July 24, 2019
Day 4A - Reaping the Benefits
Sisophon to Siem Reap
After such a refreshing sleep I felt ready to head into Siem Reap and was going to enjoy this ride a lot. It turns out my riding buddy James was already there. He changed transport modes and flew in last night from Bangkok where I would likely meet him around noon today.
I hung out at a coffee shop to enjoy some breakfast and was really getting into these chill Cambodian vibes. Then I quickly realized my backup phone had been behind at the hotel and went back to go for it. They were super helpful and found it right away. This gave me a very good impression about the locals here, and yet it was still a reminder to keep on being careful. Eventually these types of careless incidents would diminish.
A lot of the rumors that Thai people had said about Cambodians turned out to be untrue. I could tell I was really going to enjoy this country. Interestingly though, the social media feed from all my Thai friends suddenly dried up while crossing the border. They all knew I was here but whatever. That's just how it works around Asia, there is always rivalry between countries and the richer of the two look down on their neighbors. Not much you can really do about it.
Conditions were about as excellent as you could hope for along this road and the friendliness of the locals was off the chain. I was even getting waves of encouragement and good vibes from the police. That's not something you see very often.
Plenty of food stops were made. It got very hot towards noon and this resulted in a long stop in a covered hammock area with snacks and drinks. Then the weather suddenly changed as a major storm rolled in and I tried to outrun it in vain. What I found most interesting from the Garmin was how much the temperature dropped with the cloud cover and then rain. This made all the difference. When you're on the road, the tarmac increases the temperatures considerably to near furnace levels.
No wonder we ran into so much difficulty with the original attempt at this ride. These temperatures are really just brutal.
Eventually I got into town and it made for a very nice entrance. A tuktuk driver saw me riding and he was astonished when I told him I came in from Sisophon. Well, Siem Reap is my favorite spot in Cambodia. Some come for the temples but I come for the partying.
The plan was to stop off for a coffee, get some WiFi and roll into a posh and expensive 4-star hotel I had pre-booked online as a reward for doing the initial leg from Bangkok to here. Before I could even get off the bike I was approached by touts for hash, ecstasy, and all sorts of other drugs. Yes, we had arrived.
But checking into the hotel later turned out to be a disaster. It was by no fault of the hotel staff. After an hour we finally figured out the problem. I had pre-booked this via Agoda and they had sent a reply. I thought was some sort of official confirmation but it wasn't. Instead, they had sent another message into my junk email folder asking to contact them. They suspected the transaction was fraudulent because I used the name 'Steve' instead of 'Stephen' which is the name that matches my passport. They requested I sent them a bunch of documents to prove my identity.
This was a huge annoyance. After calling them and talking to a bunch of people, an Agoda rep just said in future to always use the same name as the passport on the booking form. He said let's not bother with the identity verification.
While all this was trying to be sorted, the hotel said they could upgrade me to another suite. Predictably, that would cost twice as much as the booking. I politely declined and found some cheap random guesthouse across the street for $10 that did the trick instead. My niceness to the staff must have paid off at the first hotel because they apologized many times and said they would gladly help store my bicycle safely underground in the parking area for the next few days while I was in Siem Reap.
I appreciated this a lot because I soon found out that bicycle parking is quite an issue in Cambodia and many people don't like the look of bikes parked in front of plain view of buildings for some reason. This was a peculiarity that was common in China also. Maybe it's a status thing, that bicycles are low status and reminders of past poverty. Who really knows.
Later I met up with James and we had a 'few drinks' but that went sideways real fast.
Today's ride: 105 km (65 miles)
Total: 1,336 km (830 miles)
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