Angkor Temples

We had an early start to get to the temple Bayon for sunrise. We spent the whole day on a round trip of the temples (they are quite far from each other) by bike and climbing up and down the very steep, narrow steps. This day of relaxed sightseeing ended up being our longest day cycling so far. Everywhere we stopped we got pounced on by a bunch of children trying to sell us flutes, bracelets, trousers, postcards, water, pineapples and bags. In the end we resortet to kicking them, left a few bleeding by the side of the road (only joking, of course we just used stones, no really only joking, not funny i know). We saw many monks and monkeys and finished the day with a very cheap but surprisingly nice bottle of french wine. Or did it just taste so good because we have not had any red wine in a month?

Siem Reap

Siem Reap strikes us as very touristy after having been to the smaller places. The people here don't seem as friendly and kids and everyone is well trained to get money off the tourists, which is fair enough but makes it less relaxed for us. The architecture is amazing - french colonial style. We are staying in a friendly guesthouse, which has a courtyard where the tuk tuk drivers stop and marvel at our bike maintenance. It's also nice to be able to communicate in english rather than our hardly existing broken cambodian. We have a list of a few phrases and words but even so, sometimes people didn't understand us at all. Twice we ended up with a soup of about 20 different kinds of obscure meatbits for breakfast when we thought we had asked for vegetables, vegetarian, and no meat please.

Cambodia. Poipet - Sisophon - Siem Reap

From Bangkok we took the train to Aranyaprathet, which is near the Cambodian border and started cycling towards the border. Once we got over the many hurdles we were faced with, we were thrown into the wild west of Cambodia at Poipet. There was a lot to take in and our first day felt like a week. The difference a few hundred meters can make! The roads are dusty as they are not concreted any more, the traffic is (even more) chaotic, with scooters being the most popular form of transport. A scooter can transport up to 5 people, live pigs, chickens, you name it. Babies usually act as an airbag, sitting in the drivers seat in front of their parents. We felt extremely welcome as everyone was shouting hello, laughing, smiling and waving at us as we were going around potholes and over bumps. The road is pretty good to cycle (as long as it's dry) and not as bad as we had imagined. We were only faced with the real challenge on our second day after it had rained all night. We confidently took off from Sisophon at 6:00 am towards Kralanh but we didn't make it any further than 10 km because the cement-like mud completely seized up our wheels and gears. Defeated we had to take a pick up truck back to Sisophon and another one straight to Siem Reap. The pick up truck from Sisophon to Siem Reap was quite an experience as the driver jammed as many people on the back as he could and once it was completely packed dumped a full size freezer in as well, which took up half of the space. As a consequence kiki had to sit on top of the freezer (with 5 other people) with nothing to hold on to. The driver was a nutter who knocked a moped over within the first 5 minutes and almost took out numerous other road users and try to rip off every passanger (not only us dumb tourists), giving out the wrong change, leaving a woman in the middle of the road screaming to get her money. It was a long 100km and having forgotten about the mud we found ourselves wishing we had waited and tried by bike again. But hey, we made it somehow and are enjoying Siem Reap for now.

Bangkok (again)

In Bangkok we saw the Royal Barge rehearsal on the river and met some austrian friends randomly in the street. We also discovered a nice little bar called 'Kill Time' which is what we did there. We eventually unpacked our bikes and put them together and bought a spare part at 'velo thailand', which looked and sounded like any bikeshop in the whole world.