Cambodia

You’ve got to hand it to the Cambodians, they know how to motivate you to cross the road:



Cambodia: Transparency International rate it the 12th most corrupt country in the world, which is pretty good going. They don’t make much effort to hide it either, when we crossed the border from Laos we had to take a bundle of dollars to pay off various officials including a medical examiner who checked our temperatures by pointing a ray gun to our head. Notwithstanding the fact it looked like a toy gun, I can assure you I wouldn’t be making this journey if I was running a 100˚ temperature.

We’d spent the last four days in the 4,000 islands in the south of Laos, a really serene place made up of thousands of sandbanks but only a few real islands. We stayed on Don Kohn, the quieter and more laid back of the group and really did nothing but explore on the bikes and sunbathe. Polly looks like less of a glowworm now, although she’s still not being mistaken for a local.

Still, it wasn’t without its trials and no surprise that a bike was the culprit in our latest mishap. We’d been out for the morning, looking at waterfalls and beaches and trying to find the elusive Irawaddy dolphin (no luck) and were heading home when Polly and I had a little race on a straight of road. I had been suspicious about my bike since the start, it sort of wheezed as I peddled.

When Polly started pulling away from me I knew for certain there was a problem and it wasn’t just the colour of my bike.

Next thing I know the pedals have gone limp and the chain’s come off. I got the chain back on but the illness was obviously terminal and the pedalbox or whatever it’s called was broken. An old man passing by helpfully analysed the patient and came to the same conclusion and I had to get home the rest of the way like a proper numpty:



Nicely rested we took off to Cambodia, heading for Siem Riep and the Angkor temples. It’s a twelve hour journey so we decided to cross the border and spend a night in a terminal town (in every sense) called Strung Treng. Thank goodness we did because as our guesthouse owner merrily waved us off on the boat he shouted that the bus had broken down at Pakse and there wouldn’t be one to pick us up for a couple of hours. We smiled and shouted back our thanks.

When the bus finally arrived we literally had to fight for a place on the bus. I think Polly killed a man. It took us ten minutes to get to the border and another hour before we’d cleared the various pay points and had to fight once again for our place on the bus. At one point I wedged myself behind a telly just to make sure I was in a defendable position but the company finally conceded they would have to get more transport and herded the overflow onto another bus. Seven hours later we’d got to Strung Treng and left a group of twenty Australians and Brits already well on their way to alcohol poisoning. As we found out from the next day’s journey they still had another twelve hours to go. What a bitch.

So here we are, tomorrow we take on the hundreds of temples with our cyclo man Mr Chas, a twelve year old in charge of a motorbike with a cart on the back of it. Should be great.