The Mekong Delta surprised me as it was much more populated than I had anticipated. There were towns practically the whole way from the time we left HCMC. There did not seem to be any gaps and from the road the vast amount of Paddy Fields was not visible (it is one of the largest rice growing areas in the world).
This was probably the least enjoyable part of the trip, mainly because it was part of an organised bus tour with at least 30 other people. This meant we were taken to very touristy places to see all sorts of local produce being made and more importantly sold. We also visited a number of floating markets, but unlike the Bangkok type markets where you can interact. These were wholesale markets with relatively large boats buying and selling produce, so there was not really much to look at. It was also a 3 day tour to get from HCMC to Phnom Penh but a 2 day tour is better as we were left abandoned on day 2 for over 4 hours while we waited for the 2 day tour bus to pick us up!
On day 3 we transferred to a boat for the trip from Vietnam to Cambodia. The change from Vietnam to Cambodia was very noticeable even from the river (which in places was kilometres wide). Right up to the border on the Vietnamese side the houses were packed tightly together, all seemed to have electricity and although basic were not that different in quality to the rest of the country. Once across in Cambodia, the density decreased, the electricity vanished, the quality diminished and everything looked much poorer. However the kids were much more vocal and I heard the first Hellos which were to become a trademark especially when we were cycling through the Cambodian countryside. The final part of our day long journey was on an overcrowded bus, not that unusual except that the company organising spent most of the journey trying to sell other trips in their luxury buses and promoting their high standard guest houses. Based on the standard of their one bus I wanted nothing more to do with that company and found my own guest house!
The next day was the first day of the cycle trip and I got a bonus when I checked in and discovered that I was an odd guy (very odd you may say) but it meant I had a single room for the whole trip and for no extra cost. The one fear I had about this part of the trip was that the others on the trip would be serious cycling heads, so I was very relieved when I turned up at the designated time to pick up my hired bike to find everyone else on the tour doing the same. There were no cycling heads with their own bikes, apparently a very unusual occurrence on the trip. The other good thing was that it like the rest of the passengers would be easy enough to get mainly aged in their 30’s and early 40’s. We had our first group meal in a restaurant called Titanic and thankfully we were more successful in completing our journey than that ship was!
Our first day on the road started with an 8am start through the Sunday morning streets of Phnom Penh, which was very interesting, weaving between the other cars and bikes (even though poorer than Vietnam there were a lot more cars and mostly expensive 4 wheel drives because as we found out very soon, sealed road did not continue far outside the city). We were travelling on the unsealed roads within about 40 minutes of heading out of the city towards the first stop which were the killing fields of Choeung Ek
Between 1975-1979, Cambodia was ruled by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. These decided that Cambodia was to become a Maoist, peasant dominated, agrarian society. During these years hundreds of thousands of people were re-located from the cities and a large proportion of the educated people and many other were killed. In fact almost 2 million people out of a population of around 10 million were killed as a result of the Khmer Rouge policies. The Khmer Rouge were overthrown by the Vietnamese in 1979. The Khmer Rouge fled towards the Thai border and in the resulting chaos crops were destroyed and many more hundreds of thousands died. A guerrilla war continued until 1991, during this period the US gave indirect support to the Khmer Rouge despite the fact they had previously killed over 2 million of their own people!
The killing fields were one of the locations the Khmer Rouge, took their victims. The site contains 129 mass graves (43 of which have never been disinterred!). Approximately 17,000 were killed on this site and in a memorial building (which I decided against going into) are about 8,000 skulls on about 18 levels of glass shelves. You can see them from the outside and that was chilling enough for me. Apparently some of the skulls bare witness to the fact that the unfortunate people were bludgeoned to death to save bullets. As if all this is not shocking enough, in 2005 the Cambodian Government privatised the site selling the management rights to a Japanese company who now collect all the entrance fees. The cynic in me thinks the money received is now sitting in a Swiss bank account of some Government Minister. We had a local Cambodian guide who gave us a very frank account about the time and listed many of the senior Khmer Rouge officers who were now part of the current Government. Only one person was ever charged with crimes during this period and he died during the trial! Even now writing this weeks later gets me extremely annoyed and it is very hard to come to terms with it emotionally.
In contract to the morning the afternoon was absolutely amazing, we were cycling through paddy fields, through small villages. Everywhere we went children would come running out to the road to scream hello at us and their faces lit up when we answered back. On a number of occasions so many locals, kids and adults were out on the road we had to stop. We took photos and for some of them they had never seen their own image on a digital camera before. It was absolutely magical to see how happy the locals were particularly when they had so little. We spent so long in the villages we arrived in near darkness in the town we were staying in that night. The total cycled for the day was 83 KM. We had our only casualty on the trip that day, one girl suffered from severe dehydrating and spent some hours on a drip. Luckily we had a support vehicle where you could get water at any time or rest up and put your bike on the roof!
The next day we cycled 85km, riding mainly on dirt roads (although dirt road they were still main roads!) received thousand of hellos, high fived the lucky ones and talked to some locals who wanted to practice their English, which was funny as we were on good mountain bikes with 27 gears and they were trying to keep up on basic bikes! I also got my first puncture, and had the distinction of being the only one who got a puncture and repeated the following day! We stayed that night in Kampot and had the opportunity of having a massage from a blind person. It sounded good until I read that they were muscle churning type massage, one brave person went, they rest of finding a different place to get our weary muscles massaged. We thought our oil massage to be a bit too much on hard side, but apparently it was nothing compared to the brave person who took the blind massage who felt she had just had 10 rounds with Mike Tyson, it was definitely more Thai massage than Swedish!
Day 3 was the longest day; we were scheduled to cycle 104 Kms including some descent hills. Add to this, temperatures approaching 40 degrees, some wind, and torrential downpour just to make it a little more interesting. The support vehicle was put to much use on this day, just before lunch, there were 7 out of the 10 passengers on the bus, including me! The afternoon had most of the hills and while the reason I rested on the bus was that I just got too hot, I hadn’t really being looking for torrential rain and wind as until the rain stopped it started to feel a bit cool until the sun dried us off, but there had been so much rain our shoes took a bit longer! Some of the trucks passing us even had difficulty getting up the hills too which made me feel better, it was also strange to see that a couple of these trucks had been imported from the UK and still had UK registration plates, (Cambodia didn’t relay seem a place that but much emphasis on bureaucracy unless someone couple make a few dollars!) When I g0t to the top of a particular hill I was delighted to see the rest of the group waiting, but had decided I could do no more, but was going to go down the next hill and then call it a day, how happy was I to find out there were no more hills and it was nearly all downhill from there. A number of the group who had gone up the hills in the bus also took the opportunity to ride down the hills now that the sun was back out!
Some of the locals had never seen themselves before.
We arrived in the late afternoon in Sihanoukville our home for the next couple of days. We had a very nice hotel complete with swimming pool. Sihanoukville is the only Cambodian resort in the Gulf of Thailand, complete with nice sandy beaches. Needless to say that we made the most of it, especially as we had a cycle free day! It was just as well it was a cycle free day as some of the group would have been just coming home ait the time we normally were preparing to set off!
After our day off we used a public bus to get back to Phnom Penh to catch a plane to Siem Reap. Our support vehicle had set off early to drive all the way, but did not have room for all of us and our bike for the 10-12 hour journey that it would have been. We also got to experience a local bus which is an experience in itself, ear plugs (to shield you from all the blaring of horns) and blindfolds (so you don’t see how the bus is being driven) should have been provided. The initial plan was to catch a plane mid-day for the 40 minute flight to Siem Reap and spend the afternoon cycling around some of the Wats of angor Wat. However we could not get a flight until late afternoon so we had a 4-5 hours to spend in Phnom Penh. We nearly missed our plane; in fact they held it for us since we were about 30% of the passengers on the flight. The reason? Well it was another example of absurdity and abuse of power in 3rd world countries. The Prime Minister had arrived back from someplace by plane which meant that to facilitate his journey back into the city they closed the roads from the airport to the city (about 15kms) so that his journey and that of his 30 car entourage would not be delayed. It didn’t matter that it took literally hundreds of police and army to cordon off every side road! I would hate to think of cost of such an exercise, but these are the types of things countries with little money seem to spend it on!
Siem Reap is home to the lost city of Angkor and its temples. The temples were mostly built during the 9th -13th centuries. They got overgrown by jungles, it some places trees now grow through walls and out from walls. They were re-discovered in the 1860’s after an account by Henri Mouhot of his voyages through the years. Since 1908 (interrupted by the wars) conservation work has been ongoing. It is impossible to describe the scale of the whole place. The Wats are spread over a quite a large distance, we cycled over 35 kms one day to get to one temple. There are many temples but the daddy of them all being Angkor Wat. I will let the photographs describe them better than I can. In total we spent two days cycling around the temples. We had picked up a local guide who turned out to be worse than useless, in fact if we wanted to find out anything we would join the back of another tour group! Our tour leader had many arguments with the local guide trying to improve his performance, culminating with the local guide screaming abuse at our guide (only because he told his boss how useless he was!), the local guide then stormed off and found his own way back from the last Wat we visited!
The final nights on these tours are usually a release, particularly after one as physically gruelling and emotionally jarring as this one, but this was not to be the case. Before our final meal the group decided to go a Cello recital given by the medial director (Dr Beat Richner) of the local children’s hospital (He is an internationally known Cello player). The recital is interspersed with his account of the plight of children in Cambodia, some backing video. His main appeal is that if you are young he wants your blood and if you are older he wants your money. One of the biggest problems for children in the area is dengue fever. The best solution is blood transfusions, a major problem when something up to 60% of the population has hepatitis, more have Aids leaving a very small available pool of blood donors. Add to this that the major international funds (such as Save the Children) will not help fund the hospital and two sister hospitals, as they maintain the hospital is too high tech! Apparently children in the 3rd world are not entitled to high tech facilities even if these high tech facilities are necessary to ensure that people with hepatitis do not pass this on in blood transfusions, among other needs for high tech (or normal to you and me) facilities. The hospitals cater for up to 800,000 children annually, admit more than 55,000 servery sick children, perform more than 10,000 operations and each month over 2,800 children would die if the hospitals were not there! The average cost of treating each patient is a very low $ 170. The hospitals cost $17 million to run each year, of which the Swiss Government provide 10% and the Cambodian Government another 10% and the balance from fund raising like the concerts! What is interesting was that on a recent visit the delegates from the Save the Children Fund stayed in $310 a night rooms before telling them their hospital cost too much because it was too high tech! To put the $310 a night in perspective, it would treat nearly two children and it was more than 15 times the cost of our hotel, which came complete with swimming pool, air-con and all mod cons that you could need! Some people have strange priorities! It was no wonder that group really felt like having a fun dinner afterward. If you want more information on these hospitals their website is:
http://beatocello.com
The tour finished the next day a few people left, but the majority of us were around, so we had a lazy day, watch a boat race festival (the boats had teams of 20) and those of us who were left had dinner which was more fun than the previous evening after the visit to the hospital
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