if life is a car transmission...

On our last trip to Phnom Penh, we took our 1992 Toyota Camry for a supposedly 6-hour spin from Siem Reap to Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh on an almost 400 kilometer stretch of good road. We've done the road trip countless times already so we know that before each trip, a complete car check-up is necessary. So we did, and off we went! With me were the Spoolworks Team (my design studio) - Brewster, our graphic designer who was on the wheel and KC, our creative sales director who was our beat boxing specialist at the backseat.

But an hour to the trip, we keep on losing our speed until the clutch couldn't hold it anymore...


Turns out our transmission finally broke after all those years of hard work. So what do you do when you have more than 300 kilometers to go?

Well, you start pushing of course!



Or better yet, sit back and inhale the best of the Cambodian countryside...


Or savor those seemingly dilapidated towns which seem to be trapped in the 60's...


Make friends with the brown-eyed locals...


or perhaps ride the moto with some monk brothers....


maybe settle down the pavement and enjoy a bite of green mangoes...


or stop by some houses for a drink or two...


Maybe enjoy a smoke or a puff by the roadside...


or do a full-scale fun streetfighter-inspired photo shoot...


or finally concede that we needed a new transmission afterall!


So for 35 bucks, we were pulled by a rickety Khmer Rouge - era truck to the nearest town which was another 30 kms away. We managed to find a decent hotel, had some dinner and woke up early the next day to find a car shop. A day and 400 dollars later (roughly 20,000 pesos), we got back our car and raced to Phnom Penh with a "brand new" second hand transmission tipping the 130 km/hour scale...

Then the radiator leaked and overheated. But that my friends, is another story of course...