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.
We eventually disembarked at Port Blair, which despite its setting in a beautiful natural harbour the Indians have succeeded in turning into an unattractive, dirty, noisy town replete with cows eating rubbish and mangy street dogs that could be anywhere in India - as if to reassure themselves 900 miles from the mainland. We were up at dawn scrumming for tickets for the first inter-island ferry out of there.
We were still trying to confirm our boat to Thailand but no phones or internet had been working on Havelock for over a week - we had to cycle 5 miles to the main village, borrow a dive operators mobile phone, call my friend Emma in the UK and ask her to check our email and then phone her back to get the information we needed. It was all confirmed, we would sail from Port Blair on the S/Y Siren on 12th April; some old fashioned baksheesh had done the trick.
Storms were brewing as we motored out of the harbour and the weather forecast was bad; when the crew start taking anti-seasick pills you know you are in for a rough ride. We were pitching and rolling all night and hardly anyone slept as we felt like we might roll out of bed and the cupboard doors periodically sprang open. In the morning the view out of the porthole near our bed was like looking into a washing machine. We were served the first decent cooked breakfast I had seen in what seemed like years but I was so green I could barely get it down. Thankfully by the afternoon the weather improved and we were able to explore the boat and enjoy the empty ocean, free drinks and great Thai food, though the sight of so much plastic rubbish adrift in the Andaman Sea was surprising and depressing.
After 40 hours at sea the first land we sighted was the Similan Islands to the north-east and not long afterwards the hills of Phuket to the east, but it was dark when we dropped anchor in Chalong Harbour so we stayed onboard for the night. In the morning the setting in the natural harbour surrounded by jungle clad islands and hills was beautiful but it was so hot and humid that the sweat was dripping off us just eating breakfast and soon afterwards a tropical storm let rip - the rainy season was approaching. Immigration officials were not at work as the government had extended the national holiday for Thai New Year in order to restore order in Bangkok after the political demonstrations there. It was midday by the time we were given a 30 day visa and officially entered Thailand, the land of smiles.
We took advantage of the cooked breakfasts and then continued north, up-and-down the hills past endless resorts, construction sites and tsunami warning signs. 5 days on the decks of boats at sea had turned our bicycles into rust buckets and my chain was finished. Thankfully we were in Thailand and not India and we tracked down a recommended cycle shop in the town of Thalang where the mechanic did a great job replacing worn and rusted gears, cables, etc with the same quality parts we had installed in the UK. The northern part of Phuket is less developed and we camped the night on Mai Khao Beach. The tent was like a sauna so I jumped in the sea to cool off but this was as hot as a bath and not in the slightest refreshing. I would have slept on the beach but for the Spawn of Satan (mosquitoes).
Turtles nest on the beach and in the morning a pick-up truck arrived and a man got out and started digging up the beach in broad daylight. I couldn't believe it and was just about to throw myself under his spade to save the turtle eggs when two elderly women that had been standing around took off their clothes, got into the hole and were buried in the sand!?! We went in search of breakfast which turned out to be boiled squid on rice. While I was tucking in two Canadian cyclists saw our bikes and stopped to say hello - over the next few days we would see several others sweating along the highway, more than we had seen in 4 months in India.
We took the scenic route north and spent a couple of days exploring Ao Phang-Nga National Park in a colourful long-tailed boat. Hundreds of towering limestone cliffs, topped with jungle rise spectacularly out of calm green waters. We slept the night at the foot of one of the islands in a muslim fishing village built entirely on stilts which was fascinating to wander around.
Cycling west from Khao Sok it was so hot and wet that the road was actually steaming as we climbed up to a pass through the hills with fantastic views as we swept down back towards the Andaman coast before turning north again. In anticipation of rain hundreds of frogs were croaking from roadside ponds so loadly that it actually hurt our ears, which was quite amazing. We stopped for dinner at a roadside eatery and were joined at our table by 500 flies. A monk in a mosquito net was our neighbour as we camped the night under a picnic pagoda near a lake. I was overjoyed when a huge storm brought cooling rain and the prospect of a decent nights sleep. I awoke in the early hours needing the toilet and fumbled around in the dark trying to get my feet into shoes outside the tent, shoes that unbeknown to me had become the temporary home for an army of biting ants that within seconds had swarmed painfully all over my feet, legs and hands. I got back into the tent bringing a sizeable number of ants with me which we had to massacre. Trouble was we both needed a piss but were trapped in the tent. After much bladder holding and deliberation in the end there was nothing for it but to leap from the tent barefoot, take the pain and run for the nearest bush.
Our 30 days were going quickly so we crossed back to the mainland and began the 350 mile journey north to Bangkok, which took 6 days, mainly along Highway 4, a tropical version of the A1. The main interest was provided by giant sculptures of pineapples, golden birds and dragons. We cooled off with brightly coloured ice slurpees that were so cold the first sip was like being shot between the eyes. Thailand has many beautiful snakes, butterflies and frogs and we saw most of them dead on the road. Whenever we could we got lost on lovely quiet minor roads that wound their way through the infinite shades of green of rural Thailand. Approaching Bangkok we cycled alongside and over myriad canals and rivers that only a few decades ago were the main highways but now carry only occasional boat traffic past the wooden houses on stilts that line the banks.
Entering Bangkok was like cycling into any major city - 8 lane highways choked with traffic, industry, shopping malls, housing estates and constantly being cut up by diesel belching buses and inconsiderate taxi drivers. We crossed the Mae Nam Chao Phraya river into the Chinatown district. We had cycled over 7,000 miles in nearly 12 months and street vendors were selling giant cockroaches to eat.
I have a diary to record our route and some of the many highs and lows of each day. Looking back, the entry for 1st Feb seems to capture some of the essence of our journey down the Konkan Coast: "Eating 2 dosas each for lunch at Dabhol; washing our clothes & selves in a clear tropical stream when we were so hot; watching the sun set with tea/coffee and bourbons on the beach at Guhagar; new stove is major jet furnace; nearly lost pans washing up in the sea; had to tell two blokes to leave us alone while i was naked after washing in the sea (it was dark); scorpion in kit; v. tired; woken at dawn by thud of coconuts being picked by man up a tree."
We had been trying, unsuccesfully, to find a way out of India for several weeks and had, via email, found a sailing company that would take us from the Andaman Islands to Thailand but the Indian Port Authorities had other ideas. We killed time waiting for the outcome and the heat seemed to melt the days together in a procession of cold showers, laying under the ceiling fan and raging war on the invading ants and mosquitos. The matter was not resolved but it seemed pointless to continue south on the highway in the heat so we took a 14hr overnight train across the Indian peninsular to Chennai on the east coast to see if we could influence things. We travelled 1st Class but only in the warped bureacracy of India is 1st Class actually 3rd Class.
