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2 days cycling around angkor

Saturday, November 5th, 2005

i understand why people say that cambodia is the most beautiful place on earth. it’s even beautiful, and clean somehow, in its poverty. the khmer are possibly the most tender, kind, jovial, and resilient group of people i’ve ever encountered. the pace is slower here, for me, anyway, because i can’t help but stop to talk more than a few times a day.

rented a bike and spent 2 days cycling around the angkor area. it’s 160 km2, and it would probably take the better part of a year to really discover all of angkor. built nearly 1000 years ago, it is thought to be the largest religious monument in the world. some temples have been restored, others left for the jungle to love as much as the visitors do. i strayed about 4km off track one afternoon and a guy came up behind me on his motorbike and offered me a lift back to my bicycle,. i declined, thinking he’d want money, but he said, ‘no no, no charge. i’m going that way.’ so i hopped on. this is so typical of cambodia. so refreshing.

hitched a ride on a motorbike out to angkor wat to watch the sunrise one morning. as i wrote in an email to a friend: it left me cheesily, utterly breathless. it’s the first time that architecture has ever had that sort of impact on me.

because i’ll forever wake up just after the crack of dawn even if i never step in a rowing shell again, i ate breakfast every morning with all of the guys who worked at rithy vin guesthouse where i was staying. 2.50 US a night for a great room with a double bed, shower, fan that would blow your skin off on the highest setting, and breakfast included. they kept asking me to play pool with them in the evenings. i decided to go for it on the last night there. because the other guys were all ón duty’, chinh (my best guest house friend) took me on his motorbike to a local pool hall. he kicked my ass at snooker, i came close to challenging him at a few subsequent games of pool. it was great, and i was the only foreigner in the room. i tell everyone about rejean.

10 hours through the night in the back of a pick-up

Saturday, November 5th, 2005

a road to rival the back woods of fort nelson

bought a cheap bus ticket at a dodgy but friendly agency on khao san road, bangkok. erin, it’s pronounced exactly the way it’s written. there’s your little daily dose of humour, my dear. the bus took us to the thailand-cambodia border. the bus waiting for us on the other side wasn’t a bus at all, but a pick-up truck. we – the 20 of us from the air-conditioned thailand bus – asked when the bus would be arriving to take us from poipet to siem reap, and batman (í’m sure it isn’t written as phonetically as it sounds),our dear friend/siem reap guesthouse rep who was sent to whisk us all off to his lovely lodgings, just laughed and pointed to the truck.

we drove through the night, ten hours (200km) down the most pot-holed road i’ve ever encountered, from poipet, the last khmer rouge stronghold, to siem reap. 20 foreigners in the back, a khmer guy on the roof, another on the bumper, and a third driving. it was unbelievable. the swede who sat beside me had never seen stars without light pollution hazing the view. i’d never seen miles and miles of moonlit rice fields, or random clusters of teenagers midnight-dancing to khmer pop tunes on the roadside. aside from the occasional oncoming motorbike or pickup, the only light came from bobbing flashlights in rice fields, held by farmers hunting cockroaches for breakfast.

our truck broke down, a few bridges were nearly stripped of their planks, one bridge was so bare that it required the skill of a drunken ryan boyle on a quad to cross it, the words ‘highway robbery’ played across my mind a few times. it all amounted to the kind of thrill i’d been craving for months. i may have been the only one in that pick-up who was totally delighted that the air-conditioned bus never arrived. same same, i guess, but so wonderfully different.