Cambodia day 3
Leaving Monkey Maya was tough, but we struggled back along the 15km road (construction and all) and headed back the way we came for about 40km along the main road. At our first break (Cola and iced tea), the woman at the small drink stand recognized us from the day before – evidently she works at the airport and saw us there as we were getting cash from the ATM. It was an interesting coincidence.
The road was just highway all the way today – busy with trucks and buses. The highway had one lane in each direction and quite a wide shoulder (but the shoulder was dirt/gravel and not very suitable for cycling) with a drop-off of about 10-15cm between the road and the shoulder. We cycled as much as we could on the road, but were forced off several times (mostly by vehicles passing in the other direction using up the whole width of our side of the road). Sometimes the trucks came very close, to the point where we were forced onto the shoulder.
Here in Cambodia, it seems that there is a lot of NGO Money – they seem to be the ones driving the biggest and fanciest SUV – large Lexus, or Daimler or Cadillac SUVs. A lot more than we saw in Vietnam (there it was more Toyota, Hyundai, and more reasonably prices car brands) – it seemed the larger the SUV, the faster they drove and the less respect they had for us being on the road.
We past many coconut plantations, and a coconut oil processing plant (huge facility) and after almost 5 hours in the heat, got to our destination – Picnic Resort. We found it on the Internet, with little possibilities to book anything, and where we first arrived we were expecting the worst. But the bungalows were simple but well equipped and spacious, the food was great, and they had a very large meeting area/restaurant/bar. It seems it is sued a lot for conferences and meetings, and is an eco-friendly/organic farming facilities, growing lots of different vegetables of which we got to taste many sorts at dinner.
Only drawback was that they had no Wifi in the evening (seems their data limit for the day was used up) – one of the staff tried to help us by topping up his cell-phone and giving us a hot-spot, but even that was spotty at best. Otherwise a pleasant location with pleasant staff.
It also gave us a bit of time to plan the next few days.
At the rate we were traveling through Cambodia, we would be out of the country in 2-3 days (5-6 total) without hardly having seen anything except the main roads. So we decided to make a detour tomorrow to a Community Based Eco-Tourism village on the edge of the Cardomon and Elephant Nation Park (Chi Phat) – it gets lots of positive reviews in the guide books as an example where the villages have replaced poaching and illegal logging with tourism and guiding.
We thought we’d check it out and spend an extra day there.
(92km / 170m)