We had imagined the seemingly unpopulated 160 miles east to the Cambodian border would be some kind of rural idyll and a chance to explore quiet roads and traditional Thailand. It turned out to be the land of the Asian Tiger, the habitat of Nestle, Toyota and other multi-national factories with busy roads and an urban oriented people. The best that can be said of the 3 days riding was that it was flat, the roads were straight and smooth and there was a cake shop. It was so hot that Sun-Factor 30 could not stop a rather pink Tracey declaring that she was "en flambe" when we arrived in Aranyprathat. On the way to the border crossing we took a wrong turn and cycled past the towns smouldering rubbish dump where the very poor searched for scraps.
On our 365th day we entered Cambodia and the border town of Poipet and for a few minutes I thought we had made a terrible mistake and re-entered India - the streets were dusty and littered with rubbish, shacks lined the street, music so loud it distorted the speakers blasted out high pitched wailing music, vehicles had no registration plates and there were no discerable road rules apart from the necessity to blast one's horn, the road itself was a mess and very poor people in filthy clothes bustled around pulling enormous loads on wooden handcarts. It was a grim welcome to what is still a fairly desperate nation. Once out of the town things improved considerably - the notoriously disastrous unpaved road east had been surfaced a few months earlier and most of the traffic, dust and noise receded behind us.
Our seven days of cycling across this small nation were more or less the same - a cycle tourists groundhog day: We were up early but not early enough to beat the heat and we pauped the dusty/muddy street in search of some non-meat food for Tracey before cycling out of town past the wooden shacks selling cigarettes, beer and bottles of gasoline - all a poor country needs to keep it on its feet.
At any time of the day there are Cambodian children in their white shirts and navy blue trousers/skirts cycling to and from school, often two to a cycle. As we passed they smiled and giggled and shouted hello. The Cambodian government has thoughtfully put rumble strips on the approach roads to most schools - these have been specially engineered to be just low enough so that vehicles do not have to slow down but just high enough to be a literal pain in the arse for the hundreds of children cycling to the school every day. The schools are yellow structures, many part-funded by foreign charities thus freeing up scarce public funds to spend on $30,000 SUV's for Party Officials.
The highway is flat, endlessly pancake flat, lined with wooden shacks raised on stilts. In the shadows beneath these homes men doze in hammocks and naked children play. As we passed silently by up went the call "oooohhhh.....Barang!Barang!", we had been spotted and a high pitched cacophany of "haylo, haylo, haylo, haylo, haylo" was yelled in our direction and we couldn't always see who was making all the noise so we waved at shrubbery and houses. The noise alerted the occupants of the next house who did the same and thus the cacophany of "haylos" passed along the road with us like a Mexican Wave, only it was us doing the waving.
After a couple of hours of this we would spot an orange cool box outside a delapidated shack and stop for a can of soursop pop or maybe a hand-made iced drink with a dozen unidentifiable, brightly coloured sugary ingredients. The block of ice is cut up with a rusty hand-saw before being whizzed through a hand-turned ice shaver - these ingenious yellow painted metal devices line the roadsides of the country. Suitably refreshed it was back on the bicycles for more waving, flatness and sweating until lunch. The monotony was occaisonally broken by men on scooters carrying live farmyard animals to market - two pigs strapped belly up over the seat behind the driver was a fairly common sight, as were 20 live chickens or ducks hanging upside down from wooden racks tied behind the driver, though the sight of a young buffalo strapped belly up on the back of a Honda was fairly remarkable!
Lunch was often a fairly desperate and futile search for something nice to eat that usually ended with me eating that Cambodian culinary classic "noodle soup with bone and unidentifiable bits". Refuelled (!) it was time for more waving, flatness and the occaisonal view of endless paddyfields. We would periodically pass a village wedding with unbelievably loud music which might explain why no-one looked very happy. Power is in short supply in Cambodia and in every village a gasoline generator chugs away all day charging dozens of car batteries which villagers use in the evening to power lights and TV's in their homes.
From a scorching morning the clouds had been building all day and it was then a daily race to reach our destination before the afternoon storms drenched us. After 50 miles or more we would arrive in a dusty, unattractive, one street town and haul all our bags up several flights of stairs to our hotel room. As we washed the sweat, dust and sun lotion off our tired limbs in the cold shower the torrential rain outside hammered on corrugated rooves, turned the dusty streets into mud swamps and relieved the heat of the day. We would spend several hours (or so it seemed to the ravenous) traipsing through the mud in flip-flops in a search for a meal without creatures with 6 or more legs. Cambodia must be the only country where it is impossible to tell whether the insect in your food is intentioanl or not. After Tracey had gorged herself on steamed rice and greens we noticed that the entire town had already gone to bed and we would retire to our hotel room to kill mosquitos and listen to frogs.
From Poipet we made our way east to Sisaphon and then turned south-east to Battambang where the locals scour the skies and bet on what time it will rain. I ordered a steamed dumpling for breakfast but before it could be served 20 bare-footed monks appeared in line at the front of the restaurant dressed in saffron robes with shaved heads and begging bowls. The owners and staff rushed around and gave them each a parcel of dumplings, bottled water and other food before kneeling before the monks to recieve their blessing. It was quite remarkable but there were no dumplings left for me. We enlisted on a very enjoyable half-day course to learn how to cook Cambodian food - curiously there was no mention of insects or offal but we did witness market women in pajamas chopping up fish while they were still alive.
We hired two motorbike guides to take us 20km along a very muddy unsurfaced highway to Phnom Sampeau hilltop temple - they wore helmets we didn't (The Cambodian authorities have recently made wearing a helmet law for motorbike drivers but they did not extend this to passengers!). During the 3 year reign of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge the caves in the hillside were used to dump bodies from the killing fields. I don't know what we expected to find but neither of us was prepared for the dank limestone caves containing a cabinet piled high with human skulls and bones - it was a depressing, harrowing place. As if to overcome the horror of what happened here the Cambodians are covering the hilltop in brightly coloured half finished temple buildings whose shoddy workmanship only adds to the feeling of dispair. From the top there are excellent views of the endless flatness. My motorbike guide had been a soldier for the government during the civil war and to brighten the mood on the way back he told me some of his wartime hardships while we tried not to fall off into the mud.
We left Battambang in a narrow wooden speedboat taxi full of backpackers, our cycles on the roof. The uncomfortable 7 hour journey took us down the Chas river and across the immense sea-like lake of Tonle Sap and on to Siem Reap. It was a passing insight into the fascinating watery world of the Cambodians who live in floating villages or on houses high on stilts to cope with the rising and falling waters of the wet and dry seasons. Children paddled to their floating classroom in wooden canoes and women dressed in their finest clothes paddled to a floating wedding. The brown river was the main road, the toilet and the source of all water for washing, cooking and drinking.
Things are slowly getting better in Cambodia and the friendly, smiling people have a sense of hope but it is still an unlikely tourist destination - flat as a pancake and swelteringly hot, its people are desperately poor living in basic conditions and providing work for a plethora of international aid agencies, outbreaks of malaria and dengue are commonplace, it is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, there is a recent history of genocide, famine and civil war that has left half the country covered in land-mines and thousands of people limbless. The environment is degraded, the sex trade ubiquitous and all but the main roads unpaved. Yet every year hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world flock to Siem Reap to see the famous tomb raider temples of Angkor crumbling in the jungle. The more affluent of these visitors will spend more money in their 2 day visit than an average rural Cambodian family earns in a year - whether that's a good thing or a bad thing I couldn't decide. Siam Reap is an unlovely tourist town where we both fell ill and were stuck there for a week.
It took 4 days to cycle the 200 miles south-east along the Tonle Sap floodplain to Phnom Phen. At one point we passed a road sign indicating a steep ascent - only a Cambodian would have even noticed that it wasn't actually flat, I took a photo it was so unbelievable. The countryside was littered with plastic sheeting suspended from makeshift frames and it took us a while to establish that these are used to capture crickets for eating. The highway into Phnom Phen disintigrated into a dangerous, dusty, broken road that has to be one of the worst main roads into any capital city in the world and we were nearly asfixiated by traffic fumes crossing the Tonle Sap river over the Friendship Bridge into the city.
We had long ago concluded that the world is incomprehensible and that humans are deranged and Phnom Pehn only seemed to confirm this. In what kind of world can people earn religous merit by paying to release wild birds captured and put in small cages when their doing so only means that more wild birds will be captured? In what kind of world can people turn a school into a torture centre, murder thousands of innocent men, women and children and then live free in society? In what kind of world can diners select a live tortoise out of a glass tank to eat? In what kind of world can you find yourself in a mouldy hostel room sampling a pick-n-mix of spiders (weird), crickets (tasty), maggots (not sure about the way they expode in your mouth), beetles (vile) and cicadas (plain wrong).
The 100 miles east to the Vietnam border was a slightly more enjoyable world of watery paddyfields, croaking frogs, tethered water buffalos and men fishing with a live duckling tied onto the end of their line. We had hoped to find a boat to take us into Vietnam via the Mekong River but when we arrived in Tong Luek there were no boats going until the next day and we were caught in a heavy storm. We crossed the mighty brown river on the ferry and made our way by land.
It had been something of a mystery as to where all the Cambodian birds were. We speculated that as the people were eating all the insects, frogs and fish perhaps there was no food for them. It was more straightforwards than that, on the way to the border we passed a series of grim roadside stalls selling wild birds for food.
The crossing into Vietnam was straightforwards enough and we headed north-west on a local road cycling alongside women in conical hats to the city of Tay Ninh. After a heavy shower we passed a group of men squatting in front of their wooden shack plucking the hair from a small white dog that had its throat slit. In Tay Ninh people were friendly and genuinely pleased to have some western tourists in town. We stayed in an old communist era hotel which in parts was reminiscent of an Islington Council tower block. We hung around to watch the colourful and mesmeric religous ceremony of the Cao Dai sect at their Great Temple.
It was a day's very hot ride east along the highway to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City). The scooters and buses were suicidal and it wasn't a suprise to pass a crowd of people, blood on the road and one of the former under the front of the latter. As we approached the city the highway authorities had concieved the worlds most dangerous road safety initiative by cramming the inside lane with hundreds of scooters, cycles and pedestrains while the outside lanes were blissfully free of traffic; periodically maniac bus drivers were allowed to pile into the inside lane to deposit passengers thus forcing those two-wheelers not already killed to swerve into the outside lanes where they could be wiped out by any cars and trucks belting along at 90mph.
Cycling amongst the rumble of Saigons 2 million scooters was exhilerating and a challenge of nerve and concentration - as indeed was crossing the road there. We had not cycled on anything but flatness for 8oo miles and it was swelteringly hot.
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