Blogs from Takéo, South, Cambodia, Asia

Day 10. Takeo. Saturday 20 January. 77km Away at 8am. In at 3pm. The ride out of Phnom Penh took us past a roundabout monument commemorating Cambodian Independence. Not quite as hairy as the ride in and out into the countryside close to the Killing Fields of yesterday. I think that every day our Guide Channi has taken us along a different route to the one used in 2015 and supplied to all riders. Today was the same and we are glad of it because it is off the main roads and very enjoyable despite being on dirt roads. The guides have said they like our group because we will go anywhere and do not whinge. We get the same comments in Japan because all CTC are competent riders who enjoy the riding. One dirt track ... read more

So we never made 11:00. In fact we never even came close. Dima was an hour late, then after a quick stop at the ATM, the gas station, and a not so quick stop at the port (we had to buy crab you see. My girlfriends family lives in Phnom Penh, our first stop, and if I don’t bring some fresh crab from the beach town they might just eat me instead) we were on our way about 1:30pm or so. I hate starting a road trip in Cambodia that late because it ensures that you will be driving at night at the end of the day, something that’s not all that safe in Cambodia. I’m not even sure what is the most dangerous part of driving at night in Cambodia. It could be the complete ... read more

It’s wedding season in Phnom Penh. For the last week we have listened the festivities taking place in celebration of a couple of newly-weds as they pitched a great tent behind our house which has barricaded the whole street this past seven days. These billowing structures have sprouted like weeds around Phnom Penh. Usually florescent, always noisy. Some containing as many as 1,000 guests! We’ve been learning things re: Cambodian Wedding Tradition, in dribs and drabs from our Khmer friends and students. For example, as we passed a “smaller” wedding in the province yesterday Soriya told us how the music playing at that time indicated how the wedding party were acting out the cutting of the bride’s hair. So, it is early morning as I sit in bed writing this now, sweating and itching sat under ... read more

On Sunday morning I decided to go for a cycle ride through some villages near Takeo. It had been raining most of Saturday and was still raining quite a bit today so most of the dirt roads to the villages were pretty muddy and the bike was quite dirty by the time I got back. Since I first arrived in Cambodia I had been struck by the number of very large ornate entrances at the side of the road. At first I had assumed that they were just the entrance to the houses of wealthy people but I now realise many of them marked the start of access roads that lead to a village or group of villages. As I cycled along, I chose an entrance-way and cycled down it. Many of the fields in this ... read more

Well the last thing I expected when planning to come to Cambodia was that I would be teaching computing but that's the way it has turned out. Just before I arrived, a group from a high school in Australia had been here and they had brought with them to donate a number of laptops that were no longer wanted. When the director leaned that I was a computing teacher, he asked if I could organise some basic computer lessons for the orphanage children. The laptops were all in different states of organisation in terms of software; most were Windows PCs but there were also some Apple Macs. I spent about the whole of last Sunday checking them all out to see how many I could use with the kids. They all had some old contract anti-virus ... read more