7. Angkor Wat

The cycle to Ankor Wat from the border town of Poipet is all on the main road. I’m sure some cyclists can do it all in one day, but for us it’s a short hop to Sisophon of 45km and then a monster 100km to Siem Reap. It’s all flat, always into the wind, just like we’ve been since we left Bangkok and is relatively ok until the heat builds up, then it becomes seriously uncomfortable and, for us, difficult.

So the plan for the 100km was to leave at 4am, 2 and half hours before sun rise!

We had decided we needed to get up early in Poipet so we would be tired when we arrived in Sisophon and could get to sleep around 7pm. The hotel in Poipet was very nice but it was right next door to a pub who had an incredibly loud party until 3am, so no sleep for us until then, and up again at 6.30am to beat the lunchtime heat on the short 45km cycle. No problem being tired that evening…, we were both shattered already.

The cycle was dull, flat and dusty. The road is in the process of being dualled which meant there were sections of compacted dirt that we could cycle on instead of with the traffic, and then where they’d dug the new carriageway bed but hadn’t finished the work, there were canals, complete with gorgeous pink flowers growing on them.

It wasn’t too bad on the road, despite it being very busy.  The lorries are seriously underpowered so crawl past us and they slow everything down making you feel relatively safe and there are hundreds of mopeds and contraptions on the road that all crawl along too. Even a few cycles.

We got to the outskirts of Sisophon and saw our first tourers who crossed the road to join us under the shade of a tree.

Josi and Baran, were from Germany and were on an 18 month tour of various countries on what sounded a great adventure. We had a fab time chatting to them, they’d actually just left the hotel we were staying at that night!

Our dinner plans were to take in a Vegetarian Restaurant here, only it was shut. Damn. So Pizza it was….

For our 100km we did manage to get away in a veritable pea soup of mosquitos at around 4.45am. not as early as we’ d have liked but it’s still silly o’clock.

The road was straight with one bend and one hill. You could almost go to sleep for most of it and not miss anything, but it was nice cycling in the cool and under the stars, but the noises from the bush were occasionally a bit concerning!

We timed the sun rise perfectly, coming out on to a long flat paddy field area where the sun kindly popped up reflecting in the fields of rice. Fab-u-lous darling!

We managed to find two fantastic coffee shops – one that would have been more at home in California than here, and rolled into Siem Reap just after 13:00 stopping at a large supermarket that sold co-op foods stuff!

The great thing here is most supermarkets have a security guard so we just abandon Tilly with him and usually he’s so fascinated by her he spends the next 40 minutes staring at her until we come out!

We trundled into the Royal gardens for a baguette and our just purchased Irish cheddar cheese for lunch – (the french bakeries here are one great legacy from French colonial times) and fended off the inevitable tuk tuk driver offering us tours while we ate. The tuk tuks here are unique. They are a motorbike with a hitch point that tows a 4 person Cinderella style carriage. Never seen anything like them anywhere else.

We rolled up at our hotel and parked Tilly up, dumped our cool bag with reception who took in our broken cool bag and took it off for for a new zip, which they sorted for $2 while we had a coolish shower, then lazed by the pool for the rest of the day.

Linda had chosen an amazing hotel for our stay here, old colonial style with trees growing everywhere,  a tranquil pool, open air restaurant and lovely staff. One of our all time favourite hotels, which we kept adding another day to our stay… Oops.

We had a rest day to let our legs recover from the 107km ride and then, as it was so nice had another rest day because I couldnt face getting up at 4.30 again for a sunrise at Angkor Wat!

The next day we did do the sun rise, well almost.  It was a bit cloudy! But we did get up early and sat outside Angkor Wat and watched with a handful of other people as the sun glowed behind the clouds. It was really nice and we were amazed by the lack of people – perhaps they had checked the weather forecast!

We had been warned about huge crowds but all day we either had temples to ourselves or there was just a handful of people.

We didn’t visit Angkor Wat that day, which is just one of the temples here, and instead did a 50km circular route of all the smaller less known temples that form part of this UNESCO huge temple site.

There is such a mix of styles that it is well worth doing either by bike, or by tuktuk and we thoroughly enjoyed all of them.

The tomb raider temple made famous by the film was great, but busier, and some of the less well known temples had a magic about them whilst you sat there in the peaceful solitude listening to the noises of the surrounding jungle.

The whole area has some good cycle paths that almost no one uses because they’ve got the British disease and put cycle barriers up! Admittedly they are more bike friendly than in the UK, but almost all of them have tracks bypassing them.

The drivers here are quite good, but the big new huge 4×4 pickup trucks have the worst of the drivers and we had our first opportunity to use the cyclist salute this trip… 🖕.. You know the type, tyres that stick out 4 inches from the side of the vehicle, driving a Ford Ranger Raptor Panther frontier, or a Challenger Highlander Jungle Defender or some other macho sounding name that makes some obese Nob sitting in air conditioned luxury using a couple of calories an hour moving his foot up and down feel like a ‘real’ man. These drivers are not big and they’re not clever and the cars don’t make your willy any bigger than it is. They shouldn’t be allowed to name cars like this, instead they should have names like  The Ford Yellow Buttercup, or the Land Rover Daisy!

But, rant over,  they are definitely the exception and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed cycling everywhere here. I love the cities with the complete disorder at the  junctions that actually works perfectly. It’s sooo much fun! Linda doesn’t agree with me on that!!

The following morning we did manage to get up again at 4.30 and go to Angkor for a 2nd sunrise, this time inside the main temple grounds near the reflecting lakes.

The sun came up cloudy again, but for us it wasn’t anywhere near as nice as sitting outside the complex on the lakeshore watching.  Inside it was busy, but not crowded and it was quite noisy with lots of people all talking and if you weren’t at the front it was a sea of phones, many with ridiculous filters that bore absolutely no resemblance to the real sun rise.  Many were deep hues of orange and red, whereas the real thing was grey and a bit dull. Don’t believe the images you see!!

But for us the inside felt commercial, whereas sitting peacefully and quietly on the lake side the morning before with a handful of other people with the noise of birds and monkeys, even to us heathens, seamed quite spiritual and magical.

So, after the sunrise we returned to the lake shore and had our hotel packup breakfast watching the sun break through the clouds before heading to see some more temples north of Angkor, we decided we’d come back to Angkor after the crowds had gone.

We wandered around some deserted temples and the Terrace of Elephants before heading to Bayon temple – which really looks like a pile of rock. This is the 2nd most popular temple here and had the biggest crowds we had seen.  It’s exterior had some gorgeous carvings in the walls, but the inside was a bit disappointing. It’s a pyramid temple built and finished in stages and it appeared that each level ruined the previous one! When one level had been finished it had a large cloister like surrounding with some of the 54 towers built in it.  Then the next level added a solid wall a few feet from the edge of the cloister and made it all feel a bit claustrophobic.

We saved the main Temple Angkor Wat – for last and by the time we arrived the crowds had vanished and it was calmer than sunrise.

The temple has an exterior cloister with some amazing wall freezes depicting various stories. These are well worth the visit alone, yet we had them virtually to ourselves.

Most people just go to the centre and up the extremely steep modern staircase which has been built over the old stone staircase, which is even steeper… obviously Linda wasn’t going to attempt this one !

We are probably in a minority here, but we didn’t enjoy Angkor anywhere near as much as the smaller temples on the Grand Circuit. All the small locations had a tranquility and peace to them which we really loved. Angkor, whilst definitely being the most impressive and complete, lacked this.

To round a fabulous week off we met a gorgeous French couple Mat and Lou.  Mat makes a Marvel superhero look like a wimp, and doesn’t need a fancy manly sounding 4×4 vehicle either, he’s done iron man races, triathlons and allegedly does 70% of the pedalling on the tandem with Lou to which Linda commented she’d let him do 100% of the pedaling if she was Lou!

We bumped into them on our way home on day 2 and then arranged to meet for a long lunch the next day at a great little cafe they found that had loads of good veggie stuff. You meet such interesting people touring and it’s one of the things we really enjoy about our tandem tours. The bonus of course is that they were tandemers too, but Sacre Bleu…they hadn’t yet named their tandem!