Poipet is the border town in Cambodia and as we were warned by the Lonely Planet, it does not give a good first impression of Cambodia. Poipet is a market town and also a place where casinos have been set up, it is busy and dirty. We now have to ride on the right hand side of the road and it will be this way now until Europe. All prices are displayed in Thia Baht, USA dollars and Cambodian Reil which is very confusing as we may pay in one currency and be given change in another.
It is very obvious Cambodia is a poor country compared to Thailand. There is a lot of rubbish, the streets are dusty and smog is ever present. Housing is poor. The smiling children riding their bikes to school give us a boost, they usually call out ‘hello” and wave. There are a lot of schools along the highway so this is enacted every morning, many young children riding adult size bikes often with a brother or sister sitting on the back. The road is good with a shoulder for bikes and motorbikes, fairly flat most of the time, just an occasional hill. There are less cars and more motorbikes which are used to carry whole families, loads of hay, pigs and anything else that will fit on. This area is rural, many rice paddies and other crops. The map indicates a town but all we see is markets along the roadside and perhaps a government building, obvious because of their opulence compared to the housing around. Chickens range free as do the cows, it is the dry season and there is not a lot of feed and the cows are scrawny, they wander across the road and the vehicles stop for them to cross, as we do. As we approach Siem Reap it is obvious it is market day. There are small pigs carried in bamboo cages, large pigs laying docile on their backs with their feet in the air and chooks hanging upside down on racks – all alive on the back of motor bikes. When we stop for a drink it is not cold, the stall holders are poor and not many tourists stop here to give them a reason to cater for hot, thirsty cyclists. We did meet another coupling cycling the opposite way, they were from China . We swapped maps, they took our Thailand map and we took their Cambodian one and exchanged information about road conditions. There were police checks along this part of the road, they normally waved us on but we were stopped once and we explained we were tourist before we could go. Just a few kilometers before we reached Seim Reap we felt spots of rain, very light rain fell but we must have just been on the edge of it because as we rode on it was obvious heavy rain had fallen ahead of us. We stopped for a drink when we got to Seim Reap to check our map and find where we might find a guest house when we got talking to an Australian man Peter and his daughter Bernadette. Peter worked for the UN and was in Cambodia for the first elections after the overthrow of Pol Pot and was showing Bernadette around. Peter gave us a quick history of that era and shared a few stories of his time here. They were enjoying themselves and Peter was very happy to see how the country has progressed since those terrible times. We found a guest house, the best we have stayed in so far which is good because we plan to stay here for four days, spending most of that time visiting Angkor Wat.
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