Phnom Penh to Siem Reap

 

Thursday-Friday November 14-15... Two days of riding - 320 km from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap with an overnight in Kampong Thom.

The first day was 170 km, nearly 8 hours of actual riding time, hot, humid, and blistering sun. First we had to get out of Phnom Penh, and even though we're on the road just after 0600, traffic is very much a factor. Before we were even out of town, road construction started and it continued the entire day. They're turning a two-lane road with no shoulder into a wide four lane road.

In some places, we had a narrow two lane rough hard surfaced old road going down the middle with two or three lanes worth of rocks and sand and aggregate on each side, some of it already level and compacted, elsewhere just piles of dirt. There was no new paving, so there was dust everywhere, probably the dirtiest day of the trip so far. Sometimes the new roadbed was better than the old, sometimes not, and you could find traffic passing on the right, the left, in between, using the full width which might allow six or eight vehicles abreast. It's also fairly common here for motorscooters, tuk-tuks, and even cars and vans, to drive on the left-hand side towards traffic if there is any sort of surface adjacent to the marked road.

The local folk of course take it all in stride and continue with their
routine, including taking meals to the field. This part of the road
is one of the really good, smooth sections, but you can see the dust.

Every few hundred metres, there would be really rough stuff that cars and busses were going over at walking pace - these places were really rough, but on the bike, we'd be easily overtaking the traffic. That Rae is a bit more aggressive became apparent at the end of the day when he noticed that his rear carrier was broken, one side fractured completely, the other cracked. It was brand new eight weeks ago when we started but it was aluminum - maybe okay for the city, but not up to a trip like this.

So the first day was long and hot and tough.. the second day at 150 km, better road, no construction would have seemed a lot easier if we weren't already wrung out from the day before. It's a real mental exercise to convince yourself that only seven hours in the heat is a short and easy day.

The land is flat and wet, suitable for growing rice.

 The lakes and marshes produce fish and other sea food.

Empty plastic bottles provide the flotation for their wicker
baskets as these guys scrape something from the bottom
of this pond...

...and a few metres away from is this admonition not to go into the swamp with your heavy excavation equipment... maybe that's a better indicator not to dig than some of the little text-only signs that we put beside our highways in Canada.

We're seeing more birds in this area... the fields provide a home for lots of egrets...

...and I hope my brother will help identify this falcon-size bird. We saw a couple of them on wires along the lakes - looks like it feeds on fish.

Back on the road, we continue to marvel at the loads that are carried. These minibuses provide a lot of transportation, it would appear, for non-tourist travel between towns. They're always packed with people and almost always have a motorcycle strapped on the back, usually big boxes and furniture also strapped on outside...

...and livestock... what can I say... the norms here are not what they are in Canada. We've seen live pigs strapped on their backs onto motorcycle luggage racks, we've seen piglets several at a time crammed into wicker cages that are carried by motorcycles and scooters. Here are about a dozen (that we can see) live pigs, on their backs on some sort of wooden frames in the back of a pickup truck. Who knows, maybe that is not as unkind a way of transporting them as we initially think it is.

We now have three days in Siem Reap to rest and take in Angkor Wat and other attractions of the area.