Cavorting across Cambodia

Well Everyday as we are riding I am busily composing blogs in my head and I must say, they are mostly pretty damn good.  But alas they never seem to make it to the laptop, what with getting a place which has wifi and if we do finding my place in the queue for the computer that night or maybe its because we are just plain knackered at the end of the day it doesn't seem to have happened.  So I will start at the start and catch you up with all the important news.

The night before we left Thailand we booked our flights to the UK.  We were all pretty excited as we now had a bit more of an idea of what we were doing and the timescale we were adhering to.  I wasn't looking forward to leaving Thailand as I understood it, in as much as I knew what food to order, I had a good idea of how the drivers behaved, the weather was lovely and there was always 7-11 and those Lays potato chips for when the going got tough.

Right from the first hassles for visas before we even exited Thailand, I had negative vibes about Cambodia, these fears were not allayed when we spent that first night in Poipet.  It just seemed like another country - and guess what it was!

A really hard ride saw us in Sisophon which is a crossroads town where the road splits and the '6' goes to the left of the lake and the '5' goes to the right for almost 400km before they meet again just outside Phnom Penh.  In the middle is Tonle Sap which is the largest freshwater floodplain lake in the world.  I'm not sure how many freshwater floodplain lakes there are in the world, but this is the biggest and covers 12000 sqkm during the monsoon.  Pretty huge.

We had a few hotels to choose from in Sisphon, but ended up in the last one before leaving town, mostly because I was so paranoid about our 101km ride to Siem Reap the next day - I wanted to get as close as possible to make the next day a bit shorter.  This was to become our undisputed best value room deal ever for the grand sum of $10, we managed to fit the family into two rooms - with ensuite!  It was pretty basic though, but the kids were rapt because for the first time in weeks they could sit on their beds without bruising their tail bones (Thai beds were very firm!).