Day 7 Tired and emotional – we made it!
INTRODUCTION CENSORED We were up at 4am to get on with our 7 hour boat ride along the Ton Le Sap river and lake. It was nitheringly chilly and pitch dark at the outset, but we saw the sunrise and an array of floating villages before we docked and found conditions to be searingly hot on arrival. We had a relatively soft finish, with good roads and a short ride by our now hardy standards, clocking in just north of 50k. After touring the complex, we arrived at the Angkor Wat itself, to find ourselves treated to a welcome party of school children! We had made it! It has to...
Read MoreDAY 6 A road of two halves
Lets keep this one brief. Half of today’s distance took three quarters of the time due the road’s unrelenting, wrist and arm shattering ‘design’. The other half was lovely. I finally got sun burnt today. I dropped my bike on Johnny’s already damaged family jewels, right before we set off this morning. Sorry about that. I sort of feel I should point out that they do have real roads over here (in at least some of the places) – it’s just that we can’t go on them. The highways aren’t a good place for a team of cyclists, regardless of how good their matching kit looks. ...
Read MoreDay 5 Blog – Canal Ride
I hear it’s pretty chilly, chilly in Britain right now – which means another instalment of Tales From a Hot Place must be just what you want to reading after a morning sliding around on black ice, trudging through sludge and generally wishing you’d put on more layers. Still, here’s another heart rending tale of how hot it is here, to you in cold snap Britain… Today was a good ride. Great scenery, historical significance and a reasonably good road surface – for the most part. We managed a stonking 85km, with only the final 20km being arm shatteringly awful, as well as...
Read MoreDay 4 BLOG
Children and animals Today starts with a belated dedication to Jonny ‘Boom’ Vantinel-Holmes, without whom my path through yesterday’s low point would have been a darker place. Following from my own efforts with Jonny the previous day, a rousing return to mis-placed Christmas songs raised a smile for the first time in some kilometres – thank you Jonny! So, today we visited a school which was full of smiley happy kids who were suitably excited to not have to be in their lesson for a little while as the circus had arrived in town. John and Ola delighted with magic tricks, I...
Read MoreDay 3
Blood, sweat and… well, two out of three ain’t bad. Today stared well as we had some bananas to go with breakfast. That may well have been the high point, as today was the day that my left knee woke up and realised what I’ve been up to for the last couple of days. In response it embarked upon a steady protest of declining function to the low point at which I could start indulging dramatic fantasies of never walking without a stick again (there’s quite a lot of time for your mind to wander when on a bike). I’d like to attribute this to an old recurrent injury from my rugby...
Read MoreDay 2
Ola giveth and Ola taketh away Another early start (they’re all early starts) saw us on the street eating a luxury breakfast of fresh baguette (dry) and musli by 6am. The baguette is a rather wonderful hangover from Cambodia’s period as a French Protectorate and as such is pretty damned good fresh from the market at that time of the morning. The musli is a result of having Ola as our leader. The musli was however lacking its addition of fresh banana, as perplexingly, despite having checked the entire market, there were none to be had anywhere – “oh yes sir, we have no...
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