A Tale of Two Tuk-tuks
Dave Says:
The defacto mode of transport for those quick jaunts around town and not so quick jaunts out of town is the tuk-tuk. They come in different shapes and configurations but basically consist of a modified moped pulling a rickshaw. It’s the sherman tank of the roadways, nothing can stop it, it just keeps heading where you want to go (you hope), often at top revs although not always top speed. No such thing as a meter, all trips are negotiated beforehand and are, confusingly, sometimes a fixed price and sometimes not. In any case and in any country, the trip is cheap. In Siem Reap, Cambodia they are just about the only transportation option for the weary traveler so I thought I’d get to know what life on a tuk-tuk is about.
YoYo was our driver for a whole day around the ruins of Angkor Wat. He’s young, I’d say his early twenties, and has just started as a tuk-tuk driver. His initial investment was high. Although everyone has one, the scooter has to come from somewhere, and the rickshaw half costs around $400 - which is a lot of money by Cambodian standards and took him 5 YEARS to save. I’m sure there are many loan sharks out there and a lot of drivers are hopelessly in debt. Everyone wants to be a tuk-tuk driver though and the city has enforced a licensing scheme to keep them honest (marginally) and the tourists safe (relatively). Tuk-tuk driving is seen as a lucrative job, one step above that is an official tour guide. Anything to do with tourists is considered to be a good way to make money. A dollar from us means so much more than a dollar to them. Unfortunately, this is one area where tourism doesn’t always help the economy because instead of going to college, young people fall into the tourist business to make quick money. This isn’t raising the general level of education in the country and therefore will not raise Cambodia’s economic standing in SE Asia. None of this, however, is of concern to Yoyo. All he wants to do is climb the next step up the ladder of the tuk-tuk business. Yoyo works and lives in a guesthouse. Mark and Shirin drove a hard bargain with the manager/tuk-tuk driver/guide in their guest house and rather than do the job himself for $20, he handed it down to Yoyo. Basically then, Yoyo gets the crappy jobs and has to pay commission to his boss. We certainly had a crappy job for him too. We wanted to visit two very out of the way temples and the drive was about two hours, mainly on dirt tracks where the roadside fauna was a more brown road dust than leaves. And there, on the front of the tuk-tuk, no shade or protection was Yoyo trying his hardest not give the tourists a bumpy ride on a road surface more holes than surface. Yoyo’s mum lives only 10km away from the city but he chooses to sleep in the guesthouse so not to miss any jobs and, he explained, the gasoline is too expensive to go home every night. Like most of those that work in guesthouses in both Cambodia and Vietnam, he probably sleeps on a mattress he pulls into the hotel lobby when all the guests have gone to bed. He said he misses his mother but sends as much money home to her as he can. We tipped Yoyo $5 over the amount agreed with his boss and told him not to tell anyone. Whether he did or not, we’re not sure - I’d like to think he sent the money back to his mother after buying himself a well earned beer but somehow I think his boss has him on a pretty tight leash.
The second tuk-tuk referred to in the title of this posting belonged to Nol. One of the tricks the drivers in Siem Reap do is offer you a free or heavily discounted ride in order to get a days’ business like Yoyo. We discovered this within five minutes of arriving in town when a tuk-tuk driver held up a sign implying he was the shuttle service from the bus station to the guest house we wanted to stay in. Turned out he had nothing to do with the guesthouse but would give us a free ride to whereever we like if we’d book him the next day. After two days of every tuk-tuk ride being a setup for the next day I was a little short with Nol. We had already hired him for a pointless trip back to the bus station to reconfirm our return trip to Phnom Phen (they wouldn’t do it over the phone) when he tried to upgrade us for the next day. I said “no” and walked away in a semi-huff and Sarah ran over and said that this was his first job in three days and wanted to know if he could take us back to the bus station tomorrow to catch our bus out. It’s hard to imagine when you see every tourist in a tuk-tuk that there are way more tuks than tourists and that the bartering we do mostly on principle can have a dramatic effect on the income of the driver. We gave Nol the return business and, there he was the next morning, ten minutes early, waiting to drive us. I think I gave him a big tip to make up for a hard barter the day before and to make up for being a tourist.