Can’t get that song out of my head!!

I’ve loved the song “Holiday In Cambodia” by the Dead Kennedys for almost 30 years and as we pedalled towards our destination I became stuck in a continuous mental song loop, leaving out the disturbing parts for Aran’s benefit, hoping that our holiday would prove rather more pleasant than the one in the song. Shouldn’t be too hard given that Cambodia’s horrendous period in the 70’s, the subject of said song, is long over and the people have bounced back to become some of the friendliest I’ve met anywhere. It was a good payback to Aran, this constant singing, as usually it’s him repeatedly singing something on the back of the tandem. I know he’s getting worn out when the singing gives way to asking whether there will be a flat screen TV at our destination, and he rummages even harder than usual in my back shirt pocket which acts like that little pouch on the seat back of a plane, searching for remnants of crisps. Elina doesn’t have these pockets and has a little crocodile clip for crisps on the odd occasion that she rides the tandem with Aran.

We rolled towards the border near HaTien, and I knew it would be a bit different to Vietnam, but the change was really striking…

Zev started his Holiday in Cambodia by rolling down the border office’s steps, bashing his head at the bottom and sustaining a large blue lump on his forehead on the spot he usually favours for large blue lumps. This didn’t soften the “health inspector” enough to stop him extorting a few dollars out of us for the “required” health certificate that he issued us. He was prepared to be haggled down to half of his first price.

The poker-faced border guards were strikingly different looking from the Vietnamese as they are Khmers, a race of people quite separate in language and culture from their neighbours and there was a real change awaiting as we rolled out of the border area, bruised and confused with a strange mix of US dollars and Cambodian Riel in our pockets longing for noodles and coffee.

Cambodia is spacious and empty compared to Vietnam, the buildings crafted carefully out of hardwood, including even the most functional of sheds, the people are a little bit shy and, o what a relief, they drive predictably and at moderate speed. We breathed a sigh of relief, not realising that Vietnam has been a bit stressful and crazy until we crossed the border.

Easy riding along the coast… Elina in her customary “shhh” pose that she adopts when we come near whilst Zev is asleep!

Our destination for the day was Kep, and after a family vote we opted for a shorter-in-distance but unknown-in-time-and-road-conditions route across the rice paddies and along the coast to get to the town. The first few Kms were muddy and potholed and it looked like an arduous day ahead, but we hit the coast and the brown line on Lord Google’s satellite scriptures turned out to be a hard packed track through very rural crab-catching communities. We got our first tries at Cambodian greetings and, when we got to the tarmac near Kep, got our usual bicycle escort of a group of school kids pedaling home in their pristine white shirts shouting hellos and racing us to town on their rickety Chinese mounts.

The outskirts of Kep is dotted with French colonial ruins, from the days when Cambodia was ruled by the French and the town was used as a holiday destination. They are mostly crumbing and stained and overgrown by jungle, but have recently started to get snapped up by foreign investors and wealthy Khmers, seeing the potential of this stretch of coast. I hope they install some kind of sewage treatment to go with their gleaming imported lavatories as the sea there is fairly disgusting already and as the population booms there will be a lot of jobbies with nowhere to go destined for seafront if there is not some thought about it…

Faded glory

Fishing villages on the way to Kep

Bikes resting as we play on the beach

You can still get an OK hotel there for €5 – gentrification has a way to go before things get crazy in this area – and we checked in, peeled off our muddy red outfits and headed out to eat at the market, clutching fistfuls of banknotes, some of them worth around 1 cent.

Refreshments in a posh cafe in Kampot

Next day or destination was Kampot, a fairly easy ride away, and there we found a biggish town, one area full of tourists and a load of handsome colonial arcaded shop fronts along a wide river… Our lodgings were in a strange German-run luxury resort, which seemed surprising cheap on the website, but less so on seeing that it was a remote field with small concrete sheds that had been artfully photographed by a marketing genius and stuck on booking.com. they had a pool (with the usual razor sharp edges everywhere) so Aran was delighted and we frolicked around in the water and scoured Google maps satellite view for places to stay on our way north. It became clear fairly quickly that there were, in fact, none.