A land of temples and culinary adventures

After a leisurely breakfast on Don Khong, the largest of the Four Thousand Islands, we hopped on our bikes anticipating a boat ride about 15 kilometres downriver to put us within spitting distance of Cambodia. To our mild disappointment, that long range ferry had left while we were eating, so the only option remaining to us was a smaller boat across one of the branches of the Mekong, followed by a ride and another ferry. Admittedly, I had secretly harboured hopes of taking this tiny road, since it looked more like a path than a road on the map. Sure enough, upon disembarking, we found ourselves bouncing down a dirt trail. Whether made by humans, buffalo, pigs, or more likely a combination of the three, we couldn't immediately tell. However, we saw absolutely no signs of cars, and I don't recall being passed by a single motorcycle on our 10km jaunt parallel to the river. Villagers were harvesting an additional rice crop, which we had not seen in Laos, but it seems that with the proximity of the Mekong they were able to irrigate their fields instead of relying on the rain which had ended two months prior. Rich verdant fields of foot tall rice sprouted from the shallow irrigation ponds, and were transplanted to adjacent plots by villagers wearing flattened conical hats to shield themselves from the sun. 

Strangely, three Ortleib pannier bearing riders stood in the trail replacing the cross bar of a home-made bamboo gait. One of the riders, an Italian named Mateo, had stayed at our guest-house and had made the same miscalculation with the ferry that we had, albeit earlier. All of us commented on the oddity of this impromptu group of five white people on a infrequently traveled island in the Mekong that measured 30km squared at the most. Nobody commented on being upset with the extra miles, rather it seemed that we had somehow turned a hidden page in Laos bike riding, with wonderfully smooth single track, kids who had been infected with the desire to give us high fives while yelling Sabaidee, and occasional views of the Mekong sweeping past. Our companions stopped at a picturesque beach while Brooke and I rode ahead to catch the next ferry - essentially a square raft with a powerful weed-eater as a propeller.

This waterborne riding lawnmower dropped us off at Don Det, giving us whiplash from the transition onto this tourist packed island. The Four Thousand Island region generally has a reputation as a peaceful place where people pass days sitting in hammocks staring at the river, but the north end of Don Det has about a kilometre of densely packed English signs advertising rooms, "happy smoothies," and other tourist draws for Neo-hippies and reformed frat boys looking to relive their glory days. Perhaps that assessment is a bit harsh, but we quickly dodged out of town and headed over the bridge at the south end of the Don Det, returning to the peaceful world of Don Khon (not to be confused with Don Khong.)

One of many ferries

 Our map indicated one guesthouse on the southern shore of the island, looking across the Mekong at Cambodia. However, when we arrived, the owner - a European woman married to a Thai man - informed us that her hotel was full! This had never happened to us in two months of riding, but fortunately she talked to her next door neighbour who ran had a room set up as a homestay. While we didn't get to see the inside of the hotel, our room was fantastic, and at 50,000 kip (about six dollars) the cheapest room we had paid for the whole trip. The house itself perched on twelve foot tall thick wooden stilts, with a breezeway dividing our room from the two other rooms in the house. A photogenic mosquito net framed the bed, and would let the occupants of the room take advantage of the large wooden windows on three of the walls. Fortunately, the nights were cool on their own, and mosquitos seemed to be waiting for rain to come out. We did find a large rufous tree frog in our bathroom, but he also left us in peace on the condition that we let him stay behind the toilet. 

Having settled into our room, we paid a tuk tuk - a motorcycle with a side car welded either to the side or directly behind the driver - to drive us back towards Don Det. After painfully converting our remaining kip at a 15% surcharge, we headed to one of the most striking geological oddities we've come across on our trip - the falls of the Mekong. For the last several days we had watched the massive volume of water speed through Sam Pan Bok in "The Grand Canyon of Thailand" and seen its width increase by a factor of 500 at Si Pan Don. None of this suggested that the river would fall about twenty meters over a series of falls spread across several horizontal kilometres. I imagine it would be an unwelcome surprise to be approaching from upstream in a boat, only to see the entire river disappear. The French apparently confronted the inverse problem, attempting to build a railroad around the falls to facilitate boat traffic from the sea up the Mekong, past Vientiane several thousand kilometres up the river. For reasons that I didn't get to the bottom of, they were never able to fully establish the rail road, and all that remains now are lonely brick columns in the river and a few abandoned steam engines. Regardless, the falls were spectacular in the most literal sense of the word. We ran into Mateo and the other bike tourists and spent sunset watching the falls, leaving us a five kilometre walk back to our end of the island at night. 

An inadequate representation of the falls scale

Luckily, a tuk tuk passed us and stopped to see if we wanted a ride.  We would have loved to say yes, but we had unwittingly cashed in too many of our Lao kip, and had accidentally put ourselves on a very tight budget if we wanted to eat dinner and breakfast. As a result, we engaged in the hardest of bargaining tactics - saying no because you really have no intention of paying for what they are offering. This resulted in an eightfold decrease in the price we had paid for the outgoing trip, which broke our spirit. We both felt bad for lowballing the guy, but we  really didn't have the money and planned on walking back to the guesthouse.

The following morning we met Mateo for breakfast after arranging to split the cost of the ferry to Cambodia with him. Sadly, nobody shared our love of sticky rice on this island, so we had to leave without a formal goodbye to the food that is as Laotian as apple pie is American. 

I'm not sure if the spoke had broken yet or not

After navigating between the French railroad columns, our hired boat dropped us at a landing on the east bank of the river. Looking about 100 meters downstream, we could see another landing on the Cambodian side, but this would be off limits to us until we cleared customs. An easy couple of kilometers put us at the Laotian emmigration desk, then into the Cambodian immigration area, which was not nearly as corrupt or inefficient as some internet commentators had felt that it was. After getting a variety of redundant stamps, packed up to continue our journey, I noticed another broken rear spoke! I'm not sure how long it had been that way, but the wheel was certainly out of true, rotating freely only because my brakes had worn to dust. Worse, the repair in Vietnam used my drive side spoke. Further, we had already bought a train ticket from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, putting a firm end point on our trip for the first time. 

Can't be good for spokes

Two basic options presented themselves. Mateo, an endearingly conservative mechanical engineer, felt we should take the paved road to Steung Treng, giving an easier escape (hitching) in the event that the wheel broke at the expense of an additional 100km of riding. I felt that the extra road mileage would mean too many huge consecutive days to end the trip, putting a big stain on what had been a trip where we had generally avoided being slaves to miles. Of course, getting stuck on the dirt road across the river with a broken wheel would be a stain of a different sort. Still, if my bike were to get on a bus for the first time, I would want it to be in style. I taped the spoke to the wheel so it wouldn't clatter around, and loosened the two adjacent spokes. The wheel didn't spin true, but it was a lot better than it had been, and I figured in this case perfect would be the enemy of good. The decision having been made, we road past a sleeping guard, then another five kilometres to the same landing we had seen from Laos this morning, asked a couple card playing border guards to call a ferry, and forty minutes later were looking across the Mekong at the spot we had eaten breakfast that morning. The intervening stretch of river is home to a population of Irrawaddy dolphins, a highly endangered freshwater species that supposedly can be reliably seen from Cambodia.I wish we had left ourselves enough time to take the additional boat ride, but getting to our projected guesthouse before dark required us to leave expeditiously. 

Welcome to Cambodia

Quickly our legs and bikes became covered with the red dust of Cambodia's rural tracts, which thankfully were well graded, minimizing the stress on my compromised wheel. Having made it 35km out to the paved highway, we stopped at the Cambodian equivalent of fast food - several pots of pre-made food at a road side stand. Unclear of when the food had been made, but certain that it was now at room temperature (about 95F) I ordered a pork stew and rice. Brooke may have  sampled the dish, but mostly stayed away siting the rational fear of food poisoning. She didn't miss that much - the mediocre rice was the star of the dish, and the pork actually seemed to be a collection of pork cartilage. I'm sure it flavoured the broth. Mateo gamely stuck with us, only acknowledging that our pace was punishing his legs when we had booked our room for the night and walked up the road to the village market. We all drank wonderfully cold coconut water sold by preteen boys and their moms, while I filled the hole in my stomach with steaming pork off the grill. The middle aged gentleman manning the grill spoke excellent English and instructed me on the Cambodian custom of eating "cheese" with their meat. He gave me a plastic bag of off white liquid and told me to eat it the fresh vegetables he presented in another plastic bag. Perhaps with a more open mind, I could have thought of it as bleu cheese dressing, but after trying a few mouthfuls I discreetly deposited the bag in our hotel trash can. Although the pork made a fairly large pre-dinner, we all shared a more conventional dinner at the gas station / restaurant next to our hotel, vastly outshining our lunch in taste, quantity and freshness. After cooking the food, the male restaurant employees gathered in front of the gas station and kicked a plastic shuttlecock between themselves in a Cambodian version of hacky-sack. I joined them for thirty minutes, and represented America decently. 

Mateo decided to let us start before him the next morning so he could go his own pace and get some extra sleep. Brooke and I, in an effort to minimize the discomfort of multiple consecutive five hour 100+ kilometre days, decided to start at sunrise with the hope of finishing before noon. Against reasonable odds, both of us were up with Brooke's alarm at six, only to find that the restaurant staff also woke up at six. The night before, we had gotten the impression that they would be open at six, not opening at six.

Sweetened condensed milk...

Still, a seven am departure ranks in the top five percent of departures for us, and resulted in a pleasant two and a half hours before the tropical sun chased away the relative cool of the night. By this time, we had reached the only intersection of the day, and were forced to ride through the most dissonant music I have ever experienced. It appeared that someone had set up for a wedding, with two sets of duelling speakers. Both were set at a volume that would be illegal in the US. Both were playing completely unrelated sound tracks. The resulting cacophony could be heard for two miles in either direction, and was actually painful within about fifty meters of the event. We knew we had missed out on something at our wedding, and I think that we found it in Cambodia. 

Apart from this piece of local craziness, traffic was generally light, which mostly compensated for the Cambodian drivers' high rate of poor decision making. It seemed that they channeled the chaos of Vietnamese drivers, while jettisoning the little instinct of self preservation we had seen riding there. If the country ever experiences the economic revival its neighbours have, they will have to come up with a solution or else 50% of their cars will be destroyed in a year. Fortunately, the traffic died down once we past the intersection and the wedding, leaving us in peace on a very flat road that circled a national park. Sadly, Cambodia seems to have been mostly denuded of their forests, at least in the north. Even when ample trees were growing, it was clear that they were barely second growth.

Not many tall trees around here

The plateau was an exception, and we passed a few minutes imagining out loud that wild tigers, elephants and orangutans had evaded destruction in Cambdoai's thirty years of civil war and economic pillage. By the time the plateau had been replaced by burning agricultural fields, a phenomenon across the entire region that looks like it starts a month earlier in Cambodia, the second town of the day could be seen through the smoke. We had told Mateo that we would stay at a hotel slightly out of town closer to the temple we planned to visit, but found it abandoned and too far removed from town to eat without getting back on the bikes. We immediately reversed course and headed two kilometres back to town, where we had our most satisfying meals since crossing the border. Our attention had initially been drawn by a man operating a road side sugar cane press. He would run two four foot segments of cane through a mechanical press along with a piece of orange. The resulting juice, served in a plastic cup over ice, so vastly exceeded our expectations - far less sweet than a soft drink, with a pleasant grassy background brightened by the orange's subtle citrus flavor. Seeing that we might be spending some time under this family's umbrella, we copied their son and ordered rice and sautéed vegetables. Unwittingly, we agreed to the mother's suggestion that we try the papaya salad, which was a tasty surprise addition but quite closely related to the Thai version. Pleased with our enthusiasm, the dad gave us free green mango slices with shrimp paste and powdered soup to dip them in. While the shrimp paste had a strong flavor, I actually enjoyed it, and would use it again if other shrimp pastes tasted similar. Perhaps months of eating fish sauce have softened my western palate to fermented seafood... but Brooke somehow managed to avoid this transformation.

The antidote to tropical sun

After satiating our thirst, we wandered off the national highway - the only paved road in town - and found a market that paralleled the highway on a dirt road almost the entire length of the town. We didn't buy much but were impressed by the variety of food people were selling and their pleasant nature, maintained despite obviously being poorer than all but the poorest parts of Laos that we have seen.

Somehow, our market trip took a little longer than we thought it would, or perhaps it was the shop owners two small daughters literally climbing on Brooke and I, but we realized that we wanted to grab another bite before heading to the temple. Caught in the awkward post lunch, pre dinner time period, our options were relatively limited. We saw one lady laying chicken on a grill, but these wouldn't be ready quickly. Moving down the street, we saw only one other person with a grill, so we stopped and asked if they would serve us up a plate. To our surprise, they seemed skeptical. We wondered if we had wandered into a family dinner, mistaking it for a road side restaurant (we've done this more than once.) Deepening our surprise, the man's twelve year old daughter walked over to us, and in precise but accented English told us "Its dog, many falang (foreigners) don't like dog." 

New meaning to mystery meat

In hindsite, the ribs did seem too small for pig, but I'm not sure that I would have pieced it together without her help. Obviously eating dog raises some internal moral hackles, but the dog was already on the grill and had not been killed for us, so I figured I'd give it a shot. To my dismay, there was actually very little meat, with our serving being mostly fat and bone. The bit I could pick off was hard to distinguish from other dark meat. I would have been happy to leave after a piece or two, but the dad seemed proud and pleased that we were sitting down eating his food, so I choked down ten more bites as well as vegetables and Cambodian cheese sauce, before scraping my plate into the trash. Because of these delays, we found ourselves peddling much harder than we wanted to so that we could arrive at the Koh Ker temple complex before sunset. On the way, we ran across Mateo returning from the ruins, and pedalled fasted when he said they might close before we get there.

Koh Ker is one of the further east Khymer temple complexes in Cambodia and a major reason we decided to stop at this tiny city. The complex itself spreads over more than 50 square kilometres, so as we road towards the center, we passed minor ruins in various states of decay. If we already weren't pressed for time, we certainly would have stopped at a few, likely with a preference for the ones with signs stating they had been cleared of mines (the whole complex is actually cleared.) The ticket booth was unmanned, but when we arrived at the main site, a group of women asked us for our ticket. Undeterred, we motioned that we would just pay them. This seemed to be ok with them, so we handed over ten dollars each and walked through the broken outer wall. The inner ruins were certainly much larger than the ones we had passed by earlier, with thematically similar construction and doorway carvings to ones we had seen at Champasak.

 In comparison, the temple seemed larger than Champasak (but without plumeria) which in its own right would be impressive. However, as we progressed inwards, the scene became progressively more Indiana Jones like. After handing our money over, we had seen no other people except the same young girls that had climbed on us in the shop a few hours earlier. As we walked in between two partially filled moats lined intermittently by 15 foot building, the trees seemed to open up in front of us. In the opening, the setting sun highlighted a massive structure, a nearly two hundred foot tall terraced pyramid that would have dominated all the other subservient buildings we had just walked through.

 Seeing nobody else, we ascended a wooden scaffolding to the top. Trees had grown up sufficiently to hide the other buildings, but it would be easy to imagine the Khymer hyper elite standing in that position surveying the minor temples sprouting from the surrounding plains. The experience of seeing the temple emerge from the jungle, alone apart from Brooke, highlighted for both of us one of the great aspects of bike touring. Most people don't make it this far out from Angkor Wat, and those that do come leave before sunset. By staying in a random, tiny Cambodian town because we couldn't pedal to the next guest-house, we got a mouth watering sample of Cambodian street food, usually considered the ugly step sister to Thai, Vietnamese and even Laos cuisine, and an essentially private sunset tour of one of Cambodia's massive temples.

We stoped at a few of the minor temples on our way back, but decided to beat a retreat when we heard buzzing bees from beneath a stone guardian lion we were examining. The matriarch of Mateo's hotel, where we had originally planned on staying, had shown up so we joined him for dinner. In an interesting exchange, she asked us simply if we would like to eat, we answered in the affirmative and she returned to the kitchen. No information about price or content was exchanged, but she returned with a few heaping plates of sautéed vegetables, stir fry and rice for a reasonable price. Our routes would diverge with Mateo's tomorrow, so after hanging out talking a little longer than the hotel owners sleep schedule approved of (8pm? rural Cambodia might sleep even earlier than us), we exchanged emails and headed back to our hotel in preparation for another early start.