Temples and elephants in Takeo province

‌Where did we leave it? Oh yes, sitting on the balcony of the funny fucsia painted bungalow in Kampot, drinking a couple of beers while the kids slept and frantically trying to work out our next moves through Cambodia. We had until now been so focused on where to go in Vietnam that we more or less overlooked all route planning in Cambodia so we now found ourselves with no map, no guide book, no SIM card, no idea. We scoured the internet on the patchy WiFi to find a handful of blogs from cycle tourers who like to cycle a minimum of 100kms a day on highways and so didn’t get much further. Eventually we selected on a whim and a desperation to get to bed, a vague route through a rural province that looked like there was some accommodation at the required distances and enough things to see to give each day a bit of focus. So a quick pack up and off to bed, ready for the next leg of cycling before meeting our favourite Ozzy family in Phnom Penh.

We started by getting the train to take us about 60kms away to Takeo. It’s an old train, recently renovated and made a great start to the day. We had some funny looks as we stopped the train in Takeo and pulled off the bikes into the tiny station.

The town is a sleepy kind of place along a river, but had a nice feel in the old town with the same old shop-houses and fronts with verandas that make Kampot so appealing.

The difference being that in Takeo the accommodation was full of cockroaches instead of tourists, the food was cheap but non-descript, the shop-fronts had the usual mishmash of workshops and snacks with a flow of chicks throughout the dirt floors instead of smart art and craft galleries and noone had certainly ever heard of selling Belgian craft beer. It’s interesting at least to dip in and out of the tourist hubs and see the regular world versus the destination.

Local ladies having a look in

The next few days were a beautiful mix of rural Cambodian life, paddy fields and idyllic scenes with carefully made Khmer traditional housing along the dirt tracks that Google maps selected for us.

Traditional Khmer house on stilts

Along the route we visited some Angkor period temples which we had more or less to ourselves albeit alongside some very persistent candle sellers. They are some of the few ruins from the same era as those of Siem Reap fame in a similar state, but half hidden amongst jungle and old rubbish.

Clambering around 1000 year old temples

We also visited an animal sanctuary that helped in rescuing bears from the Chinese medicine trade and elephants from illegal work, and needless to say had some pretty interesting accommodation choices due to lack of tourist infrastructure!