4/4/25
We woke with a start at 6am. There was no coffee here. So we just got up to go. We were still very tired. We set off back through the market and tried to buy some breakfast. It was very difficult to communicate. There is a Cambodian chive cake that is accidentally vegan. When we saw something that looked like it we tried to ask if it was chives. No luck. Maybe we were the idiots.
We set off down the 57B. It was the main road that headed east out of the town. It was quite busy and we were now without the refuge of a hard shoulder. There was an assortment of vehicles. Mostly still scooters, but more cars and not as many pickup trucks. More actual trucks. We were the object of spectacle. Everyone turned their head. They either had a smile and said hello or just starred solemnly. A smile back usually cracked them.
We stopped at a motorcycle and sidecar based food vendor. They had bags of bread hanging down too. Thailand didn’t have bread. Cambodia does. We fumbled through an awkward conversation to buy a couple of pieces of cooked dough. As well as a bag of ‘blue bean dessert’. It looked like tapioca in milk. Hopefully soya or coconut.
We stopped behind a gateway. We were trying to hide for a few moments. Just for a little bit of privacy. The bag turned out to be some coconut milk, tapioca and also banana. Having bread made us feel like we were back in Turkey. It seemed to be the gateway of a mango farm. As we were hanging around a pickup truck and a snazzy white Range Rover Vogue pulled in. The smiling man behind the wheel of the latter looked pretty young.
We were going ever so slightly too fast. Somehow we’d managed to climb up to 175m to cross the border. Now we were gently hurtling downhill for the next 65 km. It made soaking up the new environment more difficult. We passed a school. It seemed to be just by the side of the road. Semi-outside. How the children could hear we don’t know.
It was definitely time to stop for a coffee. We had no choice. The headaches were never worth it. There was only icy cold available. It was very strong. A kind looking, higher level English speaking, girl translated to her mother. It was 6000 Riel. That’s £1.15 for two. We sat down to rest and sip. The girl brought us tea as well. It didn’t smell familiar. The packet was in Vietnamese. It was green tea with iron scent and lotus scent and pineapple scent. It was very nice. We were starting to feel a little bit more comfortable with our new surroundings. We were honestly very surprised how different things could be after cycling over just one tiny river.
The trucks went barrelling past tooting. Large dust clouds followed them. They didn’t slow down. They appeared old, but some had those fancy new indicators. Using your horn wasn’t a thing in Thailand. Now we had to get used to hearing them again. It seemed to be an awareness measure. There also appeared to be a system: the bigger the vehicle, the higher their priority.
We were on the road. There weren’t any others. Junction signs appeared, but when we looked left or right it was just a dusty orange track. This road was where all economic activity took place for the area. Most of the fields were bare earth. Or there were mangoes. Or they’d been burnt. We saw a couple still on fire. A woman on a scooter pulled in front of us holding out a bag of cooked sweetcorn. “Arkoun” (thank you), we said over and over, putting our palms together.
Our presence was a constant source of amusement to the people. We saw so many young people smiling and waving. Three young girls clearly hopped on a scooter just to pass us waving, and then stopped shortly afterwards. Amid all the smiling and waving we stopped to buy some cold drinks. A friendly old woman had the last of the many shops in that particular stretch.
Bevel wasn’t overly busy. We pulled in to some shade next to a Buddha image. We considered cycling further. All the maps we had available were useless: google, apple, openstreetmap. None of them had much information about the local amenities. There was one hotel marked, Bun Thouern World Hotel. We asked a local person whose child had come over to talk to Jonathan. She directed us there too.
There were Chinese lanterns outside. As Jonathan checked out the room, Frankie got talking to an Australian woman who’d left Cambodia when she was 5. Rim really didn’t like the “lower” hygiene standards. She was travelling all over, visiting various places.
The room was $12.50. We paid with a $10 bill and 10000 Riel. With some pleading we convinced the receptionist to let us leave the bikes in the spacious lobby. Frankie’s handlebar bag had magnets that had started to come loose. We tried to glue them up. The room was okay. The balcony was unfinished and had buckets and brushes on it. There was a bed and air conditioning though.
When we came downstairs Rim was at the bottom of the stairs. She reluctantly came out with us. We wanted her for her translation skills. The heat was too bothersome for her. She ended up buying Jonathan a hat for $2. We’d accidentally left our money behind. She really wanted to go back to the hotel anyway. Too hot. We convinced her to translate a sentence in Khmer for simple veganism. It turned out that the word for ‘egg’ was coming out as ‘liver’. No wonder they all thought we were mad, pestering them about chicken liver.
We went back out and bought some cold water over the road. They charged us 2500, more than twice as much as the day before. But still only 50p. Should we argue? It would cost three times that at home. We took it on the chin. We walked down to the road and located a Wing. They’re currency exchange booths. We changed more dollars and the rest of the Thai baht we still had. Bar a couple of souvenirs. We had reels of Riels. It was ridiculous.
We found another stall to buy Frankie a hat while we walked round. When the children saw us it was like we were the first white people they’d ever seen. They hid with embarrassment or lined up to say hello and then giggle when we greeted them back. Two teenage boys wearing sunglasses went flying through the market on an electric scooter, big grins on their faces, ‘Hey, bro!’ It was all they could say in English. We both enjoyed and hated the attention. It was exciting to be somewhere completely unvisited by tourists to the point of novelty for everyone. But simultaneously irritating to be under the watchful eye of everyone around all the time. We almost felt like a toy, but with free will.
The hunt for food was on. We found a vendor with some sour salacca and something round we didn’t know. It was definitely a vegetable or fruit though. The street was lined with repair shops. We couldn’t see anymore potential food and walked back on the opposite side of the street. A girl was selling chips, thoroughly coated in some kind of wheat and spice concoction. We also bought a baguette. In a last ditch attempt we visited a restaurant. They only had fruit smoothies. Over the road another restaurant had a mountain of vegetables. But when we sought a meat free meal, they seemed to turn their nose up at us. ‘Go next door’. There is a little more spoken English here.
The people next door were doing a lot of washing up outside in the front. Perhaps it was past cooking time. They took a little convincing but understood. It took a few minutes before a small plate of vegetables came out. We ate them with plain rice and lashings of the Golden Mountain chilli sauce that seems to be the go to topping. It was so good we asked for another plate. Luckily an even larger one arrived. It was 22000 Riel.
We bought more water on the way back. It was 2500 a bottle again. We don’t know why the price has doubled but apparently it has. The hotel room was hot and hard to cool. It was facing the Sun and the heat mashed through the curtains.
Surly They Won't Make It 