December 17, 2007
Sisophon - Siem Reap: The road gets worse
Considering what lays ahead, we don't start early enough, which would have been at the crack of dawn, but we are exhausted from yesterday's ride. After three kilometers we are in Sisophon where we stop for breakfast.
While we slurp our soup of noodles and beef, our reluctance to face another day like yesterday grows. Here in Sisophon is our last and only chance to organize some other transportation for the remaining 105 kilometers to Siem Reap, from where we will visit the temples of Angkor.
We get directions to the bus station and try our luck. In about one minute we are surrounded by men making offers. It boils down to 10$ for a ride in the back of a pick-up or 20$ by bus for the two of us and our bikes. We decide on the latter as we were exposed to enough sun and dust yesterday.
The hour's wait offers more diversion than all of yesterday's arduous pedalling. We are offered plastic chairs until the bus comes and can observe the business transactions transpiring around us: mainly selling food to bus passengers and rounding up passengers as they arrive from elsewhere in pick-ups and selling them tickets for departing buses.
The bus to Siem Reap finally arrives. Our bicycles are stowed in the last row of seats and we are off. Now we see that the road leaving Sisophon is dustier than yesterday's ride and there are almost no spots of shade at all along the way. I would have survived it, but it wouldn't have been pleasant.
After four and a half hours we are in Siem Reap. Janos manages to extricate the bikes from the back seat of the bus and we head for the center of town, very relieved to be here and not on the open road.
Siem Reap is a lively little town due to the tourist trade generated by the famous temples of Angkor, six kilometers from here. I was in Angkor 40 (yes, forty) years ago and I remember there being only one hotel and perhaps a couple of tourists. Today there are hundreds of hotels and guesthouses and many thousands of tourists. Parts of town have a tourist scene similar to Kaosan Road in Bangkok complete with Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Italian and French restaurants, souvenir shops, massage parlors and so on.
We take more or less the first guesthouse we see in a pleasant colonial style building with a view to the river and call it a day.
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