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“What’s with the guys there with the mullets?”

“Oh, those two are my brothers.”

Crap, how do I back-pedal out of this one? But luckily the girl was a little drunk to notice I’d just insulted her family, and Anna returned to save me. But seriously, if you’ve got a mullet, and you’re wearing white tube socks, I highly advise that you do not go out to a bar that uses U/V lights. It hasn’t come out that well here, but you should be able to see the socks showing up:

But when you find out that he’s Australian, and about 16 years old, it does kind of explain things. Apparently their family of 5 goes away on expensive holidays every year – the money would probably be better spent on fashion consultants for the two boys. Ah well, can’t be helped. I would have liked to ask the young man if he regretted wearing the white socks to the pub, but I suspect the answer would be “no – why?” Anna tells me that white socks are never appropriate.

We’ve been in Siem Reap the last couple of days, at first seeing the temples, but then the last couple of days have been pretty well wasted. We both came down with some form of food poisoning. I was worse than Anna, but we both didn’t really do much all day yesterday, and today has been an easy day too, while we are recovering.

Unfortunately this has put a slight spanner in the works – we were planning on two more days of riding, from Siem Reap to the Thai border, and then onto the train. With an extra day spent here, we’re now a little short on time, so we’re going to have to bus/train from here to Bangkok in one day. A pity, as we both would have liked a couple more days of riding. So it turns out that the trip has been one way by bike, and return by bus/boat/train. Not like we were trying to set any records anyway.

One of the things you notice when you travel around is the local dress styles. These can range from the amazing coloured dresses of Central Asian women, to the just a little bit too short jeans and white socks preferred by Russian men, to the Charlie Sheen-style outfits preferred by American men everywhere.

In this part of the world, it’s all about the pajamas. Anna is very much in favour of this, as it turns out that it’s completely appropriate to wear pajamas all day long. Today we obtained photographic evidence that slippers can be worn at any time too. In Cambodia the pajamas tend to be cotton, and looser fit. Vietnamese seem to be more synthetic fabrics, and slimmer cuts. Not nearly as comfortable I should think. Men’s outfits here are pretty plain, but to be honest, it’s always the women’s outfits you look at, wherever you go.

But then you start looking at the outfits worn by the Western tourists, and you realise that they’re pretty odd too. A fine example would be the young Israeli girl we saw the other day, wearing a singlet, dancing tights, and brown slip-on workboots (such as these). I suppose she can’t be blamed though, she will have just come out of compulsory military service. Still doesn’t explain the conversation that she was having with another young gentleman, that went along the lines of “Oh, I never take any photographs, because if you need a photo to remember something, then the event wasn’t strong enough, and it wasn’t worth remembering anyway.” I should probably also point out that the young gentleman was wearing a black singlet, pantaloons and kung-fu shoes. Didn’t really quite gel with the iPhone 4S he was holding though.

Yesterday we were sitting in an Indian restaurant, when another good example walked in. A youngish man, he had a mullet haircut, divided at the back. Singlet again, to go with matching camouflage backpack and rolled-up cargo pants. A tripod and disappointingly small camera hung off one shoulder. This was at 20:30, so I’m not sure what he was planning on taking photos of, but I digress. He spends 5 minutes standing up, reading the menu, before deciding to take a seat. He then studies the menu for this Indian restaurant for another 10 minutes, before placing his order. After looking at the currys, dhalis, naans on offer, he asks for fried rice. The waiter does his best to respond politely, but you can see him thinking WTF? Calmly, he informs him that this is an Indian restaurant, but if he wants fried rice, he would be far better off going just up the street to the market, where any number of stalls will be able to do cheaper, better fried rice. Perhaps this young man’s lack of awareness of his surroundings is due to the wide availability of cheap alcohol and drugs. I don’t know.

Today we’re off to Siem Reap. Rather than take the cheap and fast bus, we’re taking the slow and expensive boat. Hopefully there’s still enough water in the lake/river system to make it through safely.

Just a quick note to let you know that we’ve just been having a couple of rest days in Saigon. The roads have been getting busier and busier, and it’s good to have a rest, and do tourist-type things.

We’ve been doing museums, visiting tunnels, eating and drinking, and dodging traffic. Typical Saigon stuff really. Tomorrow we turn back to the West, but since we’re short on time, the bikes will be stuffed in the hold of a bus, across to Phom Penh.

For cyclists coming into Saigon, it turns out to be very easy to cycle into if you’re coming from the south on Highway 1. HW1 itself is not much fun to ride on, but at least there’s usually a shoulder. Follow it until the major clover-leaf intersection, and turn right onto Vo Van Kiet. This is a major road that runs alongside a stinking canal. There is a separated lane for motorbikes and bicycles, but most motorbikes stay in the main part of the road. This means only a handful of scooters in your lane, and almost no-one going the wrong way (this is almost unheard-of in Vietnam). Follow this along for a fair way, until you can turn off to the left on Nguyen Thai Hoc. A couple of blocks along there, and the backpacker ghetto is on your left.

One other tip for cyclists – get a boat from Vinh Long to Cai Be, rather than trying to ride that section. Very pleasant, and very easy to put the bikes on a boat. There’s people at the dock who are used to doing it, and they’ll sort you out.

Some people find it quite disorienting to wake up in different hotel rooms each day. Personally, I don’t really mind, it doesn’t seem to bother me. That’s assuming I’m just waking up at my normal time. When the doorbell keeps ringing at 2:00am, it’s a different story. It takes me a while to even work out what the noise is – it’s not like it’s the doorbell from home.

OK, I’ve come to enough to work out it’s the doorbell. Prostitutes maybe? It is a border town after all. Hmm, usually they only knock once, then leave me alone. Why is it still ringing? Time to get up and look through the peephole. Oh. Two hotel staff, and three uniformed policemen. Perhaps I’ll put the clothes on then.

I knew straight away what was going on. The hotel staff had not filled in the proper registration forms when we arrived, and had not kept our passports. It just so happened that the police decided to do a raid, and they found that things were not in order. So I got my clothes, grabbed the passport, and went out to see them. Sure enough, they needed my passport, and they wanted me to go downstairs. Hmm. This could go badly.

But funnily enough, I wasn’t worried, because when I told them Anna was also in the room, but was asleep, the policeman put his finger to his lips, and was concerned about waking her. That put me at ease, and I gladly grabbed both our passports and headed down to the lobby, where the staff could fill in the required forms while the police watched. Bleary-eyed, I stood there waiting, watching an enormous rat make its way across the marble lobby, working its way around to us, before suddenly seeing us and turning tail, fleeing across the shiny floor, and out the enormous hole to the construction site next door. It’s that kind of place.

Eventually they finish with the passports, and I’m sent back to bed. Takes a while to get back to sleep after that though, too many bright lights in the lobby. Just another day on the road for me, poor old Anna was starting to worry about what was going on though.

We’re in Vietnam now, in Long Xuyen. Vietnam is a lot busier than Cambodia, and it makes things a bit more “interesting.” Luckily we got on a quiet road for our ride from Ha Tien to Chau Doc. It wasn’t on my map, but about 4km out of Ha Tien, we turned left onto a road that followed one of the huge canals here, mostly very close to the border with Cambodia.

It’s the Mekong Delta now for us. Huge canals marching off like grid lines across a flat, flat land. Water is everything here, with most of the land at least semi-submerged. Often the road is the only raised point. Houses crowd on both sides of the road, but they’re built on stilts above the water. Rice paddies stretch out for miles, but unfortunately we’re struggling to find rice meals, it’s all rice noodles here instead. Quite a good meal, but once you’ve had it for four meals in a row (including breakfast) you start looking for variety.  That’s why we were quite happy to find the supermarket in this town, which had a reasonably good selection, and we brought a lot of stuff. All manner of crackers, cheese, chocolate, snacks, cereal and lollies. Good stuff too, was like a little party in our room.

It’s very busy around here, and it’s going to get even busier over the next few days, as we get closer to Saigon. I think we’ll take it easy, do the ~200km over 3 days rather than two. This gives us more time to negotiate the busy roads, and doesn’t wear you down so much. Couple of days there, then it will be time to turn back to Cambodia.

One more thing I must report on before closing out: What it’s like to travel with my wife, rather than my previous solitary man style. Well, the main place you’ll see a difference is in the state of the hotel room. As every other touring cyclist knows, your panniers are under a certain amount of bursting pressure, and it only takes about 3 minutes after arrival in a room for your gear to explode everywhere. If I was sharing a room with another cyclist, it wouldn’t just double the mess, it would quadruple it.

This goes against Anna’s nature, and so now you’ll find everything neatly arranged on her side of the room, while my gear is at least contained, if not orderly. Just doesn’t seem right, does it?

It’s good travelling with Anna though. Means I don’t have to do all the talking, organising, etc. Someone else to share the load, someone else to keep an eye on me, make sure I’m fed, watered and happy. A very nice change.

We’ve just spent a week in Cambodia, and while most of the roads we took were sealed, there was still plenty of that distinctive Cambodian red dust around. Not nearly as bad as coal dust, but still, we were pretty filthy today. Every time a big truck went past I was enveloped in a cloud of dust, obscuring everything.

We ended up getting the bus from Koh Kong to Sihanoukville, and while it was definitely rideable, I’m happy we got the bus. The first 100km was a lot of up and down, and not a whole lot of places to stop for food/drink. We don’t have any real rules around where and when we should ride, so we just need to do what works for us.

Sihanoukville is a strange place, seemingly with a battle going on for its soul. Concrete casinos, dirty old men with Cambodian girls, backpackers, flashpackers, Filipino families, all sorts. There’s a ridiculous amount of development going on, and it’s hard to see how it can possibly survive. But it was a good place to have a few days off. With the amount of competition going on, it’s also reasonably priced, and service is far better than in places like Kampot. Get Anna to tell you the story of bad service in Kampot some time.

We spent New Years at a bar/restaurant in Kep, playing pool, and drinking overpriced beer and cocktails. $4USD for a Mai Tai?

That’s outrageous! You must be joking! Apparently not. But it was cool, the good thing about having a country that only has paper currency is that you don’t need to keep feeding coins into the pool table.

We did seem to be having a better time than the group of do-gooders at a table at the restaurant next door. Now, I am not making this up, but there was around 15 of them, all wearing the same blue/black shirt, with “VOLUNTEER” written in large letters on their backs. One poor sod had “LEADER” on their shirt. I’ve never been a big fan of voluntourism, but this was a particularly bad look. All earnest-looking do-gooder types, no doubt paying good money to come to Cambodia and tell 10th generation fishermen how to catch fish, or some such nonsense. Always be on your guard when people turn up and say “Trust me, I’m here to help.” I don’t know what they thought when someone told them they all had to wear matching shirts to their dinner party. I would have liked to have asked them if the shirts were made in a sweatshop, but perhaps some questions are better left unsaid.

We’ve now crossed into Vietnam, where we’ll be for at least the next week or so. Haven’t worked out the exact route, but I think it’s going to be off the map I’ve got. Everyone who’s ever been to this part of the world knows what the traffic is like, and can understand why I want to try and get off the main roads. I just don’t have the detail I need in my maps, so there will probably be a bit of compass work tomorrow. Ah well, I’m sure I’ll work it out. One minor problem though: I lost my speedometer off my bike today. Not sure if it was pinched, or fell off. Rather annoying though, since I’ve had that one for almost 40,000km. Can’t seem to find one in this town either. Should be able to get something in the next few days, but it does make it a bit harder trying to work out just how far it is to the next water/food/bed.

It’s taken a week to get here, but we’re now very close to our exit point from Thailand into Cambodia. Since it’s Christmas Day, we’ve splashed out on a beachside resort. Chanchon Resort is rather a nice place, and our unit is so close to the sea that there is a real danger of it floating away at high tide. Still only about $25USD though. For cyclists coming this way, it’s about 8km north of Khlong Yai, sign-posted off the main road. Turn off the main road, travel a short way down it, turn right again. Not a big diversion to come this way, see if rooms are available. They have a restaurant here serving beer, food and wine cooler (Anna wasn’t too impressed by the wine cooler, but after the 4th one, it seemed to be OK). The food isn’t cheap, but it’s good.

We’re very close to the border, should just be a short ride tomorrow across to Koh Kong. I’ve been doing some research about the next leg, to Sihanoukville, and I don’t like what I’ve found so far. The boat stopped running when they finished the road, but the road runs through an isolated part of the Cardamon Mountains, with few places to stay. It’s a modern road too, which is not always a good thing.

Over the years I’ve gotten better at reading maps, and interpreting the relationship between roads and geography. One of the things you learn is that the old roads are the best. Old roads were built for horses and carts, not for modern engines. They pay careful attention to the lie of the land. I can look ahead at the terrain, and predict where the road will go. New roads are different. People don’t understand the reason for winding roads any more, they expect to be able to plow straight through. In your white, air-conditioned Land Cruiser, you don’t notice the difference. On the bicycle it’s a different story. A slight gradient to your V8 could mean an hour’s climbing. 35° with 80% humidity feels rather different on the outside of air conditioning.

So I’m a bit concerned about that road leg, which has very few places to stay, and certainly not the plethora of roadside stalls selling all manner of cyclist-sustaining goodness that Thailand has. When we get to Koh Kong I’ll have to investigate the bus situation. Putting bikes on buses can be a hit and miss affair. The good thing about this part of the world is that pretty much any need can be accommodated, provided you have a few dollars to smooth things over. We’ll see what happens when we get to Koh Kong.

Something I should have mentioned in the last dispatch is the impact of the floods. In Bangkok itself, there was no direct impact from the floods, more the evidence of it. There were sandbags a-plenty, mostly just stacked up to one side now. Quite a few places had hastily thrown up brick walls built in fron of them to a height of 500mm or so. A couple of places right beside the river were pumping water out, but by and large, things were pretty much normal. It has been in the countryside that we’ve noticed the serious impact. All touring cyclists who have travelled through Thailand will be very familiar with the 7-11 convenience stores dotted around the country. After a long hot day, these are like a veritable oasis of calm, offering the holy trinity of air conditioning, Snickers bars and chocolate milk. It seems that the floods have hit the 7-11 distribution centres hard, and they are not carrying the full range. Prepare yourself: Almost all 7-11 stores have no ice blocks or ice cream available. That’s right, no Magnum caramel-dipped chocolate and peanut coated, “FDA approved only for people exercising more than five hours per day” ice cream goodness for us. That’s not to say that ice cream is completely unavailable, but be warned: You’ll need to hunt it down.