Day 4: Back to Siem Reap
On the last day of the trip we stopped by another few Khmer Rouge points of interest before riding back from Anlong Veng to Siem Reap. Aside from one fun section of singletrack through the jungle it was a pretty boring ride so I took a few pictures to liven things up.
I got up at 7 and we were on the road 10 minutes later. First we stopped at the Cambodia/Thai border crossing just a few minutes away.
Lis showed me a neighborhood of empty houses where a couple weeks earlier everyone had been forced to leave due to ongoing border disputes with Thailand.
Next we rode on a paved road down the mountain towards Anlong Veng, stopping to see some statues carved out of boulders by Khmer Rouge soldiers.
We had breakfast at the same place we had eaten lunch the day before, then continued on to Ta Mok’s residence.
Sophal was bad so we locked him in a cage.
(I had a turn in the cage too but my pose wasn’t as good as his.)
When I was doing my time in the cage I got the tune of Rusty Cage by Soundgarden in my head, which was great because it’s one of my favorite driving songs and we had a long ride ahead of us.
We stopped at the market in Anlong Veng:
Then we stopped for gas just outside of town. I don’t know what the vehicle pictured here is called, but they were all over the place in the rural areas we visited. They seemed like pretty versatile vehicles: good for cargo, people, animals. Their top speed seemed to be about 3 kph.
After refuelling we hit the road for Siem Reap, about 140 km away I think. It was pretty boring: a couple hours of the same flat dirt roads. When I got tired of humming/singing Rusty Cage I kept myself busy by taking a few pictures:
Last night I asked Lis if there was any fun riding planned for today and he said not really, but he’d try to find something.
So after lunch we turned off the main road onto some smaller side roads for a bit, then onto some great singletrack through the jungle. There were two paths winding through it, a wider sandy one and narrower hard-packed trail off to the side; occasionally they’d cross paths and switch sides.
I tried the sand for a while and found it difficult as usual so I tried to stick to the hard-packed trail, but I was also trying to keep up with Lis and it was hard to do both.
Once when I was too indecisive about which path to take I rode straight into the bushes between them. It all happened so fast that I forgot to take my hand off the throttle, so I just kept accelerating until I was stopped by the jungle. I burst out laughing, and when Sophal came up to ask if I was OK I could hardly stop laughing long enough to answer him. He helped extract me from the trees before I could think to ask him to take a picture; too bad, it must have looked pretty funny.
We caught up to Lis and stopped a few minutes later to buy water from these cute kids:
A short while later we were back at Hidden Cambodia’s office.
They washed my bike and it was barely recognizable afterwards:
All in all, an excellent trip!
See more photos of dirtbiking in Cambodia, or a chronological view of photos from today.