March 6, 2017

Breakfast in the room and an early start today to beat the heat. The temperature was forecasted to be over 34 degrees by noon with a real feel of 40 degrees. We have decided to split the 150 kms to Thailand into three days. We know there are guesthouses/hotels at around the 50, 100 and the border at 150 km marks and we think it is better than slogging out a 100 kilometre day to get into Thailand earlier.

As we left Siem Reap on National Road 6 we saw all the fancy hotels. These are for the people that fly in to Siem Reap “do the temples” and fly out again.

On the outskirts of Siem Reap we saw this “Country Club” entrance. We couldn’t see any buildings down the long road, not sure what was down there, but it had a fancy entrance.

How the other 90% live!

The road was flat and not much to see, apart from a rather nice temple complex that is being expanded.

Along with the heat we had a head wind, we took it in turns to be at the front to break the wind for the other person. The National Road 6, which we are currently on, is worse than Highway 1 in Vietnam. There is no centre median and drivers overtake all the time into oncoming traffic, the speed is faster, the only saving grace was that we had a shoulder to ride on.

We arrived in Kralanh at about 11:30, there is a guesthouse (Sovannaphum) on the outskirts of Town which is supposed to be a couple of years old and a couple of guesthouses closer to the centre. I checked out all of the rooms, we are back to indoor camping again. We cycled back to the first guesthouse, which looked very nice from the outside – $10.00 for a room with a fan and no hot water or $17.00 for the same room with air-conditioner. If you pay for the air-con, they give you the controls so that you can work the machine! It didn’t matter which guesthouse I choose, none of them had hot water. We opted for a fan! The windows open and there are screens on the windows to stop the mossies from coming and eating us in the night. We also have a couple of geckos that will eat anything else that might get into the room. I hope we didn’t make a mistake not getting the air-con, as it is very warm.

After being out on the road in the heat, the cool shower was quite nice.

There is an interesting vehicle in Cambodia.  It has a two-stroke engine and looks like a tractor, but it has a very long wheel-base.  No idea why it is designed this way, but we see quite a few of them in the rural areas. 

The nice thing about getting finished early is that I had time to update the blog with all of those pictures Ralf took in Angkor Wat. Hope you enjoyed your tour of Angkor Wat and surrounding area!

The bad news is that Thailand has recently changed its visa entry requirements for travelling into Thailand over land.  We can only get a 15 day visa at an overland crossing, instead of a 30 day visa if you fly into an airport!  Our flight out of Bangkok isn\’t until April 4, 2017!  We can extend the visa in Bangkok when we get there, but that probably means two charges!  We are going to ask at the border if we can have a 30-day visa because of our flight.  Fingers crossed we get a nice border guard!  We will be in Thailand on Wednesday or Thursday.

We ate our noodles in the room and haven’t moved very much since we arrived.