Today we cycled 70 kms, a personal best EVER (anything over 25 kms would beat my previous best!) we all felt sooooo good with ourselves. It was a tough day though, hot, dirty, sticky. Early start at 7am we hit the busy roads out of Siem Reap and made our way through various tar and bumpy dirt roads till lunchtime, stopping every 20 kms or so for fruit and snack and water breaks with the support vehicle. What a godsend!
After lunch we explored the magnificent ruined temple of Beng Melea, which is older than Angkor Wat, built by the same king #2. initially thinking we were just too buggered to do another temple, this one was actually the best of the lot for me. It's completely ruined and overgrown by the strangler fig trees, and we climbed our way over and across the various ruins of the layout,which is quite expansive, centuries ago the huge individual cut boulders were brought 10 kms away from the stone quarry, and one marvels at how they built this in the 11th century, just amazing. The large step climb up and down and around the ruins was a great cool down for us after our rather epic 70km cycle today.
From there we hopped in our wonderfully cool air con tour bus and bussed 90kms out the next large town of Kampong Thom. Everyone crashed in the bus ride! 30 000 people live in this city. It's almost 9pm now and am about to hit that brick wall so it's over and out for today.
PS check out today's cycling countryside and ruins pics.
PPS chased by a wild nasty dogt okay, first scary dog so far, I pedalled hard to outrun it and shouted big grrrs at it to try scare it, I think it was more scared of my surgical (dust) mask with my water back pack pipe coming out of it. A real sight!!!!
