Four legs and four wheels

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After finishing a rather late night, four intrepid travelers arose before the crack of dawn (literally) for our first adventure of the day. Cantering through the Cambodian countryside, the wind in our hair, music playing as we rode toward the sunrise in slow motion. Ok. Really it was more like walking and trotting, although there was the occasional unintentional canter. Due to cloud cover there wasn't an explicit sunrise as such, more a gradual lightening of the world. But it was still an amazing experience. I had been a bit worried that perhaps being so early we might not see any of the local people, but my fears were unfounded. The world was jut beginning to awake as we slipped through villages and along the trails, so we passed plenty of people, just heading out to begin their day. It is difficult to describe the tranquility, but being on horseback was perfect for that time of the morning. Not disturbing anyone, just quietly fitting in. I would have liked to get a few more photos, but the early morning light and bouncing movement of the horse was not really conducive to non-impressionist style photography.

After some time we came to an old temple, complete with monks wandering around. Time to dismount for a while, stretch our legs and explore a bit. Truth be told though, after not very much sleep for the two previous nights our exploration was not terribly vigorous, so we were soon back on the horses, ready for a few photos and the ride home. Lucy, our guide told us we might need to trot a bit more on the way back - our 2 hour ride was turning into a 3 hour ride! The horses were happy to oblige, so ducking under live power lines at times, walked and trotted our way back, enjoying much of the same atmosphere as before. Mandie's decided a short rest break was in order after all that trotting, and was kind enough to help them both cool off a little with a slight detour to the plan on the way home. Thankfully Grace already had her camera on record, so you can see "the incident" for yourselves here(YOUTUBE link). The other slightly entertaining part of the return home was a story from the tour guide about how when teaching the Cambodian staff to take tours, they'd discovered that the habit of not pronouncing the ending of a word (common in many asian languages) does not translate so well into English when asking a tourist to commence the tour.. "Ok, you can ride the hor(se) now" has some very different connotations!

Exhausted (so much so that Daniel had nearly fallen asleep on his horse) we arrived back at the Happy Horse Ranch, piled into the tuk tuk and returned to the lovely Ankor Pearl hotel to capture few hours of sleep before Grace caught a bus home and the rest of us regrouped to take on our next adventure. Quad biking.

As with the horse ranch, the quad bike tour sent out a tuk tuk to pick us up for our 2 hour, 41km discovery tour of the Cambodian countryside. After a briefing from our tour leader, we were each put on a bike (known as a moto kong boon, or 'motorbike wheels four' in Khmer) with with a staff member sitting behind us for a quick lesson and test drive. Thankfully everyone passed the test and was allowed to take a bike of their own. The test basically requires being able to stop, turn and not run into anything, but there was still one person in the group before us who hadn't been successful, so I guess they do the test run for reason. During the process of filling out forms and signing waivers we got chatting with the French expat who actually runs the company. He was quite lovely, and even told the guide to get out the 'new model' quad bikes for us to take out (with a gentle reminder that they are also more expensive should we crash them while doing something stupid).

The quad bikes were SO MUCH FUN! I am sure I had a massive grin in my face the whole time. We traveled on a mixture of dirt roads and tracks, with a good few bits of water to get through thanks to the recent rains. There were two guides for our group of three people, and they were fantastic about letting us stop to take photos any time we liked. It is not advised to try and take photos while driving for obvious reasons! Even after being in Cambodia for several weeks now, I was still taken by the fact that as we passed houses and villages, the children would all run to smile and wave frantically at us. Being last in the line, I was quite conscious of how much dust the bikes created, and so tried to slow down when passing people walking or cycling on the road to minimise the impact. As a bonus, this meant that I could get up a good burst of speed catching up to the rest of the group later! In the end we returned 3.5 hours after our 2 hour tour had started, absolutely covered in dust and bits of mud, but having loved every moment of it.

Returning to the hotel again we separated briefly to remove several layers of Cambodian soil from ourselves and change our clothes, before meeting again in the foyer to await Sim (the tuk tuk driver the others had used on Friday) who had invited us to his home to share a genuine Khmer meal cooked by his wife. This was a really lovely experience. They live in a kind of a community area, with lots of families close together and lots of kids running around. We had a lovely Cambodian meal, followed by some fancy biscuits that we picked up from the Blue Pumpkin bakery for dessert. It seemed to be very late by the time we left, after sitting around chatting for quite a while, watching the DVD of Sim and his wife's recent wedding and even getting to meet his lovely parents in law. I think we were all really touched by the warmth we were shown by the whole family.

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