Thonk.

There are lots of sounds associated with a minibus trip down a bumpy dirt road, but this was a new one. We looked around and saw a beefy guy on a souped up scooter bearing down on us. He cocked one arm back and threw another rock. We ducked, not sure of the relative strength of the window glass and this guy’s throwing arm. This guy was angry.

Was this the same guy whose female passenger had shrieked as we passed by a few minutes earlier? We – a small friendly group including a couple of Belgian teachers on sabbatical and a French family of five, in addition to the four of us – had laughed at the chaos on the South East Asian roads, and joked about the rules of the dirt roads in Cambodia. We were on a minibus from the Vietnam border to Phnom Penh, and suitcases were stacked to the ceiling between the driver and the passengers. For the most part, we enjoyed this, because it meant we couldn’t see the crazy driving that was surely happening. But it also meant that we weren’t sure exactly what had transpired to make this scooter guy so angry that he would drop off his passenger and chase us. Repeatedly.

After the first rock toss, he stopped to pick up another stone, missing us on his second pitch. We told the driver, since we weren’t sure what he could see. He slammed on the brakes, sending bags and people lurching forward, and then jumped out of the van with a wrench in his hand. Um. The mood in the bus turned serious. Perhaps we’d all seen to many “happy travels gone bad” movies. Babel, anyone? By the time our driver got out of the bus, the scooter guy had retreated, so the next few scooter drivers got a threatening glare from our bus driver as he tried to figure out exactly who his enemy was.

We continued on, cautiously checking behind us from time to time. Sure enough, here came the scooter man again. And this time he had a posse. We alerted the driver, and he floored it, having just moved from the dirt road to something resembling a paved road, and the palm trees started to whiz by the windows. This was not what we envisioned when we booked the slow boat to Phnom Penh. Two cars came speeding up. One passed us, the other pulled in right behind us. We were blocked in and forced to stop. It was no longer funny. We parents tried to keep the mood positive so as not to alarm the children, but we exchanged concerned glances about the yelling going on in the middle of the road. At least we were stopped in front of a small cafe, so there were witnesses.

The big downside to us of traveling in Asia is that we do not speak any of the local languages, and often, as in this case, the locals don’t speak any of our languages, so we still have no idea what the ruckus was really about, or how it was resolved. We only know that after a few minutes of yelling, the angry scooter man threw up his arms and walked back to his ride, and the car drivers followed suit, and we were soon on our way.

Even without this incident, I was going to write about the strange entrance we had to Cambodia, which involved walking from the modern Vietnamese border building across a wide swath of sand and then down a narrow dirt path on an earthen berm, piling into the bus, piling out of the bus, walking across the border down a paved street strewn with rice husks, and filling out yet more forms at the Cambodian checkpoint before returning to the minibus, but that doesn’t seem like such a big deal anymore.

Needless to say, we were relieved to get to our hotel, the very chic but down-to-earth Circa 51 in Phnom Penh, where we found a a gorgeous ginger drink to refresh us after a long day of travel, a great big room with a terrace overlooking the second-nicest pool we’ve seen yet on our trip (just for the record, the nicest was at the Mövenpick Dead Sea Resort, which wins because of its incredible view), and a few new friends.