September 30, 2017
Veal Rinh to Otres: The back road to Sihanoukville
In an effort to avoid Highway 4 we decided to try a back road to Sihanoukville. To do this we backtracked up Highway 4 for about 3 kilometers and then headed westwards and eventually southwards, effectively approaching the city from its north western side rather than from the south east as would happen if we took Highway 4. This route also meant we would go through Sihanoukville itself on our way to Otres giving us the chance to find the location of the Vietnamese consulate. In the end this decision was mostly the correct one because we did manage to avoid lots of heavy traffic moving at high speeds that didn't want us to use the road. It did mean we would still share a bad road with a fair amount of heavy trucks but at least they had travel slowly because of the poor condition of the road.
We passed through a few depressing villages - filthy, littered and very poor. This part of Cambodia seems a lot lower down on the economic scale than the northern areas that we travelled through last year.
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On entering Sihanoukville we had no problem finding the Vietnamese consulate and also managed to get ourselves completely lost trying to make our way to Otres. To cut a long story short, the delightful lady in my mobile phone was quite adamant that we should use roads that might already appear on the Cambodian cadastre but have not yet been constructed. Inevitably when this happens, we find ourselves cycling through a garbage dump.
Eventually we found the road to Otres and settled in at the Sok Saday Resort where we will be for the next few days while we sort out our Vietnamese visas, get some work done and restore ourselves after the past few days through the southern Cardomom area.
Today's ride: 64 km (40 miles)
Total: 6,285 km (3,903 miles)
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