boopyourface

Our primary mean of transportation zipping around Phnom Penh and Siem Reap has been by “tuk tuk”- a moped with a little carriage like apparatus attached to it. Since my descriptive skills fail me, please see here:

Like most transactions over here, bargaining for your tuk tuk fee is also required. We were quickly reminded of this after we failed to ask the fare to the old marketplace in Siem Reap BEFORE arriving at our destination, when we pretty much lost all bargaining leverage.

After a semi-sketchy taxi ride in Saigon, paying a few “high priced” ($2) tuk tuk fares and getting bombarded by drivers every 30 seconds walking down the street: “tuk tuk sir? madame?”, I decided to implore the method my mom uses for picking blackjack tables in Vegas to picking tuk tuk drivers in Cambodia.

On my first trip to Vegas (post 21 of course), my mom imparts her “secrets to never losing (not winning, just never losing. there is a difference)” in Vegas:

“Now Con, the key to gambling is the luck. How much luck you have, cannot change- so you must find a dealer who is unlucky.”

Now you’re probably thinking what I was thinking- how the heck do you know who is unlucky?

And so my mom walked me around the blackjack tables in the casino, twice:

“Con, you have to look for someone who looks unhappy, grouchy and like they’ve had a hard life. NOT a fun, bubbling and cheerful dealer”

And so I learned how to pick unlucky blackjack dealers. I decided to use the reverse method here in Cambodia, in essence to pick “lucky tuk tuk” drivers to carry us safely to our destination, and for a good price too (of course).

The first night we decided to try and find “lucky tuk tuk drivers” we were in the old marketplace of Siem Reap and we walked up and down the streets lined with drivers but all of them looked “unlucky” to me. We came pushing through a crowded alley, known in Siem Reap as “the alley”, with still no tuk tuk driver in sight.

And then-

The river of people parted and amid the hollering of “tuk tuk sir? madame? tuk tuk? tuk tuk?” I saw a young guy with a wide grin holding up a sign (we actually got a picture of this amazing sign on Will’s camera, but we lost/left the camera, in all places- a tuk tuk):

Do you require a chariot? to your abode. No hassel

(and yes, that’s where the question mark was. hey, the guy was pretty close)

There was our “lucky tuk tuk driver”. We’ve been using this method of choosing “lucky tuk tuk” drivers ever since to find our chariots to deliver us safely to our abode. But we still have yet to find another driver with such an amazing sign.

The morale of the story: find the luck (“oh and con, always hit on soft seventeen”)