too much salt

Kampot is famous for its pepper and salt. Ecky and I woke early and headed to the FCC for coffee and to meet our 4 ton rental truck. It was late. We hired five moto-dops to load the truck with all the kitchen equipment that the FCC had been storing from the old Bokor Mountain Club. They threw in some big frames and a cash-register and some other stuff. Then we drove to the apartment and loaded al the boxes of linens and curtains and t-shirts. The truck was barely half full. We grabbed an AC unit and the electrician and sent it all down to Kampot. Then we went and picked up Ant at his house. We drove south through Kandal and then onto national route 3. We took the new road that passes through Kep. After two and a half hours we were nearing Kampot. Fifteen kilometers to go and the traffic slows, a tour bus is parked by the side of the road and a lot of people are crowding the middle of the road up ahead. Tourist are carrying their bags up from a little dirt side road to the tour bus. Traffic stops. Cars are turning around. We ask what’s going on. “Bridge out”. Is there another way around? They gesture back the way we came. “Route 3”. The road we were on connects with route 3 about half way back to Phnom Penh, and from there it would be again as far to Kampot, about 180 k total. The motos and bikes and tourists were being ferried across the river on fishing boats (500 riel). We turn around and head back the way we came. I consult the map ( a German map) and see a small connecting road from Kampon Trach 30 k direct to route 3. So we stop in Kampon Trach and buy some beers. We ask about how to get to Kampot, they point down the way we came. We explain that the bridge is out. They don’t believe us. Finally they say we must go back to route 3. We ask about the dirt road, “No, very bad road.” So we take the dirt road. It was only 30k to route 3, past some really beautiful country and some very stunned locals. But it was also a “very bad road” and we made about 30k/h. When we finally made it to Kampot the truck (which we had zoomed past a few k outside of PP) was waiting for us. It was then that we learned what had happened to the bridge. It was a long bridge and it had a big hole in it that traffic had to navigate around. A big truck full of salt took the left hand way around this hole and the whole section of bridge just flipped over pitching the truck into the drink. The truck driver was held for questioning and will most likely be blamed by the government.