In fact, these days are not our first days in Cambodia. It actually feels like coming home. We have been here already several times. One time we cycled this country with our Brompton folding bicycles about 4 months.
We made it!
Here we are, in Cambodia. Our first long stopover on our bicycle world trip.
I have no idea how many hours we sat in the saddle, how many kilometers we rode, how much water we did drink the past year. I also don’t know how many times we actually wild camped, how many warmshowers picked us up, or how many flat tires we had.
And I don’t care either. Completely don’t care. This is where we are. In Cambodia. That’s what matters right now.
How many times have I imagined this day on our tour? I don’t know that either, of course, but it happened often. Very often.
What makes Cambodia so special? Well, it’s the first destination where we meet familiar people.
We had already made a few trips to Cambodia and had made friends in the meantime. People we are now returning to after we left for our bicycle trip in Berlin on April 30, 2022.
This is fantastic.
Cambodia is familiar to us. Not everything is new. We know the difficulties that come our way. This makes them less important and thus we have more “space” for the wonderful people in this country.
The Mekong accompanies us for a while before we turn west.
Of course again the dust between the teeth, the relentless sun burning from the sky, the typical wooden houses with their boards of different lengths, the often rather for Western noses stinking markets but especially the happy us waving people in their colorful clothes. It always feels a bit like we are cycling over a theater stage. There is just too much to discover and behind every bend something new awaits us.
We enjoy the mangos, which are available everywhere in huge quantities at the moment. We do not enjoy so much the difficulties of being on the road as vegetarians, because even if we always believe that we have been understood, meat creeps into our order again and again. But we are prepared for that too and are not too surprised.
Siem Reap
And then we are there, in Siem Reap. With Dani and Erich. We made it.
We took our time to think about the trip and came to the conclusion, it goes on. We made the decision not stop yet with this crazy trip, but first continue to Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.
But before that we enjoy that we are here. Just enjoy. Letting the brain rest, getting the bicycles in order and enjoying Dani’s wonderful vegetarian food.
Next stop: Battambang. Visiting Seed, the organization we collected in the past some money for their projects and hopefully can collect some again, especially for some bicycles for the school children. For some of them the only way to reach the school.
And finally, we got some rain and the temperature started to get below 40°C 🙂
