We’re both really excited to be in Siem Reap. It‘s one of the destinations we’ve been looking forward to and after 5 months of cruising around Southeast Asia, we’re finally here.
We spend our first morning lazing around. We search out “Joe-to-Go” and enjoy a nice breakfast.
“Joe-to-Go” is one of the original NGO businesses in Cambodia – it’s a cafe with great coffee and treats and the proceeds go towards providing education for street children.
Unfortunately, many children in Cambodia can’t afford to go to school and are more-or-less forced to work at an early age to help out their families. Joe-to-Go not only provides free education to the children, but it also pays them a small wage to stay in school to help ease the family pressure. It kind of provides the best of both worlds for them – they get an education, which will create more opportunities for them in the future and their families benefit from it in the short-term.
The staff is really friendly, the food is great and they offer free WiFi, so Eric and I make ourselves comfortable for a while.
With a successful lazy morning under our belts, we decide it’s time for some activity.
We rent two good mountain bikes with the plan to bike to the Cambodian Landmine Museum which is located on the outskirts of Angkor and along the way we’ll also stop and purchase our admission tickets for the Temples of Angkor for the next day.
Seems like an easy plan, doesn’t it?
Based on the information in our guidebook and the brochure provided by the CLM, we understand the museum to be about 24kms from Siem Reap. So with water in hand, we begin our cycle to the head office of Angkor.
However somewhere along the way we zig when we should have zagged and we find ourselves in the middle of the Angkor site without a ticket, so we head to the nearest checkpoint to get directions. You’re supposed to be able to bike through the area without any problems, but we don’t want to run into an overzealous ticket-checker and get a fine – the tourist police are apparently very diligent here.
We get directions to the CLM with no problems, but according to them it’s actually closer to 35kms away from the ticket office. Although this is kind of different than what we understood, we’re not too worried – the calculation of distances is sometimes questionable here, so we assure the young fellow we’ll stick to the roads and not visit the temples without a ticket and then we head off.
Well, we bike and we bike and we bike... okay – maybe the 35km distance is right.
Eric and I contemplate heading back but as most of you know we are both stubborn people and do not give up on goals lightly. So despite being hungry, tired and having REALLY sore butts, we continue to cycle through the countryside in the direction of the museum.
Well, eventually we get there.
And it seems both the guidebook and the CLM brochure are wrong – it’s actually located 35kms from the ticket office of Angkor, which is 5kms from Siem Reap town. This means we have a very long bike ride back home.
Worst of all, the only food for sale at the store outside of the museum is Pringles.
So we wolf down a canister of those, stroll around the museum for about 45 minutes and then begin the journey home.
By the time we get back to Siem Reap our butts are numb with pain, we’re hungry and we’re tired. But it all seems to melt away when we remember our chilled bottle of white wine in the fridge.
Needless to say we have a quiet evening in, after a dinner of lok-lak, pommello salad and our new favourite food, minced pork & eggplant.
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