The hours of traffic jams in the capital in the evening can be ‘hammering’, unbearable but sometimes almost poetic. To put it plainly, on board a tuktuk, you can hate it, but you can also almost love it by using your imagination.
Back from work, delivery, a stroll, an outing in the capital, who knows? Between 5pm and 8pm, the capital's main boulevards are packed with noise, light and unpredictable movement.
Tens, hundreds of thousands of cars, tuktuk, motorbikes and lorries invade the pavement in a single, chaotic, harmonious, Cambodian movement.
It's an hour you can hate without too much difficulty. Yes, it's an hour when each tuktuk will weave in and out of the queues, sometimes crossing this young, grey concrete demarcation, to gain just a few seconds, sometimes finding itself - ironically in this vain quest to save time - stuck on the other side of the lane it wanted to take.
Yes, it's the hour when you curse the tuktuk driver for not maintaining his cart, while the shocks, not oiled or only lightly oiled, offer you a miniature gymkhana at every pothole. The vertebrae don't like it.
It's also the time when phones are switched on at a standstill, sometimes while you're driving. He'll turn it off in a nano-second, knowing that his starred Grab score could suffer... and that the app's watchdogs will remind him of the holy sacraments he regularly forgets: ‘you will not watch You Tube or chat with your wife or girlfriend on Messenger while you're driving!
Yes, it's the hour when the city is stifling and drowned in lights above, to the right and to the left, in the centre and in grooves. But it's almost beautiful.
However, you can curse or wonder about the GPS technology that sends your driver onto Norodom Boulevard to cross the Monivong Bridge, which means making a diversion, a U-turn (despite the well-marked ban) with a short break at an unofficial, improvised roundabout, They'll sometimes get a little too close to your frail three-wheeled vehicle, almost squinting at the bolts on the wheels of these behemoths, which are often cobbled together and infinitely noisy.
A polite protest that Monivong is going to Monivong. No, the driver will show you with aplomb, seriousness and determination that the application gives you a road map with no logic to follow religiously.
This is the sometimes humorous hour when the driver pisses off and, on rare occasions, even honks the horn at an outrageously loaded old tuktuk unloading its red plastic tables and stools, cans, cobbled-together electrical systems and the like to set up its modest street restaurant.
It's true that he parks a little too far away from his pavement landing area and that he gets in the way. It's amusing to see him being booed by those who have had to cross the white line, run a few red lights and criss-cross the two roads turned into four, time and time again.
So this overflow of noise, lights, smoke and civic senselessness can be difficult. So we can try to make a semi-abstraction of it and reflect by capturing this anthill of little destinies that invades the roadway. These lights and movements can be incredibly photogenic, unusual and full of questions.
Where is this family of four going, bouncing along on a Dailim that miraculously holds together? Where is this overdressed young woman going, sitting like an Amazon in the back seat of a too-new motorbike, nonchalantly holding her rider's waist with one hand and trying to control her splendid hairstyle with the other?
Where does this trailer pulled by another rotting Dailim, loaded two metres high with boxes, driven by an already wrinkled Cambodian staring at the road through cheap sunglasses despite the late hour, go?
Where is this teenager going, with her two dogs straddling the handlebars of her electric motorbike, reminding us inevitably of Edgar's - albeit less chaotic - scene in The Aristochats?
And there are so many others...
This excessively noisy, excessively bright and excessively motley slice of life can become one, two or thousands of stories. Just a few years ago, this stretch of road was a gigantic, muddy, never-ending construction site leading to a new town called Borey.
Today, it is perhaps a reflection of Cambodia, full of excesses, contrasts and life. So it's OK to complain, but perhaps wiser to dream or let your imagination wander at the sight of these images, noisy and smoky to be sure, but which hold so many secrets.
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