After our big Siem Reap blow out, which we ended up extending by one day - cos it was just so good, we embarked on our biggest effort so far. 65km then 86km, then 86 followed by a leisurely 74 - 4 days of hard riding. It was great (ish) and much better than we had originally thought as the roads have now been paved all of the way from Siem Reap. Other blogs we had read, talked about the wicked dust and the horrendous potholes. Saying that the last 3 days were some of the worst riding we have experienced.
A quick word about the Cambodian traffic. There are never any traffic queues as nobody ever gets stuck behind trucks, buses, cars etc. This is partly because the roads are really straight but mostly because they are all stone mad. The pass everywhere, through towns, on bridges, on blind corners, it seems that so long as you sit on your horn, long and loud, drive at full speed and use your indicator - its allowed! Usually this wouldn't bother us because most of the roads we have been on so far have a cycle lane for motor scooters, bicycles, pedestrians, bullock carts, pony carts, stalls, parking, someone's wedding ceremony (not really). It appears that someone suddenly had a policy brainwave to abolish the cycle lane, fill it up with potholes and make the road have a big drop off. If you lost concentration and went off the road, you got a nice big jolt to wake you up (and increase the number of punctures you were likely to have).
Before we put Cambodia into the itinerary, I have to admit I'd never thought too much about it and I have to admit, didn't even make the connection with Kampuchea - dumb aye. So anyway we got reading and found out about Angkhor Wat and the Khmer Rouge (learnt how to pronounce Khmer). Basically (if you are as ignorant as we were). Pre 1975 there was a civil war with the country folk against the Government. The Khmer Rouge won. They ordered everyone to leave the capital and set up an agrarian society where you were vilified or possibly worse - shot if you were an intellectual (this could amount to speaking a foreign language or merely wearing glasses), if your skin was too white, if you worked for the previous Government etc. Everyone got shipped out to the country side and put to work growing rice and vegetables for the new Government. 3 million of the country's 17 million population was killed in the following 4 years. Those that survived were left displaced, mourning, starving and the task of trying to rebuild their country. They have done this really well with lots of new infrastructure (the aforementioned roads) and Siem Reap and Phnom and Penh are International Cities.
We finished our Cambo experience by travelling down the Mekong on a boat to the Vietnamese border. It was a 4 hour journey which we shared with some Americans Dad and his 3 sons (18-25) who had been on a similar tour to ours, but 6 weeks via planes, trains, buses, cars.
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