The border crossing back to Cambodia was quicker than on the way in and the road back to Stung Treng was quiet apart from when we stopped for lunch just as the 122 Ford ‘IveGotATinyWily’ Ranger Wildtrack Frontier Pansy 4×4’s came past in a convoy with rally stickers on. They had to follow a police car which was doing all of 40kph which I’m pretty sure will have pissed off the convoy on this long straight empty road.
The highlight of the ride for us though was bumping into a French family cycling toward Laos, 2 children – one on his own bike aged 9 doing 40 to 50km a day and the other one, 7, hitched to his dad’s cycle Wow!
They were all lovely and we broke out our emergency fruit pastilles for the kids. They are away for a year and home school the children an hour a day, though the education they get from the trip will far outweigh anything school could have given them.
Having said goodbye to them we peeled off the main road and ended up at our hotel for the night on the Mekong, with a log cabin directly on the river with picture windows. Amazing! The restaurant was built on stilts over the water and we loved our evening there with a beautiful sunset.
We rolled into Stung Treng the next day and refilled with money from the cash machine which involves firstly finding one that accepts foreign cards, obviously removing your hat as the concierge (yes ATM’s have them) gets upset if you don’t and then once you’ve got your cash going into the bank to get the 100 dollar bills changed into something that the local shops won’t refuse.
They’re very fussy over the condition of the notes. They must all be pristine and not written on otherwise the bank won’t take them. So each one is checked meticulously by the cashier, then counted (both of the $100 notes) then put through a counting machine just to make sure there really are 2 of them.
Then you get your change and are not allowed to leave until you’ve counted these, inspected them, accepted the free bottle of water and sweets and bowed to everyone concerned. It’s a bit like a tea ritual!
The town itself is a supply town for the whole area and the market sprawled across the streets with hustle and bustle and some dreadful smells. It’s a fun place to visit, but the meat and fish, always covered in flies isn’t our favourite section.
We found a veggie friendly restaurant and had a cheese, tomato and mashed potato bake – which was made for us on the spot and took ages but was soooooo worth it. Delicious! We even found a donut shop, so got supplies for the next couple of days at the same time.
We only had a short ride to our next town Mon Pong, which really did Pong, and our hotel looked completely out of place towering over the surrounding town to 10 stories. The guy on reception was actually in a sleeping bag asleep on the sofa and the hotel was deserted. He looked bemused at what to do with potential customers and eventually managed to phone someone who spoke English to check us in.
The room was clean, the air con worked, the toilet seat fell off and there was obviously no hot water which we’d guessed would be the case when we found the lift had been switched off. But, as long as it’s clean and cool who cares.
From here we had our longest ever ride to Kratie so set off at dawn, the receptionist didn’t even bother to turn up to see us off, and by 9am we’d done over 50km.
For once we had a wind behind us for about half the ride – it was heaven – and we managed to do 100km before stopping for lunch back on the Mekong (We’d stopped for donuts a few times prior to this).
It was actually a fab ride and we think we’ve said hello to a good third of all the school children in Cambodia. Every single one waves, shouts hello and has a huge grin on their face when doing so. It’s an absolute joy to see this time and time again.
Kratie is a bit of a tourist town, with the main attraction being the river Dolphins, which we chased around in a long tail boat along with a few other tourists.
It was great to see them but they are disappearing from here, just like they did at Don Det in Laos. Perhaps some of that is the noise of these long tail boats, we couldn’t understand why the boats weren’t electric, especially as some even had electric motors but didn’t use them.
I think if I was a dolphin I’d swim off to somewhere quieter and obviously leave a note “So long and thanks for all the fish”
Having cycled 127km the day before on a flood plain we naturally stopped at the only temple on a hill for hundreds of miles around on our day off. And of course it had 400 steps to get to the top. Our legs were not amused.
But the stairway to heaven was well worth the view and to see the adorable monkeys that live there who appear to live on condensed milk – many of them were carrying small tins of it around with them and gradually either pulling the ring pull to open them or biting a hole in the lid and licking the milk. They were so cute!
Our hotel was an old colonial building refurbished in what is pretentiously called industrial fashion. What that means is they rubbed all the walls down but couldn’t be arsed to paint them so in ‘Emperors New Clothes’ style tell you it’s a fashion statement not money saving laziness.
In it’s defence Linda liked it, so when we do eventually buy our next home I intend to decorate it in the Industrial fashion!
The hotel was a nice hotel though, the owner was French and very nice and chatty. It even had a rooftop bar which did jacket potatoes… Bloomin lovely!
We stayed with the colonial theme for our next night at Chhlong, staying in a very grande former French residence right on the river, now converted into a very nice hotel, not in the Industrial style. Again, we were the only guests at the hotel and restaurant and were heavily outnumbered by staff.
Chhlong has a few old colonial buildings in the centre of town and they are now dilapidated and in a serious state of disrepair. The shacks and stalls that surround them set a strange scene and it’s a shame these buildings don’t get saved like the hotel. They really could be magnificent.
We were on a mission now to get to Phnom Penh in time for a Christmas lunch and turned in 2 more big rides (for us) weaving our way through the villages along the Mekong towards PP.
Everyone still waves and the kids still cycle with us and when school kicks out it’s bedlam! Only a handful of parents collect thier kids with most having bikes and mopeds to get home. The school closes the roads with a couple of 9 year old girls waving red and blue light up batons to stop traffic and then about 3 million bikes pile out of the school yard. No one is on a phone, most bikes and mopeds have a pillion and everyone is in the same uniform and they all smile wave and look really happy.
And surprisingly they all pootle along on their mopeds, there aren’t any souped up bikes whizzing around, it’s just all sedate and brilliantly organised.
As soon as the school yard is empty the two girls bow to the traffic and move their fence off the road and we all continue to almost immediately be knocked off our bike by a moped!
One of the school girls, as many do, slows down and rides with us looking at Tilly and waving etc. Then she pulls almost ahead of us and turns right across us whacking our front wheel and panniers with her back wheel. We do a snake like wiggle but fortunately don’t come off, Tilly suffers no damage and the young girl just carries on..
The traffic here though is pretty good. It rarely goes fast – pootling is a national pastime on foot and on the road – and once you get used to the lack of any order at junctions you are fine. Cars cut the corner off any junction so the fact that they pootle avoids head on collisions and at crossroads we now often just turn across oncoming traffic and it just lets you go. It’s weird, but works!
Kampong Chan is Cambodias 3rd city and we had had a few debates about where to stay. Oddly there aren’t lots of hotels here and a brand new one that had opened up was charging $80 a night which is ridiculous for here, so we debated what to do and Linda said “Lets stay at the one with the cockroaches” The reviews of the hotel frequently mentioned them, but we didn’t see any, the room was nice and clean and they gave you a free beer, so result!
Tilly sat outside the main entrance and the 24 hours security watched her for us. Sadly they didn’t wash her like they did all the luxury cars that were parked there.
Kampong Chan also has a very unusual bamboo bridge to an island in the river. It’s built every year and dismantled before the rainy season. It used to be the only access to the island and could take lorries, but now a new concrete bridge links the island all year round but they still build a smaller version of the bridge – presumably for tourists. We stopped off to see it but it wasn’t on our route so didn’t get a chance to cycle it. I bet that would have been lumpy!
Our last stop before the Capital was Silk Island. This is where most of Cambodias silk comes from and you cycle through the island (having taken a number of ferries to get there) and all you can here are looms from people’s back yards, oh, and very loud music – it’s a national past time to try and buy a sound system they can hear in Vietnam and I’m sure most of the locals are now registered deaf.
The island has a small coop museum where most of the pure silk is made and we had a tour with a lovely local lady seeing how the silk worms were grown and the silk harvested and then made into material. Fascinating and of course Linda had to make a purchase… At least it’s light!
Silk Island
We had been warned that once you reached Kampong Chan it was all main roads to PP. Well they don’t count Jonny Tours! We wiggled around the back roads and eventually hit the main road about 100 metres from the ferry directly into PP, which arrived across the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle rivers and gives you a wonderful Staten Island ferry like ride into a very Manhatten looking PP.
So after cycling 432km in a week, we arrived on time and boarded the ferry to our Christmas break in Phonm Penh.
Loving the getting cash out “ceremony” – just as well not in a rush!