AsiaLIFE

From six people on an old motorbike to a car roof crowded by a dozen passengers, there is seemingly no end to the inventive ways in which Cambodians take themselves and their wares around the country. It’s a curious sight for newcomers, yet even those who have spent years in the Kingdom often find themselves surprised by the amount of monks that can fit into a tuk-tuk, or the number of bananas a single motorbike can carry.

“I got a shot of a child sitting over the front wheel of a motorbike, with her father driving, and presumably his wife in the back holding on to a big load of vegetables,” says Conor Wall, Phnom Penh resident for close to five years, and one half of the team behind the new photographic book Carrying Cambodia. Featuring nearly 200 shots by him and Bangkok-based photographer Hans Kemp, the book showcases what Cambodians seem simply incredibly adept at doing - piling themselves and their things in astounding quantities onto cars, motorbikes, bicycles and carts.

The book came about somewhat unexpectedly. “I was collecting images for Hans to be used in a book containing shots of various loads from all over Asia, and was amazed at the quantity of good shots I got.  It was near impossible to minimize my selection, so in the end I submitted the whole lot to him,” Conor says. “After seeing the variety of Khmer transportation techniques, he decided to scrap the original book idea and instead concentrate on Cambodia. Once he pitched the name Carrying Cambodia to me, I knew it had to be done.” The book is Conor’s first, while Hans already has several under his belt. Hans considers Carrying Cambodia a natural progression from a previous book, Bikes of Burden, which features shots of motorbikes in Vietnam. Both books are published by his own Hong Kong-based publishing company, Visionary World.  

“The variety of vehicles being used in Cambodia is greater than in Vietnam, whereas Vietnam has much more variety in terms of what is being carried on motorbikes alone,” Hans says of the difference between the two volumes. Most photographs for the new book were taken whilst riding on the back of motos in Phnom Penh, though Conor also travelled across rural Cambodia to capture a large variety of images. “I enjoyed it a lot,” he says. “Usually I’m the driver, so it was nice to take a back seat for a while. Though to be honest, after a few hours I got quite sore...”

If travelling on the back of motos has him complaining, one might expect many of the twelve different means of transportation featured in the book to simply be out of the question for Conor. Yet he too has had his fair share of odd journeys,“To get shots from a different perspective, I once sat alone on the roof of the van coming to Phnom Penh from Kratie,” he explains. “The police stopped the driver and asked me to get off. But I convinced him it was ok. I said I would tie myself down and promised I wouldn’t fall.”

Carrying Cambodia is available at Monument Books for US$25.