A wild ride into Cambodia's past

In the jungle of central Cambodia is a wonderful antique that links the colonial past with the world of today. This triumph of human ingenuity is called the Bamboo Train.

On a recent trip through that country, my wife and I spent the day on the backs of tiny motorbikes, sliding along the muddy paths that pass for roads during the fall monsoons.

Everyone rides motorbikes in Cambodia because there are few cars available and even less money with which to buy them. For about a dollar a day you can be ferried anywhere you wish on the back of a motorbike. Hundreds of young men line the streets, each hoping to be chosen as a guide by one of the handful of tourists beginning to trickle into this once forbidden land.

After a couple of hours, I was the color of chocolate from head to toe, having been dumped unceremoniously from the back of my trusty steed into the mud as my driver struggled mightily to keep us upright. We could have ridden an elephant and I wondered if I had made the right choice.

We passed farmers with prosthetic limbs picking rice, the result of some 5 million landmines leftover from a civil war and an invasion by Vietnam. We visited Hindu temples that predated their touristy cousin, Angkor Wat, by more than 400 years. And we observed a way of life that hasn't changed much for more than 1,000 years.

It was one of those special days that a traveler hopes for. But by midafternoon, when the high humidity equaled the air temperature, I felt apprehensive about our 30-mile ride back to the city of Battambang. I had just stopped trying to scrape mud from my clothes when my guide said he had a special surprise: We were not riding the motorbikes back. Instead, we'd take the Bamboo Train.

I was intrigued at the thought of riding a train through the jungle, yet I had not seen any sign that such a thing existed. I had read that, in their zeal to create a submissive agrarian society, the Khmer Rouge had systematically destroyed modern conveniences such as airplanes and trains.

Aside from the motorbikes, the only other major mode of transport I'd seen were the water buffaloes.

When I asked about the Bamboo Train, my guide smiled the smile of the knowing, and we headed deeper into the jungle.

In a short while, we arrived at a crumbling shack in the middle of nowhere. Wild monkeys screeched at us and Brahma cows eyed us warily as they chewed their cud. Next to the shack was a narrow-gauge train track, no wider than two feet. It looked small enough to be a toy railroad. From inside the shack two young men appeared, carrying two ancient steel axles with cast-iron wheels at both ends.

These were placed on the track - a perfect fit. Next, they produced a long semi-rigid bamboo mat that was about three feet wide and maybe eight feet long.

The axles fit into two steel forks on the underside of the mat. The mat sat atop the wheels, unsecured except by the steel forks. Next came a tiny gas engine that seemed no larger than a loaf of bread. A rubber drive wheel linked the engine to the wheels.

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