Getting up at 4:50, we made our way out of the hotel. The hotel restaurant had lights on so we went in. To serve us food they had to wake up several people.
The whole day was more or less downhill so we made good time. At the halfway point, Srey Noi, we stopped for lunch and then found a place we can stay on our way back up. 137 km down hill is a very different thing from 137 km uphill.
In town we met several friendly people, three of whome spoke pretty good English. On the way out of town Mark picked up some fried roots and and fried bananas. After going a little way we had a little rain. We dove under some cover and started eating our fried snack. Some soldiers a little ways away motioned for us to come. We obeyed the summons. They sat us down at their table and tried to have a friendly chat with us. The lack of a common language made this difficult. Though we all laughed pretty good when the one soldier tried to mount Mark’s super tall bike. While we were there some school kids came over and we shared our snack with them.
After that we enjoyed a period of good weather. by the end of the day we had ducked out of rain a few more times, once for quite a while, while somebody dumped buckets from the sky. We ended up riding the last 15 km into Siem Reap in a light rain.
Highlights of the day included seeing cambodian houses with prettier paint jobs than Ubon houses; having hundreds of little kids yell ‘hello’ at us; seeing carts pulled by cattle; seeing piglets in baskets on the backs of motorcycles, seeing the glowing green of fields of young rice.
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