Michael Batson

Neak Loeung is a sleepy, dusty town in Cambodia on the main road between Phnom Penh and the Vietnam border.

Once upon a time the highway at Neak Loeung crossed the Mekong River by ferry as you moved between Kandal and Svay Rieng provinces about an hour’s drive south of the Cambodian capital in a country where transport still moves relatively slowly. Today the town has taken a back seat as the once bustling ferries are now gone replaced by a most spectacular sight, the Tsubasa Bridge, an engineering marvel. The opening of the Tsubasa Bridge in April 2015 made it possible to drive across the Mekong River on this route for the first time all day every day, and removed the bottleneck of the river crossing. Building the bridge has been hyped as the star development project in all of Cambodia and showcased the high-quality infrastructure capabilities of Japan.

Neak Loeung isn’t so much a town with a bridge as bridge with a town, though the town came well before the bridge was built. The town has a population of a few thousand, is a regional service centre, and serves as the base for NGOs working in the area. Before the bridge was built all traffic using the main road and crossing the river on the ferries went straight through the town. With that transport function came employment and economic activity with communities built around those. The ferries carried everything across the river. Squeezed on board were every manner of wheeled transport. Saffron-robed monks on the backs of motorbikes, families in tuk-tuks, trucks, cars, horse-carts, and some foot passengers. The larger vessels had ramps at each end which allowed for easy roll-on and roll-off, so no need to turn the vehicles. You drove straight on and then straight off again.

The ferries made the town a hive of activity. As usual in these parts, entire cottage industries popped up around this traffic: food sellers, drinks, even religious accessories depending on the time of year. Before the waiting vehicles could move onboard, peddlers would pounce before the engines had even been switched off. Teenagers would mob the cars, offering drinks, sweets and cigarettes. Elderly women weaved through mazes of vehicles, balancing trays of bugs or betel leaves on their heads. Sunglasses were for sale. Eggs of all sizes. DVDs, donuts and toy dogs with heads that bobble. And then there were the beggars: toddlers with runny noses wearing no more than grime, blind men with big smiles, and spindly old women who survived civil war and genocide only to end up pleading with strangers for cash.

The area also became a second home for those seeking to sell to and beg from these crowds. Many of the hundreds who beat the sun there every day were following in their parents’ footsteps. Some families arrived as soon as the ferry service resumed in 1979. When the bridge was opened in 2015, though, they all needed somewhere else to go. For those who had carved out a living around the ferry landing, the new bridge represented the end of an era. In a piece by the wonderful, but now sadly defunct, Cambodia Daily, Chou Nang, a 67-year-old who had worked the dock since 1979 said when interviewed; “Now, I don’t know what to do. When the ferries stop crossing, the cars will stop coming and I will have no one to sell to.” A fixture at Neak Loeung since it reopened for civilians following the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Ms. Nang had an exalted position in the hierarchy there. She would sit out of the way of the moving vehicles, smiling from behind a neatly rolled stack of betel leaves, which she sold wholesale to other women who then would zigzag between cars looking for buyers.

Over the Khmer New Year (March) and Pchum Ben holidays (September), the chaos increased significantly at Neak Loeung as thousands of families leave Phnom Penh for the southeastern provinces of Prey Veng and Svay Rieng. Vehicles would queue for kilometres. Families sometimes slept overnight. The road turned into a shantytown and the locals reaped a windfall. Ms. Nang said on normal days she’d earn about 10,000 riel ($2.50) “but during the holiday, in three or four days I can earn 500,000 to 600,000 riel [$125 to $150],” adding that she brought a sleeping mat and a mosquito net so she could cater around the clock to the holiday crowds.

She recalled the 1973 bombing of the town by the US, her husband being hauled away by the Khmer Rouge in 1978, never to be seen again, and Vietnamese troops coming across the Mekong in the days before the Khmer Rouge were toppled. At the time of the bombing the then government of Cambodia, the short-lived Khmer Republic led by Lon Nol, a right-wing populist, was engaged in an increasingly bloody civil war against the forces of the Khmer Rouge. Neak Loeung was then a garrison town full of government soldiers, so those effectively allied to the US. On 6 August 1973, US B-52s carpet bombed the town killing 200 and wounding many more some of them children. The target area of single B-52 is approximately 500m by 1500m, so a mile long. From 4 October 1965 until 15 August 1973, just nine days after the Neak Loeung attack, the United States dropped 2.7M tons of ordnance on the Cambodia mostly from B-52s. Indiscriminate by design: carpet-bombing by B-52s flying so high thier "targets" are invisible to the naked eye. .The carnage wrought by the bombing was depicted in the Hollywood film ‘The Killing Fields’. The main street was cratered with many of the bombs having fallen near the barracks where pro-government soldiers resided with their wives and children, damaging the local hospital and demolishing large sections of the town. On hearing of the incident, the US ambassador journeyed to the town and started handing out $20 notes ($146 today) as compensation to survivors, that seemingly being the value placed by Washington back then on human life in Cambodia.

The road on either side of the bridge is busy and narrow. Unlike some other national roads in Cambodia, which have been upgraded to dual carriageways, Route One is still single lane in each direction. I recalled my first trip along this road in 2006 and again the next year when the road was then being resealed as we bumped along at a crawl reduced to one-lane while dodging heavy machinery that covered everyone and everything in dust. Road speeds aren’t that much faster now and infinitely more dangerous. Some freight from Vietnam comes upriver from Saigon, the world’s seventeenth busiest port but most freight still travels by road. Thoughts of inter-regional rail networks are still far away as Cambodia remains the missing rail link. Buses connecting Phnom Penh with Ho Chi Minh City appear about every ten minutes in each direction their drivers usually driving with one wheel on the centre line, headlights on full beam even in daylight, blasting the horn repeatedly, and planting their foot hard on the accelerator to make schedule. Everyone and everything else are seemingly expected to make way.

I rolled out of Phnom Penh south riding my motorbike along Monivong Boulevard into a spaghetti junction of sorts. Some of it was still under construction with workers in high-viz vests, hard hats, and wearing flip-flops wandering about the roadside some looking at their phones and others buying drinks and food from street vendors who follow the work gangs along the route as the work progresses. The road is built up each side and traffic is chaotic. Stopping at red lights seems optional and obeying traffic signals can cause accidents. Cambodians don’t really “get” traffic lights, or being in the proper place in traffic lanes. Indicators, especially on the ubiquitous step-through scooters, seem to be turned on one week and switched off the next. Rearview mirrors are purely ornamental or used for body maintenance. Road traffic in Cambodia is a sort of motorized melee where you take your chances.

Once free of the city confines there are often long columns of vehicles travelling in each direction. Overtaking is common even when there’s no obvious room. Drivers just pull out and accelerate straight at oncoming traffic, which is then forced to take evasive action. Vehicles usually make way on an evolutionary scale: the bigger and more expensive ones usually get to go first and others make way, though there’s no hard and fast rule and you should be prepared for the unexpected at all times. Sometimes you see vehicles two or even three abreast coming straight towards you. Vehicles can undertake other vehicles driving on the hard shoulder. If you’re on a motorbike you wind up wedged between one vehicle in the road on your left, and another on the shoulder, on your right. All you can do is hold on and to hope for the best.

All types of vehicles can be seen travelling on Route One to Neak Loeung including some you won’t see on roads at home. There are: tuk-tuks; motorbikes, some often performing freight functions, and others carrying multiple passengers; trucks most usually grossly overladen; SUVs; the latest fad in people wagons; vans overloaded with people and carrying freight also; pick-ups (or utes, take you pick); and buses of all description. Some vehicles look brand new while many others look in dire need of maintenance. Many drivers have had no formal training and invariably hold no licence, and tend to drive increasingly high-powered vehicles like they used to ride motorbikes. Add into the mix roadside furniture, local traffic crossing at odd times and angles with no due care, pedestrians and livestock, and the road to Vietnam through Neak Loeung can make for a fraught experience.

The main street of Neak Loeung is lined with shops fulfilling the town’s function as a service centre with everything needed to keep the local economy going. There are some guesthouses but this town isn’t really for tourists; local or foreign. I found a couple of cafés where the staff seemed surprised to see any customer, much less a foreigner. There’s a bakery near the turn-off from the main road which is like a Cambodian drive-in or rather a ride-up. You can ride up to the front counter and without dismounting, point to what you want from the display cabinets all of which then gets put into individual plastic bags and all your items then go into another plastic bag. Where once bags were woven of natural fibre and food often came wrapped in banana leaves, nowadays Cambodia loves plastic. It gets used and it gets dumped everywhere.

My first sight of the Tsubasa Bridge was in 2014 from the ferry looking north to where the gigantic towers appeared out of the water and I first travelled across the bridge two years later in 2016. The bridge is all the more imposing as it appears out of a flat landscape the towers emerging through the vista of sugar palm trees. It’s a modern engineering marvel in a country where land use has remained largely unchanged for centuries. In Khmer the bridge is called “Spien Tsubasa”, and is sometimes referred to as the Neak Loeung Bridge. “Tsubasa” in Japanese means “bird stretches wings”. It’s the tallest and longest bridge in Cambodia at 130m high (about the same as a 43-story building), 2.2kms long, and weighs in at approximately 38,000 metric tons. It is a feat of modern engineering that took four-and-a-half years to build on one of the world’s great rivers. Before the Tsubasa Bridge was built the longest bridge in Cambodia from 2002 was at the sleepy town of Koh Kong near the border with Thailand. While that Thai-sponsored structure is long, it's not nearly as impressive as the Tsubasa (sorry Koh Kong)

Tsubasa was the third bridge to be built in Cambodia with assistance from Japan. Japan began a programme of international infrastructure assistance in 1954 known as Official Development Assistance (ODA), a part of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A major focus of the ODA is building economic and social infrastructure essential for economic growth and has seen Japanese-sponsored projects across the globe from Cambodia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The first bridge built by Japan in Cambodia goes back to 1963 when the Chroy Changva Bridge (officially the Cambodian-Japanese Kizuna Friendship Bridge but usually shortened to Japanese Friendship Bridge) was built in Phnom Penh. That bridge was severely damaged during the civil war in 1972 and 1973 when the Khmer Rouge blew up sections, and remained closed until it reopened on almost 20 years later, in 1994. Since then, Japan has been working with the Asian Development Bank to develop infrastructure in the Greater Mekong Sub-region.

These days another Asian economic powerhouse is providing development in Cambodia; China. Immediately adjacent the Japanese Friendship bridge in Phnom Penh is the New Chroy Changvar Bridge, or, the China Friendship Bridge. The older Japanese built bridge runs two lanes from west to east and the China built one runs two lanes in the opposite direction. After the Lao People's Democratic Republic, the Kingdom of Cambodia is China’s new best friend in Southeast Asia.

Japan’s history of bridge building in Asia though goes back before the creation of the ODA. War and empire-building saw the Imperial Japanese Army build bridges across Southeast Asia, especially railway bridges useful for troop movements though the Japanese army beat the British and captured Singapore using just bicycles. Many Japanese engineers were trained in the UK so contrary to the depiction of these as being incompetent in the famous film ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’, many had the same training as any British engineer. Bridges and other infrastructure building work in Asia by Japan today is probably as much an effort at repairing its national image from those years before and during WWII, when Japanese forces perpetrated numerous atrocities on populations, and the country’s proposed Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere delivered none of the promised benefits to any other Asian countries.

Bridges now are at the forefront of infrastructure development by Japan. Some 2,000 bridges have been built in developing countries. The rationale is that bridges improve people’s living conditions and facilitate transport, and can play a major role in strengthening regional ties across national borders. The Tsubasa Bridge was to be link in the ASEAN highway system (the Southern Economic Corridor), connecting Bangkok, Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City. Construction of the Tsubasa Bridge had a long development. The first feasibility study for a bridge at the site was done as far back as 1995-96 when two other potential bridge sites across the Mekong River were also identified. Following completion of the first of these at Kompong Cham in 2001, Cambodia requested Japan build another bridge at Neak Loeung. A further feasibility survey was then undertaken from 2003 until early in 2006. Then a follow-up study took place from late 2006 and lasted a year. From April 2008 until March 2010, a preparatory study took place before the grant agreement was signed in June 2010. Construction work commenced in December 2010 and was completed officially on 6 April 2015.

During planning and construction of the bridge Japanese engineers encountered major obstacles not found at home. These included land mines and other unexploded ordinance, fluctuating water levels of up to 8m; an eleven-fold seasonal variation in the river’s water volume; and riverbank erosion of over 50m on the eastern side alone. Constant erosion makes the Mekong look like the colour of milky tea and sometimes tea that's become stewed. It took so long to get around to building the Tsubasa Bridge. So long, that in the meantime Japan built another, cheaper bridge across the Mekong River at Kompong Cham north of Phnom Penh. One reason for the delay was money. The cost of the bridge escalated when Vietnam, situated downriver, demanded a clearance height of 37.5 meters be guaranteed so that 5,000 DWT vessels could navigate under the bridge. This meant the bridge design needed to be lengthened and the cost therefore increased.

The bridge was built with Japanese grant money and cost about USD127 million based on the exchange rate at the time the grant agreement was signed in June 2010. Design proposals were made for a cable-stayed bridge, an extradosed bridge (a hybrid bridge, a cross between cable-stayed and prestressed girder), a truss bridge, and an arch bridge. Construction began in December 2010 and was to take two years but actually took over four years to finish. Sumitomo Mitsui Construction, part of the giant Mitsui zaibatsu with roots going back to the 19th century, managed the project with 17 Japanese (inclusing: a director, deputy director, 13 technical staff, safety specialist, and one clerical worker), 32 engineers from other countries not including Cambodia, and 107 Cambodians. Parts of the construction were also undertaken in partnership with consultant companies supervising the construction. Over the more than four years of the project the total workforce grew to number over 1,000. Specialists from six different engineering specialties were employed in construction which also included safety management specialists.

Building the Tsubasa Bridge in Cambodia took over 10 years from initial planning to the finish of construction. In all work consumed about 8 million work-hours making it now possible to cross the Mekong River on Route One for the first time 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. As mentioned above, building the bridge required overcoming major obstacles some causing delays. One of the delays in the project was the discovery of unexploded ordnance left over from the civil war and US bombing. Multiple unexploded ordnance was found during the topographical survey of the area scheduled to be used for the bridge construction. More unexploded ordnance was discovered during the preparatory study conducted in 2009. In 2010, some 38 hectares of the construction area was gone over by the Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC), Cambodia, having the best de-miners in the world by some reports, found and cleared 4216 items of unexploded ordnance and 12,127 pieces of debris. CMAC and the Cambodian military were stationed at the construction site in case of further incidents, which there were. In July 2012, unexploded ordinance detonated during the pile foundation work of the eastern main tower, forcing the suspension of construction work for four months while further security measures were made.

Another challenge of construction was the river itself. The Mekong River stretches 4,763kms through six countries to its outflow into the South China Sea. It originates in the Tibetan Plateau of China at an altitude of 5,200m, then drops 4500m in elevation over its first 2200kms through the mountainous upper basin in China. It then begins levelling out near the "Golden Triangle" where the borders of Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos meet. Over the course of the last 1000kms the altitude variation of the Mekong is just 100m. The decreasing elevation from north to south creates a wide range of water levels and flood dynamics. North of Neak Loeung, the river's flow is influenced by the Great Lake, Southeast Asia’s largest freshwater lake, which swells during the rainy season and the flow of the Sap River is reversed, from where it joins the Mekong at Phnom Penh. The river's final stage is the delta in Vietnam, a flat, sprawling area that is at or near sea level. Recent data shows the average elevation of the delta is less than one metre above sea level, making it particularly vulnerable to changes in sea level and river discharge. Climate change exacerbates these challenges, leading to increased frequency and severity of both droughts and floods, which are most pronounced in the downstream areas.

The river depth at the Neak Loeung crossing point is 25m (depths upriver can be 100m). Water depth fluctuates seasonally however. During the wet season the water depth is on average 7.5m higher than in the dry season and can be higher still with flooding. Seasonal water depth variations impacted bridge construction work causing delays. Substructure work, which was scheduled to be carried out during the dry season, would drag on into flooding season, thereby extending the construction period by up to nearly a year. During this time design was also changed to reflect the changing environmental conditions. During development of the project, the Mekong River was flooded four times (1996, 2000, 2001, and again in 2002) where water levels reached almost eight metres above normal dry season levels.

With seasonal water level variations comes increased river flows. The discharge of the river during the wet season is 11 times that of the dry season (33,000m3 per second versus just 3,000 m3). Riverbank erosion rates were also a serious factor. Some 40m of erosion had occurred in the five years from the 2004 feasibility study to the time of the basic design study in 2009. The land in the Mekong Delta is subsiding, which, along with rising sea levels, contributes to inundation of coastal areas, a problem linked to the delta's low elevation. All this information had to be reflected in the pier design. A multi-column foundation was used with ship-shaped pile caps due to streamflow and vessel navigation. The piles were made 70m in length to counter the seasonal variation in the water levels, and in order to prevent scouring. Piles and the support layers of the bridge were located at certain heights from the riverbed to allow for this.

Since completion, the Tsubasa Bridge has become somewhat of a tourist attraction. It’s common for motorists, motorcyclists, and even food sellers to stop and park at the bridge’s apex. This is dangerous as there’s nowhere for vehicles to stop. There’s the traffic lanes (one in each direction) and a smaller lane for motorcyclists, which acts as the hard shoulder. Vehicles also overtake on the bridge. The gradient on the bridge is quite steep, so coming up one side you can be confronted by vehicles coming at you head-on over the curvature of the road. Trucks invariably cannot manage more than a crawl – it seems to be that every truck in Cambodia cannot manage more than a snail’s pace on any incline – so vehicles invariably become impatient and overtake despite there being no room to do so. Police even stop at the top of the bridge and pass the time.

You can drive under the Tsubasa Bridge at Neak Loeung on Route Eleven which bisects the town. It starts at the turn-off to the town itself on the main Vietnam road and runs east-west to the river, and then north all the way to Route Seven where it hits a T-junction. There's it's left to Kampong Cham and the second Japanese-built bridge, and right taking you towards Vietnam before swinging north and on to Kratie up to Steung Treng and then all the way to the border with Laos.

The building of the bridge has for the most part cut the travel time from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City by half. Travel time between the two cities though still takes 5-6 hours (the distance by road is barely 280kms) depending on what time of day you’re travelling. If you go early enough then it's about that long, but if you go later then there can be delays at the Bavet-Moc Bai border crossing. Other plans that the bridge will ‘fill a vital gap in the planned expressway that will link Ho Chi Minh to Bangkok via Poipet City [and resolve] the bottleneck of the Southern Economic Corridor connecting Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar’, haven’t come to fruition yet and won't anytime soon as long as the Thai military maintains closure of the land borders with Cambodia.

The Neak Loeung ferries are still running but upriver in Phnom Penh where they ply the junction of the Mekong, Sap, and Bassac rivers. They’re probably still just as busy as they were at Neak Loeung but now are crossing to the Chroy Changva Peninsula which was joined to the city by the first Japanese built-bridge, and across to the township of Areiksart in Kandal Province. Japan may yet build another bridge at a site identified during the first studies they did back in the mid-nineties. Another bridge site, also proposed as part of the study at Prek Tamak has not yet been built.

If you make the trip by road between the two biggest cities in Cambodia and Vietnam you will pass over the Tsubasa Bridge. If you go by river by fast ferry from Phnom Penh to Châu Đốc or vice versa, or splash out on a cruise along the Mekong you’ll pass under it. If you’re in Cambodia but don’t go anywhere near the Tsubasa Bridge you can still see it on cash transactions for the bridge’s significance is captured in the design of the 500-riel note, which is the note most often used in Cambodia.

Thanks to Neak Loeung and The Cambodia Daily.