THE TOUR IS NO MORE
So after hinting at the demise of the 'Tour de Cambodia' in my Mekong post I thought I'd better explain the circumstances in which the most sensible 400km bike ride across undeveloped, sketchy and potentially dangerous terrain become no more.
The first issue was the size of the group halving from the original 4 (2 boys, 2 girls) to just myself and the other English guy Dave...we were just clearly too hardcore for the others! Not a great start.
All was not lost at this point, as I had managed to recruit one other who was brave (stupid) enough to join us, and I also still had my puncture repair kit i bought in Saigon. This istelf took 1 hour of the most painful translations (impression of nails flattening tyres, bicyle pumps etc.) before I was able to get my hands on what would surely be a valubale piece of kit.
So, next thing and perhaps crucial to the mission was to source some bikes. After searching around the travel places extensivly and shaking my head at several bikes that ranged from E.T style BMX's to ''Blue Rinse shoppers' it wasn't looking good.
However, we perservered and managed to find some places downtown that rented out half decent mountain bikes. After the owners of several of these stores had finished wetting himself at the thought of us peddling 380KM to Siem Reap, myself and my new found Canadian colleague rode out of there on the best of what he had....10 year old mountain bikes.
The sheer quality of our purchases fortunatley became clear early on, when cycling back to our guest house a moto brushed the back of my bike no harder than a gust of wind...this was obviously too much for my ageing equipemnt and the backwheel promptly folded faster than superman on laundry day and all of a sudden I wasn't going anywhere!
This, I'm ashamed to say is where my common sense kicked in for probably the first time on my trip (or longer than that maybe!) and I admitted defeat. I put my excuse of a bike on the back of a moto and returned it back no more than 5 minutes after we'd hired them.
The fact that the bikes lasted less than a mile out of downtown Phnom Penh, and that a road map was proving harder to find than a Scotsman at the bar, the trip was ended there and then.
This has now left me jaded, and with the overwhelming urge to do something random / stupid to try and fill the void...no ideas as yet but will keep you posted!
So after hinting at the demise of the 'Tour de Cambodia' in my Mekong post I thought I'd better explain the circumstances in which the most sensible 400km bike ride across undeveloped, sketchy and potentially dangerous terrain become no more.
The first issue was the size of the group halving from the original 4 (2 boys, 2 girls) to just myself and the other English guy Dave...we were just clearly too hardcore for the others! Not a great start.
All was not lost at this point, as I had managed to recruit one other who was brave (stupid) enough to join us, and I also still had my puncture repair kit i bought in Saigon. This istelf took 1 hour of the most painful translations (impression of nails flattening tyres, bicyle pumps etc.) before I was able to get my hands on what would surely be a valubale piece of kit.
So, next thing and perhaps crucial to the mission was to source some bikes. After searching around the travel places extensivly and shaking my head at several bikes that ranged from E.T style BMX's to ''Blue Rinse shoppers' it wasn't looking good.
However, we perservered and managed to find some places downtown that rented out half decent mountain bikes. After the owners of several of these stores had finished wetting himself at the thought of us peddling 380KM to Siem Reap, myself and my new found Canadian colleague rode out of there on the best of what he had....10 year old mountain bikes.
The sheer quality of our purchases fortunatley became clear early on, when cycling back to our guest house a moto brushed the back of my bike no harder than a gust of wind...this was obviously too much for my ageing equipemnt and the backwheel promptly folded faster than superman on laundry day and all of a sudden I wasn't going anywhere!
This, I'm ashamed to say is where my common sense kicked in for probably the first time on my trip (or longer than that maybe!) and I admitted defeat. I put my excuse of a bike on the back of a moto and returned it back no more than 5 minutes after we'd hired them.
The fact that the bikes lasted less than a mile out of downtown Phnom Penh, and that a road map was proving harder to find than a Scotsman at the bar, the trip was ended there and then.
This has now left me jaded, and with the overwhelming urge to do something random / stupid to try and fill the void...no ideas as yet but will keep you posted!
posted by aboutabwoy at 7:27 AM
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