IN the mid-1990s, as Cambodia recovered from the horrific genocidal crimes of the psychopathic Khmer Rouge, a group of dirt-bikers set off on one of the nuttiest and greatest motorcycle adventures in history (part one of this story can be found here).
Dirt-biking in Cambodia (© Andrew Spooner)
ZEMAN picked up a job at a local English language school and settled into life in the Cambodian capital. “It was pretty easy to get a job and you didn’t even really need any qualifications,” says Zeman. He then began promoting events and parties and soon moved on to managing a local night club. “It was a pretty dark place with some pretty dark characters hanging around.” Drugs and beer provided as much sustenance as noodles and rice, something Zeman fully availed himself of. “I’d go to the market and buy 3kg of ganja for about £1.50 from this woman who was set up amongst the vegetable sellers. At one point, I had so much of the stuff I arranged this party and just built a huge ganja bonfire. It was nuts.”
It wasn’t until about 1996 that any kind of genuine offroad bikes made it into Cambodia. “The first offroad bikes I came across were XLR 250 Bajas,” says Zeman. “They were mostly beaten up, gnarly things but they were a godsend. We now had a chance to fully explore the country.” Most of Cambodia was still without basic modern amenities such as electricity and running water, with several places not having seen mechanised machinery for a generation. “When we arrived in some villages it was like a spaceship had landed,” says Zeman. “The entire country was virgin territory.”
Zeman then teamed up with Ben Laffer (38), a big-framed Aussie dirtbike legend who’d arrived in Cambodia in 1992. “Ben and me began to strike out into the far flung corners of Cambodia and decided to set up the first Rally Raid,” says Zeman. The Rally Raid – now an annual event – was loosely based on bigger rallies such as Paris-Dakar and was designed as an organised way for a group of bikers to safely visit remoter areas. “There’d be 50-plus bikers on each trip and we’d have TV crews, support vehicles and even work with NGOs delivery things like anti-snake venom and mosquito nets. The idea was to have a positive impact.”
The ill-fated trip to Mondulkiri outlined at the beginning of this article was a recce for Ben and Zeman’s initial Raid. “After being caught by the army they took us to their HQ about 50km away by the Vietnamese border,” says Zeman. “One of the guys said we were working for the Red Cross and the officers suddenly became very friendly and started plying us with drink and food. But they soon found out we were bullshitting and ran us out of there. Luckily we got the bikes back.”
Another early trip for Ben and Zeman was equally disastrous. “We’d heard of this remote, almost mythic temple, deep in the bush called Preah Khan,” says Zeman. With no roads or trails linking Preah Khan to the outside world, no villages or locals living nearby and certainly no maps or GPS, finding the abandoned temple was always going to be tricky. “We knew roughly where it was,” says Zeman.
Three days into the trip Zeman and Ben were in bad shape. “We’d run out of water, food and the bikes were overheating and we’d been lost for days,” says Zeman. Then, after 10 exhausting hours spent riding through unnavigable 7-foot high elephant grass, Ben passed out and things began to look desperate. “We were completely disoriented and had no idea where we were. There were no features to use as navigation aids and no locals to ask directions.” Ben and Zeman were hardly well prepared for such an eventuality. “We didn’t have a compass or even water purification tablets. It seems pretty insane looking back at it.”
After finding a swampy pool – “we drank from it but, amazingly, didn’t get sick,” says Zeman – they eventually chanced upon a local. “Ben offered him cigarettes and money to help us get out of there. But the local just totally freaked and ran off into the forest, waving his machete and screaming ‘The white ghosts have come, the white ghosts have come.’” The next local, thankfully, proved to be made of sterner stuff. “Finally, we found this guy who took us there for US$10,” says Zeman. “It was such a relief to arrive.”
If Zeman was looking to push the limits, Ben seemed to be riding full-speed off a cliff’s edge. “I’d take a handful of Ecstasy or some LSD and go off on huge night rides into the bush,” says Ben. “Sometimes I’d ride through marked mine-fields, cross borders illegally and push up to 90mph on the roughest trails.” And, about the more famous bike-adventurers, Charley Boorman and Ewan McGregor, Ben has this to say. “I watched that show and thought it was kind of pathetic. They just rode on these big bikes with all these support vehicles and whined a lot.”
Read the next installment here
