73 km

It’s just hot these days. Right from the start of each day. We are here in the absolute hottest time of the year. Maybe not the best planning, but it is still worthwhile. Somehow our bodies are adapting, and as long as we start really early we are still able to get in some pretty full riding days. The last couple of days we’ve had some tailwinds, which speeds us up by a couple of km per hour and that’s helpful. As long as we are moving on our bikes we feel OK, but the instant we stop for any reason–to eat, find a bush or take a picture–we feel completely overwhelmed by the heat. And there is no stopping unless it’s in the shade. There are some great photo opportunities passing us by because it is just too darn hot to stop.

A brief morning stretch. I was unaware of the monks walking by on their way to collect food from villagers.

We had a really hard time finding lunch. This is sort of a desolate town with few restaurants, at least obvious during the day. We approached one where a woman was sweeping the empty front area. We asked if she had food and got sort of a blank stare. We asked if we could eat and what she had, and she said “Soup!” without a smile and without making a move or asking if we wanted any. She was giving us nothing, so we smiled and said thanks and moved on. We circled around and around and finally found another place. This place only served papaya salad, but they also had a fridge with yogurt, so we had some of that too. Then the woman called a friend who came and said she has a restaurant where we could eat dinner just down the road. She asked what we liked to eat, we explained our vegetarian preference, and she said she’d cook a meal for us without meat. Great!

After spending the hottest part of the afternoon in our a/c room reading and journaling, we went back out for dinner. When we arrived we were greeted with smiles and shown a table. Soon after we were served a huge platter of stir-fried vegetables, rice, some salsa-like sauce, and som tam, a fragrant and delicious fish soup with lemon-grass and mushrooms with vegetables. It was all spectacular. While we ate we talked with our hostess, Latdavanh. Everyone here is given a nickname by their parents when they’re babies in order to fool evil spirits. Latdavanh’s nickname is Terb, which means fluttering eyelids. When she was a baby, Terb’s eyelids were always fluttering in her sleep. Terb is a pharmacist and her parents are both doctors. They all work at the hospital in town. Terb also works in her sister’s restaurant to help out. In her spare time, Koung is studying English. But the only book she has is “English for Hospitality Workers,” which is simply a very long list of sentences in Lao with the English translation below each, and sometimes not a very good translation. There is no grammar, not even simple building blocks, and she has no dictionary. Despite this, she speaks really well, and we had a great time visiting with her and learning about her family, town, and culture.

60 km

We met two cyclists traveling separately at a roadside cafe this morning–one from Switzerland and another from Australia. They were headed in the opposite direction, and we got some great advice about choices we have coming up in Laos. We also traded our Cambodia map for a very useful Lonely Planet Laos guide. It has much more info than our LP SE Asia book.

Another hot and steamy morning.

We got to Paxse feeling hot and wilted, but we cheered up when we saw an Indian restaurant and refueled. We then got a huge a/c room at the Great Wall Hotel for $15 and cheered up even more after a cold shower. We had a restful and uneventful evening.

102 km

While Dave rode around the island yesterday, he found where the real ferry dock is: only 3 km south of the area where the guest houses are. Last night we asked a local how much the ferry cost, and he said 5,000 Kip (about 60 cents). So we were each ready with a 5,000 bill when we got on the ferry, which had a wood platform on top of three canoe-type boats with a motor on the back. It was big enough for a couple of scooters, our two bikes, and four people plus the boatman. When we got off, we handed the boatman our Kip and he smiled and said thank you in Lao (korp jai). Easy enough, with no special tourist price!

As we turned back onto the highway, we noted the sign for the turn-off so you can have your choice of boats if you’re heading to Don Khong too: it is not signed for Don Khong, but instead says, “Ban Hart, Ban Khinak” and you’ll want to follow the paved road straight toward Ban Khinak. It might make most sense using the ferry on the way to the island if you’re heading north, and use the longtails back to mainland, because riding to the ferry and back to the turn-off for the longtails was an extra 9 km this morning.

We had heard about the Kingfisher Eco-lodge from Damian and Judy back in Krabi, Thailand. We had dinner with them one night and got all kinds of great information about our ride in Laos, and we were looking forward to a “very romantic” rest day at the Kingfisher. Dave made reservations for two nights through their website a few days ago. From our guest house on Don Khong, it was 91 km to the turn-off to Kingfisher Lodge. There is a sign at the turn-off to the right, which directed us up a smooth gravel road. It was a very hot day, and as we slowed down climbing a bit uphill, we remembered their words telling us it was worth it. And it was. The place is just past a small village and is on the edge of a lush green wetland. The grounds are beautifully landscaped with palms, banana trees, and other greenery to offer shade.

Unfortunately, they did not have our reservation, and they were booked tomorrow night. We decided to go ahead with one night. We stayed in an “eco-room” for U.S. $16/night, which was like a duplex bungalow with separate shared bathroom. All bungalows plus the main restaurant/reception building look out over the wetland, which often has water buffalo roaming through, and in the evenings the locals let the elephants loose to eat and sleep out there.

Speaking of elephants: we rode one. The lodge said it’s a good way for the village people to make money with the elephants instead of using them for logging. At 3:30 we walked back to the village where the rides begin, climbed a platform and sat on a cushioned seat on top of one very large elephant. The elephant driver sat in front of us on the elephant’s neck and used his feet to tap her ears and grunted commands to make her go. Then we walked through the village and followed a gravel road up a very steep hill. But! Three-quarters of the way up that hill we met two elephants with people coming down. It was late in the day, and I think our elephant was hot and tired and wanted to go back with her friends. After the two elephants passed us, she turned right around and started following them.

Other elephant riders.

Our elephant driver would have none of that. He knocked her on the head with the wood end of his little rope stick and yelled a command. That didn’t work. Meanwhile, elephant sort of ran downhill, with us bobbing around on her back.

The driver turned around and traded his little rope-stick for a metal hook. It looked like a meat hook. He took it and jabbed it into her forehead and yelled again, trying to turn her head to the side. This time she raised her head and trunk and trumpeted, again and again. Turning her head each time he jabbed her with the hook, she would then turn back, trumpet, and run forward. I wanted OFF. The driver kept looking back at us with a smile saying “It OK, it OK. Want go back.” and then hooking her again. I said, “It’s OK to go back, it’s OK to go back!”

The other elephant drivers finally stopped their elephants and one of them was shouting in Lao at our driver. Was he yelling at him for hooking the elephant? Or was he yelling about what to do? We’ll never know. When the other elephants stopped, so did ours. After a minute the others went on, and our driver kept our elephant at a stop. But when he tried turning her back around she got mad again and trumpeted a couple more times before finally turning around and going up the rest of the hill.

When we got to the top there was another platform with stairs. The elephant went right up to the platform and we got off. My legs were shaking while walking down the stairs. The driver pointed up to where a ruin was, and we walked up to take a look.

I did not want to get back on that elephant, but the driver was waiting when we got back and the elephant looked calm. Dave said maybe I’d feel better if I pet the elephant, so I did. I’m not sure how much better I felt, but I was glad to see that the elephant stayed calm as we got back on, and made good time getting back to the village.

Back at the village, we got off and immediately were met by a girl who had bananas to sell for the elephant. I bought a big bunch, and started peeling one for her. They said no, and motioned to give the elephant the whole bunch. She took the whole thing with her trunk and stuffed it in her mouth, chomped a bit and then spit some back out her trunk all over her body.

I’m done riding elephants. I don’t want to be the reason some poor animal is forced up a hill in the heat or hooked in the head for wanting to go home. I just felt bad about the whole thing. I don’t propose any better solution for the retired logging elephants, but I sure hope the tourist business of riding elephants isn’t causing them to go out and get more of them from the wild. I wish I could see them roaming out in the wetland instead.

Dave rode 44 km

Dave and I got up at our usual 4:30 time and made it out to the river for sunrise. Afterward, I wanted a good rest for my knees, which have been feeling great during the big days we’ve been riding but were starting to get a little edgy. Dave decided to ride around the island and check it out. The Lonely Planet guide said it should be 35 km, but it was actually 44. So Dave got a fair little ride in today while I read, drank coffee, and lounged. In the afternoon we made tentative plans for the next several days in Laos, then hid from the heat and read for a while. We had dinner next door on the riverside deck and watched the kids swimming in the river and the fishermen paddle out in their dugout canoes.

95 km

Oh man, the minute we walked out this morning we felt the heat building. Not a cloud in the sky! Oof. We set out to see if we could get across that bridge. We rode along the river to the base of the bridge, then back along it to where we could push through a break in the guard rail. We saw a couple of people on motos approaching the road block, and a moto coming across from the other side of the bridge. So! We rode up and, waiting only a second for a moto driver to push his scooter under the bar across the road, we did the same. Then we hopped on and rode across like we did this every day. No “present” necessary.

The land emptied out again, and soon it was just us and the water buffalos, only they were smart enough to cool off in the muddy ponds.

As we got close to the turn-off for Don Khong, one of the islands in the middle of the Mekong, we wondered how we’d know which road to take. Finally, we saw a sign to turn off for Don Khong. We rode through a small village to the end of the road at the edge of the river. A couple of young men, boys really, came out to greet us and asked us if we wanted to go across. We said yes, and asked how much. Four dollars, he said. We didn’t have any Lao Kip yet, but we knew that the dollar was also used in Laos, as well as Thai Baht. Dave thought $4 was too much, so we bought a couple of sodas and sat down in the shade to see if anyone else came along. Finally, we figured if we wanted to get over there we might as well pay the price, so we did. The ride took less than five minutes, and we were dropped right where the guest houses and restaurants are.

While I was looking at a guest house recommended in the Lonely Planet book (Pon’s) Dave talked with the woman next door, who said she had rooms for ten dollars. I wasn’t thrilled with the $12 room at Pon’s, so I looked at the woman’s $10 a/c room and it was perfect, an upstairs end room with windows on three sides. We wanted to stay a rest day here, and this was a comfortable choice. Plus, the woman running it was sweet and so smiling, and she helped us with learning the Laos greeting, saying thank you, and things like that.

After getting settled and showering, we sat on the river’s edge deck of our guest house and had banana shakes while watching the sunset reflect on the clouds.

A note on money: if you don’t yet have Kip, try to use Thai Baht rather than U.S. dollars, since their rate is much better for Baht. The local exchange for figuring prices in dollars is 8,000 Kip per dollar, but currently you should get a rate of at least 8,500 at a bank, or about 8,750 through an ATM. Whether using dollars or Baht, you will get Kip in return for everything but the guest house bill.

145 km

We left before six a.m. and found the sky was mostly cloudy and the air was cool. This was a real blessing since we were looking at a 140-or-so kilometer day. There are no real towns and no guest houses between Kratie and Steung Treng, so we made sure we had enough food and water to carry us through a very long day.

We enjoyed the cool morning as we rode north past the place where we saw the dolphins yesterday. Soon after, the village lining the road thinned out and after a while we found ourselves to be the only people on the road for good stretches at a time. We haven’t seen much empty land in Southeast Asia. We heard that they’ve recently cleared the land near the road of land mines and from here to the border the government is now starting to let people move in to farm. I wouldn’t want to be the first farmer.

By mid-morning we pretty much had the road and countryside to ourselves. We passed through very small villages now and then, waving a few hellos to the shouting children. Some of them don’t know hello, but instead shout, “OK!” really loud. Many others shout, “Bye bye!” and answer hello only if we say it. Here’s another thing we’ve noticed since that first muddy day along the Mekong: there are groups of kids every so often who shout hello while holding their finger in front of their lips like a “shh” motion. I don’t know where these kids got that one. I mean, we came up with some theories, one being that someone got a bit overwhelmed by the many many repeated shouts of hello all through the village and replied by saying, “Shh” and holding up their finger. Who knows. They’re so cute they make me laugh out loud sometimes. They get so tickled when we say hi back that sometimes they scrunch up their shoulders, laugh uncontrollably and run away. They’re really the cutest ever.

Steung Treng is at the junction of a major river which joins the Mekong. So, to continue tomorrow we will need to either take a very short boat ride for FIVE DOLLARS EACH (grumble, grumble) or try and see if we can sneak across the newly-finished but not-yet-open bridge. The proprietor of the restaurant we ate dinner at said to bring a nice present for the guys and they might let us pass. Ah, yes, a “present,” of course.

Five Dollar Ferry

Closed Bridge

32 km

We rode a few kilometers north of town to see if we could get a view of the Irriwaddy dolphins, the endangered freshwater dolphins that inhabit the Mekong in this area. There are only about 80 dolphins left, and this is supposed to be the best spot to see them.

We got to the viewing area and read the brochure on the boat rides. We’d already heard from another cycling couple that the boat ride is good and they don’t seem to try to get too close and there are not too many people out there at any given time. Some of the money goes toward their preservation, and it also shows the local people that the dolphins are valuable for saving, since they bring in tourist money to the area. So we went ahead with the ride, $14 for both of us.

It was a wonderful time, and we saw many dolphins, or at least a few dolphins many times. The boat driver would get us to an area and then cut the motor and paddle us around. When we floated too far away, he’d motor us back to the good spots and do it again. We got some great views. These dolphins don’t jump out of the water, but they do come up for air. They’re very shy, but we did see and hear them and it was really a special thing to see.

38 km

We expected today to be short and easy, with only about 30 km to ride. It was raining when we woke up, and by the time we got out of the hotel it was only sprinkling. A Cambodian driving the other way said he went through road construction much of the way from Kratie to Chlong the day before and he thought it would be a bit difficult. We rode about four kilometers out of town and saw the beginning of the road construction: a very wet, muddy clay coated the surface and most people were stopped to consider the odds of making it through. A major portion of traffic in Cambodia is motos, and there were a few trying to get through. Normally we see anywhere from one to five people on one motorbike, and most moto passengers were walking, barefoot, through the mud behind struggling drivers. Many a scooter went down, and there was a huge crowd of locals watching the spectacle. Some attacked with speed, others on bare tip-toes keeping the bike upright while barely inching forward. The sprinkle became a full rain again, so we turned around to wait it out in a restaurant.

The view from the restaurant where we waited out the rain.

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Three hours later we returned to see even more traffic and people backed up, but more were also making their way through now. The sun had come out and so we waited, while watching, another hour and a half or so before going through.

The spectacle of the mud race!

Within a couple of hours we were going through dust. We made it to Kratie in the late afternoon, with the sun showing it’s full power, the cool rains a very distant memory.

99 km

Goodbye horns, hello dirt! We thought we left the noise behind yesterday, but today we really enjoyed a lack of traffic. We took the “river road” north from Kampong Cham on the east side of the Mekong. It started out as a hard-packed gravel and dirt road much like the urban trails in Flagstaff. Soon it turned to hard-packed and rough dirt, and soon it became mud because of the rains that came through early this morning. We went from dirt to mud and back to dirt several times. A few times, we left the main river road to follow single-track paths behind the villages right on the river’s edge, winding between the river and fields of corn and tobacco. It was my favorite day in Cambodia because the scenery was green and beautiful, the pace was slow and the people were the most warm and welcoming of any we’ve seen here so far.

We rode right on the edge of the Mekong for many kilometers before heading inland on a dirt road.

Later, the mud just starts to build up as we ride and push our way through ox-cart village roads.

The day was longer than we expected from reading our map, and it was our longest on this trip in terms of time. The rough dirt and muddy sections took a lot of time and effort. Luckily, the last 25 kilometers were paved with chip-seal so we were able to increase our speed for the last bit. We were completely tired out when we finally reached Chlong.

80 km

We see countless farms each day, but we’ve seen only a handful of motorized tractors working the land. Instead, more and more, we see large white cattle hooked up to ox carts and plows. If they’re not working, they’re usually tied by a rope through a ring on their nose to a stake in the ground where they munch on any remaining green they can find. Other times we see them moved, two at a time, by a lean man encouraging their pace with a light tap of the whip from behind, holding their ropes like leashes. These are the tamest cows I’ve seen.

A farmer leads his cows out to the fields in the early morning mist.

Today the road goes from pavement, to dirt, to mud, and back to pavement again. It rained this morning, and we are on a lesser road now, so we are prepared to see anything. But as we choose smaller, less maintained roads, we also see less traffic and that is a relief.

What is not a relief is the constant frustration of knowing we are being charged a special “tourist price” for many things here in Cambodia. We can sometimes see that we’re being charged more than other people, other times we just know it because we might have paid half the price for the same thing earlier in the day (like a simple can of Coke or a bottle of tea). It can happen in restaurants, fruit stands and markets, and probably sometimes at hotels although it’s harder to know. We understand that Cambodia is coming through the other side of a long tragedy and that tourism is a great infusion of money into their economy. But does it have to be infused so quickly and so much by us? We are spending more per day here than we spent per day in Malaysia and Thailand. Guidebooks tell us we have to bargain for everything, but so far we have found no one willing to bargain except for a woman who was selling us warm cans of soda and the illegally-copied guide book I bought from a young girl at Angkor Wat. (“This is a copy,” I said. “Yes,” she said, “but it is a good one.”)

Tonight we rode across a hand-made bamboo bridge to an island in the middle of the Mekong river. Once we got to the other side we saw it was a toll-bridge. That’s fine, we thought, it’s a pretty neat thing to see. We rode up to pay our way, and saw two people on a moto pay 1/4 of what we each were charged. Each of these incidents are small examples, but when you consider how many times we stop and spend money every day, it adds up. Where do we draw the line? We want to see Cambodia rebuild and prosper. When we’re bugged enough we just walk away. But we have to eat. And we are glad to be seeing the things we’re seeing.

This handmade bamboo bridge, re-built every year for the dry season, leads out to an island where people live and farm. Even a car came down this thing while we were riding on it! We had to balance on the edge and I nearly got my toe run over.