moving. Dump trucks can move at speed and coming head or side-on make matters even more dangerous with their bulk, the amount of dust they throw up, and the practice seemingly of operators to compete directly for road space as if in some competition.

According to the Cambodian Ministry of Public Works and Transport, construction of Route 48 is now over 80% complete. My observation would be the opposite, that there is still 80% to be done. The construction project to rebuild all 148kms of the road (which apparently also includes work on the existing bridges even they are less than 20 years old) began in January 2022 and is costing USD78M. The road, the Ministry acknowledges; ‘is a key strategic route with significant potential in areas such as economic development, trade, transportation, logistic s, and tourism’. Its importance is ‘further amplified by its role in connecting to the deep-water port in Preah Sihanouk Province, aiming to boost trade, investment, and the efficient, cost-effective transportation of agricultural and agro-industrial products.’ Construction is another joint venture between the government and private companies. Apparently, there are eight teams (up from the original three) doing the work. I can’t recall how many I saw but my overwhelming impression was there was an awful lot left to do, and not many people to do it.

At the town of Botum Sakor three of the passengers got off; foreigners with their backpacks escorted starry-eyed into a waiting pick-up bearing the name of some wildlife NGO to whisk them off to save the planet, or just this part of it. Botum Sakor looks like a mini city with a number of multi-level buildings all of especially ugly and of similar design. None are for people, rather they’re artificial bird houses, constructed modern nest farming for swiftlets. Of four to five storeys high with blank concrete walls lined with rows of slits. The noise of these bird cities is enough to drive some people insane. The buildings themselves look like they’re part of some penitentiary; the concrete now stained grey by the humidity the uniform design looking like so many prison cells. While we were stopped our driver got out to tape up the door to the luggage hold at the rear of the vehicle. This was where my bag was located, so I got out to check what was going on. I wasn’t sure if this effort was because the door was defective – they couldn’t close it properly at the depot in Phnom Penh before we left but assured me it would be fine, or whether it was an attempt to stop the compartment being filled with dust. Either way it lasted all the way to Koh Kong where I was relieved to see my bag still there when the door was opened.

We crossed the Cardamom Mountains dipping down in the valleys across the Thai-funded bridges and up the other side again. My first trip this way albeit in the opposite direction had been to cross the rivers by barge, there being no bridges back then. There are still tracts of jungle. Signs at the roadside stated which regulation the trees are protected by, that is, until someone decides there’s more money in logging than in conservation. At places the new road is being cut through entire hillsides, the bare grey rock revealing the extent of the work, which looks far from finished. Everywhere the dust chokes traffic and trees. Near Koh Kong the hills give way to the coastal plain stretching out to the sea at the Gulf of Thailand. The new road is being continued right into the town itself. On the left someone is building a new house, the size of a casino.

Having come through the Cardamom range on that road you do get the view that Koh Kong is literally the end of the line; the terminus like on the Tube map. For years the town was only accessible by boat it being blocked off by the impassable jungled valleys and hills of the Cardamom Mountains (fishing boats and there was a daily ferry to and from Sihanoukville, and maybe still is) or by air. When the road was being constructed vehicles would travel along the route as best they could; negotiating mud, boulders, earthmoving machinery, and crossing the rivers on rudimentary barges. Koh Kong had all the characteristics of a lawless frontier: isolation, illegal logging, wild animal trade, banditry, and thanks to the casinos linin the border with Thailand, gambling, prostitution, human trafficking and soaring rates of HIV-AIDS. Koh Kong’s claim to fame for years was once having the longest bridge in Cambodia. The Koh Kong Bridge, at 1900m in length and opened in 2002, links the town with Mondol Seima, on the way to the Thai border crossing. In addition to providing Cambodia with access on this part of the coast to Thailand, it also links that country with Vietnam at Hà Tiên, 290kms away.

For the last part of the journey through to Koh Kong we played follow the bus with another Virak coaster. For some reason this other vehicle kept stopping, then would overtake us and then stop again in the middle of nowhere seemingly for no particular reason. Despite this it still managed to get to the Virak depot in Koh Kong before us, at which point those of us going on to Thailand piled into that vehicle for the short trip to the border. Our coaster to the border was overfull with tourists all going to Thailand. None were stopping in Koh Kong itself. The road to the border takes you over the aforementioned bridge, once the country’s longest, and through two features of Cambodian border areas: Special Economic Zones, and casinos. One good thing about the road to Koh Kong is there’s little other traffic, so roadworks construction vehicles aside, there’s much less chance of crashing into another vehicle, something which can’t be said for the other roads in the country.

The border at Cham Yeam on the Cambodian side and Klong Yai/Hat Lek on the Thai side have changed little in the years I’ve passed through. To be fair the Cambodians have built a more substantial facility than the shacks that once sat there but it’s all very low key. Trucks sit in queues waiting their turn to advance. There are the usual stalls and shops at least on the Thai side. The border crossings sit right on the coast, the beach just a few metres away. Once through immigration, there’s seemingly no customs on either side for foot passengers, you’re on your own, and another kingdom awaits.