Cycling in Kampong Cham province

Er, I didn’t mean my first entry to the blogosphere to be quite so harrowing, so I thought I’d follow it up by an account of yesterday, a brilliant full-day bike ride around the countryside near Kampong Cham.

Six of us – Ingran, Dave, Gilly, Sam, John and me – set off around 9.30 on bikes that were definitely not made for Cambodian countryside, and stopped at around 9.50 at the first bike repair shop we saw. Cambodians tend to be very resourceful, though, so they managed to sort out Sam’s chain while we had some breakfast and tried to work out how to wear the traditional Cambodian krama - a large checked tea-towel that people wear on their heads to protect from the sun – without looking like an old woman. As you can see, we weren’t particularly successful.

We were back on the road soon after and cycled for about an hour on Route 7, one of Cambodia’s main provincial roads. I had my first Cambodian road accident when a motorbike carrying logs overtook me, forgetting that its logs were horizontal, and whacked into my leg. No harm done though. The Cambodian countryside was beautiful: lots of water and bright green vegetation, and we passed some floating houses. These look like massive rafts where people live and fish with massive nets that they lower into the water. It looked very peaceful although it’s probably a very tough life for people living on them.

We arrived at one of the many rubber plantations in the area. They had been planted by French colonialists and after independence were given to the Cambodian government. Technically, they are state-owned but apparently they just line the pockets of a few rich people. We stopped for a drink, saw some wild water buffalos, and recovered for a few minutes from the immense heat.

We then went onto some small roads and cycled for another hour or two, and everyone we passed was extremely friendly, saying hello in English and smiling. Children, in particular, were very excited and came out of their houses to say hello – I felt a bit like Jesus must have felt when he cycled into Jerusalem. I’ve read that cycling in Cambodia is something done only by people who can’t afford not to, so they were possibly quite surprised that we would choose to do it. Anyway, it was very nice.

And then I had my second (minor) road accident when I fell off my bike. I had a few cuts and grazes, but to keep them covered I had to put bandages on because I was sweating too much for plasters to stay on. This had the added advantage of making it look much more serious than it was, so I got considerably more sympathy from everyone. Just before we stopped for lunch, though, Gilly almost fainted due to the sun and lack of food, so she returned in a tuk-tuk (motorbike with a cart attached) and the rest of us carried on.

We were getting a bit anxious because apparently we needed to get a boat to avoid having to go back the way we’d come (about 35km), and they weren’t running all day. So after a quick lunch we carried on in the direction of the port. When we got there, though, it was really easy to get someone to take us across: four of us went in one narrow wooden boat and Ingran went with the bikes in the other, along with a small child, his captain. It was a really nice experience to travel by boat and see other boats on the Mekong River – the biggest and most important river in South-East Asia. We followed the bank downstream towards the Kizuna Bridge (a Japanese-built development project that will have brought huge benefits to the area but which, incidentally, must also have completely destroyed an entire boating industry), passing some very basic-looking wooden houses on the shore. People here were noticeably less friendly and probably have a much harder life than some of the villages we’d passed earlier in the day.

We paid half a dollar each for the boat trip and they laughed a lot when we paid them, so we wondered whether we’d given too much! The final stretch was cycling through a busier road towards the bridge, with lots of market stalls on either side of the road, back in time for some beers by the river.

It was a really fun day and we saw quite a lot of Cambodia. I’m going to be working in a very rural province in the east of the country so I’m now feeling very excited about it all.