July 12, 2019
Day 3 - The Foreboding Flies
To Lemin Resort, Sa Kaeo
True to form it was a late-ish start. We had agreed to try and be on the road before 8am to beat the heat but too many delays rendered that impossible. Still we made it to a 7/11 about 5km away just before the turnoff to Route #359 which was pretty good I'll admit. There, for some reason, an attendant handpicked me as the lucky guy to answer a survey about tourism in Thailand.
I began to wonder about this. For now it's a well known fact that tourism is down significantly this year in Thailand, some would say up to 30% for a variety of reasons. Maybe it's the sluggish economy and the inflated baht which is making everything more expensive. But there's other factors as well. Something this year just FEELS different. I don't know what it is exactly.
[Update November 2022: Whatever it was, that time was obviously before covid. Covid put the accelerators on that, but interestingly enough things got much better after it ended]
We tried to speculate as to what was going on, as everything changed in a big way since our last trip in the summer of 2018. Sometime between then and now, a sham election was held while the military government managed to keep holding power. Also many Thai people I talked to in Bangkok said they wanted a more progressive government, that is one that was more business and foreigner friendly. The current one was obviously not.
Anyways, the people making the survey gave us some free snacks for taking part. Then we turned onto the Route 359 that would go all the way to Cambodia. It was a blissful change to all the prior truck traffic and for a brief while we were sailing along with the tailwind. This highway is relatively new and the services have yet to catch up but we still managed to find plenty of nice stops.
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As the day wore on it got hot again, even worse than yesterday and the speed dropped to a crawl. One of the many stops was at the restaurant pictured just above and the staff gestured for us to sit in some shade.
We pointed at some food and I guess that was ordering. Maybe we were all so delirious that we didn't really order, or they didn't recognize we wanted food. Maybe they thought we just wanted shade. Whatever it was, we sat for over an hour with no food coming. As time went on, more and more black flies gathered around us and settled down on anything liquid, in this case the flies gravitated to the sweat pouring from our bodies which accumulated more and more by just sitting there and not even moving.
Eventually the waiter came around and turned on a fan but no food came. What on earth was going on? Finally I walked over and made an order in Thai, then some more time passed, and still no food. As we were waiting the black flies gathered in bigger and bigger numbers and there was this huge cloud of flies gathered around to mirror the strange vibes of surreal gloominess. Lord of the flies anyone?
Bzzt bzzzzzt bzzzzzzzt they kept on coming as we tried swatting them away in vain. I was getting sick of this. It was already Friday and by now we were supposed to be a day out of Siem Reap. But at this current pace it would take ages, despite a tailwind making it possible to bank a lot more distance.
[Update November 2022: What a learning experience. This was not the right mental state to be in for cycle touring. Eventually this kind of thinking culminated towards a disaster]
James and I would have been better off talking about these things more, as our expectations for touring distances were not matching reality.
For whatever reason I got this sense that the black flies represented something out of order in the universe. Not much of what was happening seemed normal. This scorching weather should be in April not July. Locals were ignoring us and not servicing our basic orders at restaurants. There were scowls everywhere, not the land of smiles. The flies themselves are normally rare, especially the huge volumes we saw now. It just felt like something really awful was going to happen soon and it was a deep feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach.
In the end we ate nothing and just moved on. We did pit stops every 5km at which point I decided this was enough. We sat down at a 7/11 and mapped out a resort to end the day. There was one about 15km away. That was going to be the place to crash.
Before we could get there, we took another break at one of those bus shelters. Eventually, finally, we got there for the night.
We proceeded to pig out on some pizza and that felt better, then we got some much needed bungee straps at a nearby Tesco Lotus to deal with the backpack again that had fallen off.
Today's ride: 78 km (48 miles)
Total: 625 km (388 miles)
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