Two days back on the road, and already we're taking a break?!

Leaving Phnom Penh was a blessing, we were both tiring of the busy city life and restless from having spent almost 2 full weeks in one spot. In typical Z+E fashion we got up early but hit the road late at around 10am after a number of bike and gear adjustments. We opted to ride Hwy 2 south towards Kep and Kampot basing our decision mostly on the reports of low traffic from other cycle tourists. Getting out of the city took quite a while and I think we ended up cycling about 25km in dense population before getting back to the rice fields and huts we've become accustomed to seeing.




A side trip inspired by our favorite Phnom Penh café took us out to the Phnom Tamao wildlife park about 45kms outside Phnom Penh. The directions were to head down Hwy 2 until you see the sign and then turn right… sounds easy enough but our American Highway Sign reading brains didn't get that what we should be looking for was exactly what we rode right past: the faded, blistered, hand painted sign without an arrow or a "TURN RIGHT HERE" message, and the accompanying dirt road apparently leading off into rural Cambodian oblivion. After cycling back a kilometer or two we got on the right track and 6km and strangely quite a few persistent roadside beggars later we had made it. Where we made it to was the T intersection at the top of a dusty hill where a tiny ticket booth stood baking in the hot sun. The means for keeping unpaid park goers and poachers alike was a rope stretched across the road. Once we paid the $5 each for our tickets the rope was lowered and we were allowed to cycle right over the only security measure we saw separating the rest of the country from the park. Inside the park we were met by a crowd of young men offering us coconuts, a place to park our bikes, a tour guide, a cold drink, and a place to sit in the shade… all at the same time. We're always leery when it comes to leaving our fully loaded bikes out of our immediate vicinity but the enclosures we were going to be wandering through, not surprisingly, weren't set up for cycle tourists who want to muscle around their ungainly luggage racks on wheels everywhere they go. Reluctantly we locked up and took what we knew we couldn't live without and left the rest at the mercy of our new acquaintances. We had declined the offer of a guide but we got one anyway as the best english speaker of the bunch led us toward the first of three sections of the park. Once inside the chain link fence we were face to face with a couple of portly banana loving deer in search of an easy snack.



Back home the animal sanctuaries are run a bit differently… where we're used to feeding stale loaves of bread to buffalos from the windows of our station wagons, safe in the knowledge that we're surrounded for the most part by a safe steel barrier, in Cambodia you're encouraged to pet and feed the full grown deer with a 12 point rack and a penchant for fruit while the only thing surrounding you is a steel fence that's keeping you and the animal in close proximity. But hey, there's a first time for everything right! The next couple critters we got to meet were all in their own pens and though we could get closer than most of the zoo's back home let you, thankfully we weren't being greeted by the crocodiles in the same fashion as we had been by the deer.



We caught the Sun Bear exhibit just in time to see them delighting a gathering crowd by ripping open coconuts that our tour guide was lobbing over the fence at $.50 a piece. Inside the Free The Bears information house we got to chat with an Australian who was working with the project about the park and the Bears in particular, which helped to fill in some of the gaps in our tour guides knowledge.

Inside the Free the Bears exhibit E. kindly posed for this picture to entertain all of you.


A few dusty hours later we'd seen what there was to see, the highlights being the Gibbons, Tigers, and Elephants - although we missed meeting the one elephant whose getting the prosthetic leg because he was out swimming in his new pool.

We set off back down the same highway and in search of a hotel reportedly in the next town to the left of the "supermarket". We've been fooled by this euphemism once before as we searched the streets of Sisiphon for another supposed supermarket. Needless to say we never found the hotel and ended up cycling right through a fabulous sunset and barely making it into Takeo before the twilight had transitioned completely into an amazingly dark sky set with thousands of diamond-like twinkling stars.




Our next days cycling was beautiful and long. We didn't have a clear idea of how many kilometers we had to go, only that we were staying in Kep. The road signs didn't help as the mileage yo-yoed back and forth, sometimes we were only 25km's away, then 10km down the road we were back to being 35kms away. A decent headwind, a longish stretch of unpaved road, and the first small hills we've encountered in longer than we'd like to admit, wore us both out and made us quite happy to find the beds large and comfy and the shower nice and cool on our arrival at Botanica, our guesthouse of choice.

Riding into Kep along the seaside, our first glimpse of the big blue since Vietnam.


Sunday was spent leisurely enjoying breakfast under the large thatch roof of the guesthouse restaurant. A nap may have been enjoyed in the hammock in front of our bungalow as well as some much needed reading time. We hit up the Crab Market in search of some fruit to take on the 8km loop hike we'd planned to tackle on our rest day but as we set out the rain came roaring in, literally. At the crab market everyone was running for cover and trying to keep everything that wasn't bolted down from blowing away. We opted for lunch there in one of the sturdier brick restaurants instead of the hike seeing as the weather was clearly had different ideas about our plans. After lunch the wind was still whipping the waves into whitecaps but the sun had reappeared and the combination of the two had dried everything out in short order. We decided to check out the trail by bike as much as we could and hopefully hit a couple good viewpoints along the way. Turns out the whole "trail" is double track and in pretty good shape, about the equivalent to a fire road back home. We made the whole loop in under an hour and got to check out some spectacular views.


To top off the day we taught ourselves a new card game called Three Thirteen and E. got her first taste of rummy! W00t!