January 15, 2013

We knew we would be getting a late start considering we were at a home stay, where socializing always keeps us longer than we think it will, but we enjoy these visits. Our hostess made us pancakes and coffee. She gave us a can of sweet milk and motioned that a jar on the table was sugar. We had talked about palm sugar production the night before and how it is similar to maple syrup. I thought the sugar was just thicker than maple syrup, not individual crystals. I took a small spoonful and mixed it into my coffee. The hostess then came back to the table and swapped the jar with another identical jar and said she accidentally put out mayo and this was the sugar. Oh well, I got some extra calories for the day.

We finally hit the road around 8am after many goodbyes and signing the guestbook. Yesterday’s feelings were long gone and we were both happy to be biking. The weather was nice and cloudy, however we continued to have a headwind. I think I will also be biking in a long sleeve shirt for while. It appears as though I have developed prickly heat on my arms. This is when sweat is trapped in your pores and you develop a rash. Just as lovely as it sounds.

Happy on the bike again

Chicken, anyone?

The ride was not exciting until we had about 30km before we reached Kampot. Mountains started to appear- the first ones we’ve seen since Thailand! Soon, a man on a motorbike putted along side us and said hello to me and then moved up to Chandler. I thought he would say hello and then move on. Instead, he held a conversation with Chandler for the rest of the ride. For 30km, or about 2 hours he rode along side Chan, cruising on his moto at 10 mph. He left at one point, only to return a few minutes later, after he got a bottle of water. Apparently, he wants to be a tour guide and was asking Chandler to explain the meaning of different words. The topics vocabulary lesson ranged from specific names of construction equipment and fruit trees to the use of the word “immediately”. They also spent a while discussing the subtle difference in the pronunciation of the words “three” and “tree”.

Mountains

Chan and his buddy

We had a little trouble saying goodbye, because he wanted us to stay at his brother’s guesthouse in the town center, but we had trouble conveying that we wanted to stay on the river. We finally got things squared away and he left after thanking us many times. We found a nice bungalow on the river. It was a single unit up on stilts with a thatched roof and a brick bathroom on the ground floor. We set up a hammock and spent the rest of the evening reading and relaxing, until we were ready to sleep. That is when the “backpacker” bar next door started blasting American dance music. Luckily, it only annoyed us for a moment, we were both so tired, we fell asleep quickly.

Our bungalow

January 14, 2013

After a quick omelet breakfast (bacon and eggs for Chan), we hit the streets in the middle of rush hour. The traffic wasn’t bad, but requires extra concentration and is always slightly stressful. Phnom Penh traffic has a little more of an anarchic feel than Bangkok, for example, there are many uncontrolled major intersections that at first appear to be absolute traffic jams, but everyone weaves their way through slowly without bumping, crashing, yelling, or really even using horns much.

After an hour of biking, I was really ready to be done but we still had 65km to go. While the road was paved and very flat, the constant headwind and monotonous landscape was getting to me.

Once the foul mood hit, I cultivated it. I started thinking about how I hated biking long distance and how exhausted I felt. My rear felt like I was sitting on sandpaper. I wished we had taken the bus to Sihanoukville. I hated pretty much everything.

Suddenly, Chandler yelled to me that I had missed the small sign marking the turn off for the home stay we had found on our route. We traveled about a kilometer down a dirt road in the midst of rice fields to a quiet courtyard. The owner was quite surprised to see us, as most guests book ahead of time and are either dropped off by a local taxi or brought in by the owners themselves. They were quite stunned that we were able to find them, but we had marked roughly where their road was on the GPS and Chan was watching closely for their tiny hand painted sign.

The owner must have noticed something else because she told us to go clean up and asked her sister to make us lunch. Lunch was fabulous. Huge piles of rice, veggies, tofu, omelet and fresh fruit. Now, everything was better! I knew I would have tough days like this, but the important thing was that at the end of the day, I’m still happy we are on bikes. I’m glad not to be stuck in some bus, being whisked through everything between the big cities.

The owners only had one other couple as guests- some friends from New Zealand staying with them, so it was nice and quiet. The owners are both teachers and have an English class that they teach at their house. They asked if we wouldn’t mind talking to the students to help them practice their English. The students were all between 17 and 20 and a fun bunch to talk to once we all got over being shy. We talked about Alaska, bike touring, our families, what they do for fun, what their career goals where, what we do for a living, what they study, and all sorts of other things. A few of them also took turns riding around on my bicycle, which everyone found amusing.

After talking with the students for an hour, dinner was ready. We had a nice family style meal with everyone. The owner was a bit embarrassed because she had already planned a “western” meal of spaghetti and garlic bread not thinking that they would have guests, but it was very good, and a perfect dinner for cyclists. We had a traditional Khmer desert of sticky rice flour ground mixed into a paste with coconut milk and wrapped around a center of palm sugar and peanuts, which is then steamed in a folded up banana leaf. It was very tasty and we both had seconds. Apparently palm sugar is derived from “sugar palms” which don’t have coconuts. The sugar palm guy (for lack of a better term) climbs the tree and makes a precise cut near a new flower on the tree and hangs a bamboo bucket which collects the “sap”. After it is collected, the sap is reduced with heat into coarse sugar- kind of like maple syrup!

We chatted with everyone for a while after dinner, but we both got sleepy pretty quick and decided to retire early to ensure we were well rested for tomorrow.

January 12 – 13, 2013

We had our usual set of chores to complete while in a city but we decided to leave those for the afternoon. First, we visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum referred to as S-21. In 1976, the Khmer Rouge converted a high school in the middle of Phnom Penh into a prison and interrogation center. Warning- this post is a bit depressing!

The people brought to S-21 were photographed and usually starved and tortured in order to extract to confessions of “crimes” they had committed against “Angka” which was an ominous term for the “organization” that controlled Cambodia during the dark period of the mid to late 1970’s.

The record keeping at the prison was meticulous and the confessions that people were forced to sign were elaborate but usually very obviously contrived. Of the few dozen example confessions on display, most prisoners admitted to being agents of the CIA or KGB and most “crimes” were associated with spreading counter revolutionary sentiments and burning rice fields or supplies. There was a confession from an American citizen who had been captured on a boat off the Cambodian coast while supposedly intercepting radio transmissions from inside Cambodia. It was not clear what his fate was. Some prisoners were photographed again if they died at the facility. Many were executed in killing fields outside the city. Of an estimated 20,000 prisoners there were only an estimated 200 survivors including 7 who were freed when the Khmer Rouge abandoned the prison as the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979.

The museum was very simple, with pretty limited interpretive information, but a number of relics from the original configuration were left untouched, such as makeshift cells and bedframes used for torture.

It was a very sobering experience and gave us an idea of what some of the Khmer people had to go through. I think one of the worst parts were the photos of the victims, especially the children.

After a couple hours at the museum, we were both pretty stunned and weren’t up for a tour of the killing fields. We decided to get our errands done. Chandler broke his Kindle e-reader when he accidentally dropped his bar bag and the Kindle got smashed inside, so he was in the market for a new one. Luckily, it wasn’t the tablet or one of the cameras.

We went all over town looking for one, managed to complete everything else on the list, but no Kindle. Chan is now relegated to photocopied books on local history or used Danielle Steele and other pulp classics. We dropped off our bikes for a cleaning and to have someone look at my bottom bracket to figure out why my bike clicks. After walking around for a hour in the heat, we decided to take our first tuk-tuk. Finally, we ended up at a mall and in an arcade. For some reason there was a ban on photography in the arcade, so no pictures, but we had a really good time playing video games and ended up with a pretty decent crowd gathered around us watching us play. $2 kept us busy for a hour or so.

We spent the next day relaxing and planning our route through the rest of Cambodia. We didn’t venture too far from the hotel.

January 11, 2013

The wind was working with us today and we plowed through the first 20 or so miles. We enjoyed smooth asphalt with a good shoulder and light traffic. Then we hit road construction. For the next 25 miles, we rode through red dust clouds and mud in a tangle of trucks, cars, tuk tuks and semis sporadically moving towards the city. Chandler’s sunglasses broke a few days before so he was having an especially difficult time seeing, which is obviously an unfortunate sense to have dulled while riding a bike in chaotic Cambodian traffic. He ended up wrapping a scarf around his face which improved things very slightly.

Chandler of Arabia

Density Test

We were both so happy to finally reach Phnom Penh and dust free asphalt with a massive shoulder. Chandler’s bike computer, which has logged most of our miles ridden, both loaded and unloaded around town, hit 1,000 miles, a milestone only with us Americans who still use the “English” system. (Chandler will note that the “megameter” (Mm) milestone was reached unceremoniously just west of Siem Reap) The guide book had a number of suggestions for lodging and we picked out an area at random. The hotel we picked was actually in a Muslim neighborhood with several falafel restaurants and a mosque under construction nearby.

Night time mosque construction

The hotel used to be situated adjacent to a lake which has since been drained. Along with the lake the tourist amenities in the area also dried up. We read a couple reviews online of the hotel and they were mostly bad. People complaining that there wasn’t enough happening and it was too far away from the bars. Sounded like the perfect place for us. The reviews were pretty accurate and the place was nearly deserted and slummy, but they had cheap rooms, good food and wifi, which are our chief concerns. We settled in and watched the sunset over the vacant lakebed before turning in.

January 10, 2013

This morning was full of false starts. We stopped into the restaurant attached to the big hotel in the center of town. They claimed that they did not have eggs, which seemed rather strange for such a bustling spot. The only two options for us was chicken soup or bread and jam. We ate bread and jam and decided that wasn’t enough fuel to get us too far so we stopped a few hundred feet down the roads and ordered omelettes. Unfortunately, they came with bacon, piled on top. Good for Chan, bad for me. So Chan got extra bacon and the half of my omelette smothered in the evil bacon grease. Not too big of a deal, but having to stop twice ate up a lot of time.

My flat tire returned once we finally started. I had checked the inside of the tire, but wasn’t able to find anything the first time I fixed it. While Chandler looked for the hole in my tube, I looked for the cause of the flat in the tire. While we did this, a group of about 8 young men began gathering around us. I was able to find a little metal sliver in my tire and Chandler patched my tube. I started to put everything back together when one of the dudes watching took over. He was not interested in my help and put everything back together for me. That was actually very nice. Then they traded turns pumping it up, and even insisted on tightening the axle nut once the wheel was back on.

The rest of the ride was hot and hard. The heat was blazing at 10am. I did the impossible and put on a long sleeve shirt because my arms were burning and sunscreen had stopped working. As usual, there was wind. The headwind has a way of zapping all of our energy. Riding against a steady wind for hours is way worse than climbing a big hill, because you get no sense of accomplishment when its over. The prevailing wind seems to come consistently from due east, so we have been quietly cursing our west to east route, which has made tiring days out of otherwise completely flat rides.

More stone masons

Long, flat road

The traffic here in Cambodia is pretty crazy, but manageable and fairly predictable. However, the constant honking is annoying and frustrating. Normally, people give a quick honk to let you know they are going to pass. However, some people, usually the dreaded taxi vans, see you in the distance and start honking manically, until you are no longer in their rearview mirror. The trucks like to blast their air horns when they are right along side. Some like to honk when they see you and they are going in the opposite direction. Our favorites are the hardwired honkers, ALWAYS a Lexus or a Landrover, traveling twice as fast as even the taxi vans, in their own special lane, which is the middle of the road, horn on ALL THE TIME. Another frequent Cambodian traffic maneuver is the “layered pass” ex: I am passing a slow tractor that is passing a child on foot while a semi full of bricks passes me while a tour bus was passes the semi. Is that really necessary?

I keep an eye out all day for sugar cane juice while we ride and was just not seeing anything today. Commercial offerings are decidedly heterogeneous in Cambodia. Towns seem to specialize in one thing or another. One village had 40 stands selling rice cooked in bamboo stalks, then we see only two more in the next 200km, the same with fried snakes, roasted and flattened rice, carved stone figures, I’m sure there are others. Anyways, finally, around 1pm, I found a sugar cane stand and quickly ordered two drinks. The woman just nods her head and tells me to sit in the shade. Chandler was a few minutes behind me and asked if I ordered when he arrived. I thought I had so we waited and waited. I tried to order again and nothing. I tried to buy some cookies, but she just nodded her head. We pulled out money and pointed, and that didn’t work. What kind of store won’t sell stuff? It was getting awkward so we just left.

We finally made it to Skuon around 230 sunburnt and tired. We took wonderfully cold showers and relaxed by watching a movie about surfing penguins. The Lonely Planet guide book says that Skuon is famous for their fried tarantula. Chandler extensively searched the market but where unable to find this delicacy. Bummer.

Used for catching bugs to eat, but not spiders