8. Angkors away

After a great week at Siem Reap, and having stocked up for the next few weeks with western essentials (cheddar!) at the local western supermarket that stocked virtually anything you could get in England, we moved on!

We’ve been a bit apprehensive about the next leg of the journey. Originally we had planned to head to the capital Phnom Penh and then south to the coast, then we saw the hills and the main road we’d have to do with long moutainous rides and thought again!

So we’re now heading north temple hopping with a bag full of comfort food supplies.  Despite me not being keen on Asian food you’d think it would be simple to get veggie food here. Think again. Much of the ‘veggie’ food is made with fish paste and or meat stock. There’ll be no meat in it, which will be fine for some people but not if you’re actually vegetarian like us.

The French couple we met earlier were also veggies and they told us they’d had to stop at 4 restaurants on a cycle one day before they could find anywhere that would do them anything veggie at all, and then it was boiled rice and vegetables. And when you say restaurant, you often mean road side stall. So, we now have plenty of pasta and stuff to add to vegetables and cook for ourselves if needs be.

We are heading into a non touristy area. There’s one B&B in 150km and it looks a bit remote, but that’s the road we have to cycle to get where we are heading.

We ummed and arghed about this section. It looks really boring and pretty exposed too. There’s virtually no villages and without shade it will be unpleasant to cycle (naturally into the wind).

A B&B broke it into a 50km and 90km, but it looks and sounds awful. Over the years we’ve stayed at plenty of poor hotels and some really bad ones, some where we’ve had to change the sheets ourselves as they were blood stained (looking at you America) and some where our sleeping bag liners, which we always bring, were essential.

But this one is the king of the lot. The review pictures show sinks on the floor, there’s no cistern, just a bucket or water to flush the loo and obviously no hot water. People say the bed linen isn’t changed, there are bugs all over the room and people knock on the door all night. Even hardened long distance cycle tourers describe it as the worst B&B they have ever stayed in.

So how about 140km in one day, with hills… We need to rethink our plans again!

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. We left our gorgeous Siem Reap hotel, Pavilion D’Orient and headed on to our last temple on our Angkor Wat ticket 50km away.

The ride was fab, with every school child waving and beaming at us, many pedalling bikes with a person sitting on the back rack.

The temple ticket guy looked after Tilly and we sat in the shade and had cheddar cheese sandwiches! courtesy of the Western Supermarkets in Siem Reap.

The temple itself is a complete ruin. It’s very similar to Angkor Wat but was abandoned and fell apart over the centuries. It’s now got huge trees growing out of it and is so peaceful hidden in the jungle.

We loved it and again would love to have a TARDIS to pop back and see it in its heyday – we say that so often! When is Ncuti going to drop by and pick us up!!

We spent that night in a tent! Albeit an air conditioned tent that was insulated and bigger than most hotel rooms we’ve stayed in which had lovely views over the greenery surrounding it.

But, the Cambodians seem to prefer a hard bed. Generally this has been fine, but here it was so hard it was like sleeping on concrete on one of those roll up camping mats you see attached to the bottom of the backpackers rucksacks. We both slept badly and the next day had various aches and pains – it’s obviously an acquired taste the firm bed!

We set off after breakfast and almost immediately bumped into a pair of Brits cycling from Laos, the complete opposite route to us – they loved mountains and didn’t like coasts! It takes all kinds…they were from Devon though, so much more accustomed to hills than we are.

We struggled with the ride that day… it wasn’t a hard ride, but was up a steady incline into a strong breeze and the sun was out in earnest with little to no shade.

Even so it shouldn’t have been hard, so we think lack of sleep must have something to do with it so had an early lunch and as soon as we’d got to our hotel went to bed for a nap  before riding a now pannier less Tilly down to the temples we’d gone to see.

This site is huge – 81sqkm of temples! You can’t visit most as they are in the jungle and have uncleared land mines around them, but the circuit that we cycled around had a dozen or more ruins of temples and the Temple of the White Elephant, which is a gigantic square step pyramid temple in excellent condition.

We arrived, having virtually rolled 10km from our hotel, just as all the tourists were loading up in their taxis to head back to wherever they came from and had the place to ourselves. The temple has a smaller brick and stone built temple infront of it acting as a gateway. This is still in good condition – particularly the brick built sections and you walk through admiring all the carvings (but none of the statues which the French stole for their museums) and then suddenly infront of you is this Aztec like pyramid.

It’s an amazing sight. You can climb it, but for once I couldn’t summon the energy to go up as we both were thinking ‘how are we going to manage cycling up hill for 10km back to our hotel’! But, we did. And it was easy too. No idea what was going on with us that day, but we couldn’t believe how easy it was and we flew along. What a strange day!

So all we have to do now is decide on our next leg of the trip. Time for another beer I think…..