We reluctantly left our Christmas oasis of luxury in Phnom Penh after a lovely seven nights rest.
Our journey from here takes us back westward to the coast. Once we reach the coast we only have one road option and that’s the main road and it goes up and down a lot. You know what we think of ups and downs, but far worse than this is that the road is being ‘resurfaced’. What the Cambodians mean by this is its actually being laid. The old road is what an estate agent would describe as ‘Laid to pot holes’, though this is stretching the term pot hole, you could lose a small car in some of them!
So we did our usual in these situations and it was Taxi for Tilly!
The mayhem out of PP was worth the price alone, there’s far too many cars on the road, even though they are outnumbered about 100 to 1 by mopeds and tuktuks they slow everything down to a crawl. Where there’s no cars everything wizzes along, but once you get half a dozen big ultra wide 4×4 then it all comes to a stop.
People drive here like they walk. You come to a cross roads and want to turn left, then you aim for the road and turn into the oncoming traffic. At times there are cars pointing everyway as if a child had playfully plonked them down. They are all stationary and gradually, like those sliding square puzzles, people inch forward and you’ll get past it. It’s ridiculous.
But once out of PP we hit the toll motorway – it could have been a French motorway in the south of France, it even had the same central reservation plants! But these need watering so there were loads of tankers crawling along the outside lane dumping gallons of water on them with the lane coned off. I wonder how many times they do that a week.
Once off the motorway you arrive at the construction and the road is a mix of one surfaced lane, very small sections where both sides are complete and large chunks where you appear to drive over the moon.
Our driver obviously didn’t own the vehicle as we took off occasionally and I’m sure his springs won’t survive the journey back.
The construction takes place alongside the traffic – no cones, just, if they’ve finished a lane up to the tarmac ready stage, branches are laid on the surface to try to prevent people using it before the tarmac equipment rolls up.
And it’s seriously dusty. You can’t actually see anything but dust at times and tankers spray water to little effect. The dust alone would have been a nightmare to cycle through and Linda kept counting how many ‘paddy’s’ she’d have had by that stage of the journey. In the end we decided it would have been a two divorce ride. Best avoided then.
But we arrived in one piece, even though Tilly had bounced off the floor a few times and we’d had to hang on to her to stop her going through the roof and checked into our hotel to dedust and regroup.
That night we surprisingly went out for Pizza and beer. There’s a little Italian guy from Napoli who runs a tiny Pizza shack and he cooked the best Pizza we’ve ever had. Wow! Come to Cambodia for the Pizza! It was worth that journey..
Next morning, we set off for the border and encountered a hill! Good lord what’s going on! We’ve not had a proper hill for, well ever this trip. It was such a shock to the system we had to get off and push. That and it was 11%.
You can’t even roll down at full pelt in Cambodia else you risk ending up flying off your seat as you hit a pot hole or bump. And of course if I hit a large bump it’s then magnified by the thump I get from behind…
We past a German cyclist with a suitcase on his back rack – never seen that before – but he was actually using buses mainly and cycling a few bits, but he’s the only cycle tourer we’ve seen since shortly after we crossed out of Laos.
We cleared the border easily and it felt like you’d got back to the west. How odd that seems. Everything was more developed immediately. And the 7 eleven had dark chocolate Kit Kat’s – always sign of a civilized country…
The roads then become smooth and newly laid and the traffic vanishes. So we upped and downed along the coast past the narrowest part of Thailand stopping at some lovely coffee shops and waterside villages and had a leisurely cycle to a shed on the beach (with air con) where we had our first night back in Thailand.
Linda cooked on the beach and we had ice cold beers from the bar to watch the sunset then dashed inside before the hordes of Mosquitos arrived to have their dinner-on us!
With New Years Eve being the next day we cycled on to the metropolis of Trat, a mid sized town where early evening we sat on the street outside a bar (as the disco inside was so loud the glasses were jumping around the tables) and watched the traffic at the traffic lights – always highly entertaining.
The owner of the bar rolled up on a white Harley – first one we’ve seen here. He immediately got himself a cup of whisky – one of the staff had to nip out to the offy to replenish their stock, lit up a fag and went over the road with his 5 year old to the Pot Shop! He then stuck fireworks in the railings of the park and set them off, much to the glee of his daughter, came back to the bar and handed us sparklers for an early new year celebrations where we taught his daughter to make patterns with her sparklers.. which was fun, though I wouldn’t want to ride back home with him on his bike like she did after his whisky intake!
We then nipped into the Pizza shop – along with all the other Westerners in town and retired early to bed before the proper celebrations for midnight kicked off like right old fogies…being woken briefly at midnight by what sounded like a few pops and bangs which we were glad we hadn’t stayed up for!
We had originally planned to go to Koh Chang for NYE but the hotels were either fully booked or silly money so ambled to near the ferry port the next day for a 2 night stop at a gorgeous 5 cabin resort that overlooked the sea.
The owners arranged a lift for us to the ferry the next day – we weren’t taking Tilly on the hills there, they’re stupidly steep – and we climbed into the back of a pickup truck bus that goes all over the island and headed for White Beach, the centre of the tourist zone. The bus crawled up the hill and we even past a racing boy walking his bike up. We had smug looks on our faces for not cycling!
White Beach is lovely, trees line the waters edge giving you shade (and swings) as you stroll, but it’s full of westerners, more smoking than we’ve seen anywhere else in Thailand and endless bars and hotels.
We’re glad we went, but very glad we didn’t stay there, it’s really not our cuppa. It’s also full of what we assume to be ‘buy a brides’ (which is probably a totally unacceptable term these days!) mainly because the streets are lined with ATMs and shacks offering instant marriage licences !
Quite why these attractive young slim ladies chose to be with what always seems to be extremely overweight, unattractive, smoking drinking pensioners I’ve no idea. On many occasions they walk dutifully a couple of meters behind their pot bellied hubby. And when they are in restaurants the men seem to treat them more like possessions than partners. Obviously not all of them, but enough for us to form this view.
Anyway, we then decided to go to see Canterbury Cathedral… Errr, well Chanthaburi Cathedral anyway. So had a long hot cycle to get there leaving as always at 6ish.
We managed to tuck ourselves away on small roads mainly and hardly saw cars at times, passing some fabulous sites. The black Buddha and the ancient temple with wall frescos were amazing and deserted and we rolled into Chanthaburi and visited the reclining Buddha and then on to the Catholic Cathedral.
Catholics can be strange over your attire, and we had read of many people being tuned away for wearing the wrong clothes. I’m not sure Jesus, who washed the prostitute Mary Magdalenes feet and associated with the leper (both things highly frowned upon in the those days) would approve, but we came equipped with a shawl for Linda so went in to admire the inside and the ever so white Mary and Jesus. They do know he wasn’t white don’t they?
It was a nice place though, painted a kind of pastel pink and with all the windows and doors open was full of birds chriping away. We enjoyed our time there and having lost one of our friends recently, who was Catholic, felt it appropriate to spend some time thinking and reminiscing about him and shedding a few sad tears in a beautiful place.
The town itself has a lovely Vietnamese quarter – who are largely Catholic here – with narrow streets and wooden houses. It was lovely to cycle through and it also had a fabulous Indian restaurant. Wow, best since we left India.
The whole area is very prosperous, apparently this is the richest in the country due to it’s Gem trade, with dozens of shops dealing in gems and a whole market selling them. People come from all over the world to trade here, hence the wealth and opulent homes.
But we just stocked up on supplies in the local TOPS store, who stock Waitrose, Iceland and Greggs stuff and headed back towards the coast.
“A 2 divorce ride” – brilliantly evocative!!