We woke up to the gentle chimes of Sim City 2000 in the roomy coolness of our digs at the Blue River Inn. We made our way downstairs to the free breakfast to find that today’s offering was a kind of smallish блин . It was tasty, but none too filling. After some deliberation, we decided that this might be just enough calories to fuel us through the short ride to the Reunification Palace.

We collected our things and climbed on the cycles. It seemed the Speed TRs were getting along especially well with Vietnam. Mine felt smooth, tight, and responsive as we wove our way through the surging waves of motor bikes.

The Vietnamese coffee, in all its cloying sweetness, was beginning to kick in and we made short work of the ride, purchasing the 85 cent tickets and entering the palace grounds.

To call this place a palace is both right and wrong. It certainly is a palace in the grand-structure-with-which-one-impresses-others sense, but it is so very communist, that one might better call it an official headquarters, or even a diplomatic reception building.

You see, dear reader, at one point, on the same ground on which one now finds the Reunification Palace, there was a very real palace, made of ornately carved wood. This was destroyed, and a new palace was built by the French, when they took over the running of Saigon after a slow but brutal campaign in 1868. The French ruled from this, though they kept the king of Vietnam around as well, doing some minor ruling from the old royal capital in the central Vietnamese city of Hue. During the second World War, the place was briefly occupied by the Japanese, until the defeat of the Axis in the Pacific and the forcible reinstatement of French rule in Vietnam.

The French had a strange habit of calling Vietnam Cochinchina, which to AsiaWheeling makes about as much sense as deciding to call Malaysia Varanasiindonesia, and this might have had something to do with the subsequent troubles that a France still recovering from crushing defeat and occupation in during WWII had in establishing control over their previous colony.

In this time of strife, Ho Chi Minh, and his communist organization, the Viet Minh took power in Vietnam and eventually, after a string of military victories, forced France to sign the Geneva Accords, which returned Vietnam to local control, with the north ruled by the communist Viet Minh, and the south ruled by the marginally democratic Republic of Vietnam, split along the fabled 17th parallel. The north was led by Ho Chi Minh (the guy on all the money here in present day Vietnam), and the south was led by a fellow named Diem (a rotten, paranoid, murdering dictator — heavily supported by the U.S.) Diem ruled from the old French palace, now dubbing it the “Independence Palace.”

During the early 60s, North Vietnamese bombers destroyed the palace that had been built by the French, so it was rebuilt in wonderful 1960s mod South East Asian Art Deco glory. To this day, it still retains the original facade and interior decoration. It also sports some interesting exhibits and re-education videos, so we figured it was worth a visit.

Inside we found it to be decorated not unlike a cooler version of the rooms in one of our grandmother’s houses. I’ll let the photos talk:

We also were sure to watch the re-education videos in the basement, which tell the story of the Vietnam War from the North Vietnamese perspective (to them it is the American War). It was very interesting and embarrassing to see how sinister and destructive my country could seem through the eyes of our one-time enemy. While I am sure that in reality the truth, as always, lies somewhere between the version of the Vietnamese War that we are taught in American schools and the one taught in Vietnamese schools, one thing is for sure, it was an ugly, wasteful, crying shame of a war.

Before we left, we made sure to tour the basement of the building, which was set up somewhat like a level from that old Nintendo 64 game, GoldenEye.

This video should corroborate:

We left the Reunification Palace hungry, and climbed on the cycles to weave our way back into the wild traffic of Ho Chi Minh City, looking for a place to eat. When we spotted a Vietnamese crushed rice restaurant, we called a waypoint, but were for one reason or another tempted even more by a restaurant across the street advertising Hue (pronounced “Hway”) food. Hue food is from the central part of Vietnam, and since we had bought tickets that skipped right over that part of the country, we figured we had better try the food.

I ordered a bowl of thick square yellow noodles with a spicy sesame broth, Scott got a clear soup with round white rice noodles. We shared a plate of tiny fried clams that we spread on pieces of toasted rice paper, sprinkled with fresh garlic and hot peppers, and scarfed down.

As we ate, a man came into the restaurant, and noticing that there were no more tables left, planted himself next to us. We exchanged greetings, but he did not appear to speak much English. It was not until we had finished eating and begun to take turns reading aloud the Vietnam War section from the Wikireader that our table partner spoke up.

It turned out that, in fact, he did speak quite good English, and presented himself to us as a Vietnamese journalist. He was interested in what two young chaps, interested in Vietnamese history were doing riding folding bicycles in this city. For one reason or another, we intrigued him enough that he agreed to meet with us later that day, at his hotel, and allow us to interview him about his life and perspectives on Vietnamese history. As you can imagine, dear reader, Scott and I were tickled pink at the opportunity, and spent the next few hours wheeling around Saigon, brainstorming questions to ask the man, and hunting down a fresh supply of pens and paper.

When we met up with the man, he had changed his clothes and was welcoming us into his luxurious room at the New World Hotel.

He called for a maid to assist him in making coffee for us. With steaming mugs in hand, we sat down in his heavily air conditioned room, and he and began to tell us his tale, and perhaps more exactly, the story of Vietnam in the 20th Century.

And this was it:

His father was born shortly after the turn of the century (the 20th). He was of wealthy intellectual background, so he studied at a good French school, eventually becoming a lawyer and securing a position within the administration of the last Vietnamese king, who still held a fair amount of power and popularity with the people at that time. Our friend was born during this time, as his father was rising to his final position as the Chief of the Office of the King. As you can imagine, this is a rather high position, and our friend’s father had become a trusted adviser to the king.

With the end of WWII, and the aforementioned unstable power switch between the Japanese occupiers and the old French colonialists, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh had come to power. It was actually our friend’s father who, in light of the growing communist power in Vietnam, suggested that the king resign once and for all, appealing to Ho Chi Minh. The king did this, and in response, Ho Chi Minh offered him a position in his new communist government, as supreme counselor. So with this, our friend’s father found his way into the Communist Party, and our friend moved from Hue to the northern communist capital of Hanoi.

Meanwhile, while the English and French are invading the south of Vietnam, attempting to re-establish colonial rule. Our friend is 16 at this point, and along with his father, joins the resistance. They worked in the military administration, with our friend eventually reaching the rank of Chief of Company. In 1954, the French and English are defeated, and the country is split according to the Geneva Accords along the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh’s administration is new, and the country is war-torn. He realizes that in order to catalyze development, he must educate his people in the ways of science and industry. And with that, our friend was assigned to be sent to Beijing (they called in Peking then)  to learn metallurgy. After spending a year in Hanoi learning 中文, he made his way to Beijing where at the Vietnamese Embassy, he overheard a conversation that would change the rest of his life.

A telegram had just come in from Hanoi requesting that five students be selected and reassigned to learn journalism rather than their respective scientific or industrial vocation. He promptly presented himself as a volunteer and the officials agreed. It was in this way that our friend became a Chinese-trained journalist.

He returned to Vietnam four years later, in 1955, to find the U.S.-supported Diem regime in the south to be unstable and losing popular support, while meanwhile the communist Vietcong insurgency was slowly, under the direction of Ho Chi Minh, eroding the power of the Southern State. Meanwhile open war had broken out between the Soviet- and Chinese-supported North and the U.S.-supported South. By now U.S. forces were playing an active role, not just training and advising South Vietnamese military, but engaging directly in ground combat and devastating bombing of the north. Even the U.S. became fed up with Diem’s inability to lead, and he was assassinated in a U.S. supported bit of regime change. Unfortunately, subsequent leaders were no better, and were instantly seen as puppets of the Americans, which of course they were.

In the meantime, our friend is working for the North Vietnamese newspaper. Interestingly, we later noted that this fellow had a parallel occupation to the protagonist of Full Metal Jacket, “Joker”, who wrote for the American wartime newspaper Stars and Stripes, telling stories of American valor and the failings of the North Vietnamese Army.  When we asked him if he felt the press was free in North Vietnam, he explained to us, “I was free to write anything which would raise the morale of our people. I was not told what to write, and I did not write lies.  I just only wrote stories that were uplifting for our struggling citizens. You may call it what you would like, but I will call it free.”

America, of course, lost. And when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, the official moment is often considered to be when an NVA tank bulldozed its way through the gates of the Independence Palace, taking over. They renamed the place, Reunification Palace. As soon as word of the fall (or liberation) of Saigon made it to Hanoi in the north, our friend made his way down to witness the event. He told us the story of walking into the old U.S. Embassy, which was now in ruins, riddled with bullet holes and stained black with the soot from burning vehicles. He walked through the interior, which was in shambles, having been ransacked by the Vietcong. Amidst the sea of documents that covered the floor, he saw a bolt from an American rifle on the floor. He picked it up and has kept it since as a paper-weight.

Since the war, our friend went on to work in Vietnamese television news, traveling the world, and even visiting America five times, to such exotic locales as Nebraska, Kansas, San Fransisco, and Washington. On his trip to Washington, he was accompanying the Vietnamese prime minister, taking an historic image of the American and Vietnamese flags side by side on the president’s limousine.

Our friend now works in a senior capacity at Viet-My, a Vietnamese-U.S. relationship magazine published by the Vietnam-USA society. His magazine now works to build good faith and friendship between the people of the two countries. AsiaWheeling would flatter itself to think it is working to do the same.

Many people have told us not to disclose that we are American while traveling. It’s safer they say. But also, as our dear friend Mr. Stew Motta so eloquently put it, “You’ve got to represent, man.” And we agree. In traveling, AsiaWheeling has enjoyed so many more positive experiences connecting with people from other countries than we have negative ones. And in many of these, we are playing the role of representatives of our country and our race. With so many jokers out there, and so many idiotic things that have been done by Americans in the past, it would be a crime for all of us decent folk to hide behind Canada or England, rather than starting to rack up a few more positive interactions on behalf of America.

With that I’ll sign off. From the AsiaWheeling mobile offices in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, good night and good luck.

Our second day in Saigon, which is of course more officially known as Ho Chi Minh city, began with complimentary breakfast. It consisted of sunny side up fried eggs and a baguette. Unfortunately, with it we saw the return of the Bandung-style petroleum-derivative margarine, which refused to melt even in one’s mouth, and left the poor consumer stricken with a greasy interior coating.

I was still struggling to shake the coating from my own mouth when we hopped on the cycles. Our plan that day was to simply wheel west, away from the river, and see where we ended up.

As we rode through Saigon, we began to discover that the city was sectioned off in a very interesting way. More perhaps than any other place we’ve been, certain neighborhoods of Saigon were dedicated to a specific type of shop or service.

Stopping for an obligatory coffee, we spent a moment at a roadside cafe that had set out vinyl deck chairs  providing a good view of the city’s bustle.

Using the restroom meant going into the back of the cafe and meeting the proprietor’s extended family, which of course we were happy to do multiple times.

We went by the area where all the power tools were sold, which transitioned organically into a neighborhood full of working clothes and protective equipment.

With the added protection of our new helmets, we were really beginning to get the hang of wheeling in Saigon. It was not for the weak of heart, that’s to be sure, but it was doable – enjoyable even. The other people in the traffic were mostly quite alert and communicative.

They might not signal their intent in the explicit way that AsiaWheeling does, but our fellow riders’ head motions and shifting in weight spoke volumes about their next driving moves. We were wheeling fast and hard through thick traffic, but I did not feel out of control or unsafe.

One particularly interesting feature of Saigon can be found in the sidewalks.  The majority of them are actually sloped to allow motorcycle traffic to climb on and off as needed.  This makes it much easier to transition into a “Mario Kart” while riding with the rest of traffic, and seems to be a nod by the Ho Chi Minh City urban planners to the necessity for sidewalks in wheeling.

Soon we found ourselves on a street of musical instrument manufacturers. When I saw a fellow hacking away at acoustic guitars and upright basses along the side, I called a waypoint.

Once again, I found that guitar shop owners stand out from all other shop owners in their willingness to simply hang out, chat, and let me play music in their shops with no pretense of sale. We sat around with this particular chap for some time as he brought out guitar after guitar. It seemed a shame, for the man could build quite decent guitars when he put his mind to it, but it seemed that the demand in Saigon was primarily for 30-dollar-piece-of-garbage guitars, which refused to stay tuned even for the duration of a test play, and were made mostly of unfinished splintering pieces of wood. Regardless it was an enjoyable experience, and I exchanged hearty good wishes with the fellow before departing.

It then occurred to us that it was certainly time for more eating. We wheeled along the musical instrument street and watched as it changed into a stamp street. We could not resist stopping at a local stamp producer to investigate the opportunity for production of an AsiaWheeling ink stamp or two. The shopkeeper was, unfortunately, not available to communicate.

Shortly after the stamp street we found our way into a bakery district. This seemed the perfect excuse to engage in a little scarfing of Ban Mi. Ban Mi are the Vietnamese version of the French baguette sandwiches that had been such a welcome addition to the AsiaWheeling lifestyle since our arrival in old French colonies.

Next was a quick cup of coffee at an anime-themed restaurant that seemed to be populated by the lazy well-to-do youth of Saigon, who flopped lackadaisically on pillows and eyed us suspiciously.  From the fourth story of the building, we had a good vantage point to view the city.

Electrical wires were strung en masse, providing power to all those who consumed it so vigorously.

Once we had finished our coffees, we headed back onto the streets, heading once again westward. We made our way along a main westward street that suddenly turned to gravel. The flow of traffic continued unabated though, plunging onward into a giant cloud of dust being thrown up by the many motorbikes and cargo trucks that traveled with us.

We then reached a strange dust-free area in the center of the large stretch of gravel. It soon became clear why this section was dust-free. A large team was conducting some kind of sewer-related operation in the center of the road. Part of the operation required a great pipe to be dumping sewage into the center of the street, which wetted down the gravel and killed the dust cloud. I wheeled by trying to minimize my exposure to the splattering sewage.

From there we made our way onto a smaller street, still plunging westward. The city began to change the farther we went. The buildings were getting smaller and closing in on us.

We stopped along our way to investigate a shop selling a great many folding bicycles. We investigated them and asked the owner how much for each one. He quoted a price of just a little over $30.00. And that was to foreigners, before bargaining. These were some seriously inexpensive bicycles.

From there we kept heading west until the roads became so small and clogged that the smoke and the noise became too much for us and we pulled a rauschenberg onto a parallel street.

This street was much more comfortable in terms of noise and traffic, though it did run alongside a giant river of sewage. Despite the smell, we stopped a few times to investigate interesting operations taking place in this part of town, like this scrap metal business.

From there we headed back into town, and called a waypoint at a large grocery complex. We paid a few cents to park our bikes outside and went inside in search of some Project K9 goods. We were able to find some interesting kitchen supplies and spices therein, and left feeling quite good about the day’s work.

We made our way back toward the neighborhood of our guesthouse just as the sun was beginning to sink low in the sky. In the process of doing this, and not for the first or last time in Saigon, we found ourselves quite lost. As the sun began to sink into the smoggy haze, we continued to make our way around the city. We were  finally able to recognize a bit of our surroundings and suddenly found ourselves outside a large and delicious looking Pho place.

It was time to try again. And this time we were far from disappointed. The Pho was cheap, generously portioned, and accompanied by a giant plate of greens, hot peppers, sliced lime, and the like. We dug in greedily. There is a certain healing quality to this soup. Every time I eat Pho, I walk away quite full, but it is a stomach filled mostly with broth, fresh greens, and rice. And it seems no matter how much I eat, it quickly settles to a comfortable size in my stomach, leaving me refreshed, energetic, and optimistic about life.

Pho, official Vietnamese soup of AsiaWheeling.

Once again, Sim City 2000 called us forth into the world. It was 5:00 am in the Amari Watergate, and I was brewing the last cup of complimentary coffee that we would have for a while. The city was just beginning to wake up and pull itself together as we rode through the gray morning streets. We rode through the area where all the sugarcane to be juiced that day in Phnom Penh was being prepared for transport to the far ends of the city.

As agreed, a van arrived at a certain street corner to pick us up. The driver instantly locked in on the Speed TRs as an opportunity to extract some bicycle-related fees. He proceeded to go on at some length about it, inspiring mounting fear in the AsiaWheeling team that we might miss our bus to Vietnam, until Scott and I agreed to a bicycle fee of $2.00 per cycle and we were promptly on our way.

The van picked up two more passengers on the way to the bus depot. One was a German, the other an American. As we rolled up to their hotel, they were sitting at a table outside with a scantily clad Cambodian woman. When they saw the van, they quickly finished their coffee and both kissed and hugged the Cambodian woman goodbye, then climbed into the van, reeking of booze.

At the bus station, we paid our $2.00 to the luggage-loading fellow, which secured prime spots for the Speed TRs in the belly of the bus. The luggage handler grinned and ran over to the far end of the parking lot. I watched as the driver of our van and the luggage loader then split the money between the two of them. I walked over to where they we doing so, and placed a hand on the luggage loader’s back, laughing in a congratulatory way. He first looked scared than began to laugh too. Just doing my part to spread love here on AsiaWheeling, one transaction at a time.

From there, we had about 10 minutes to wander around the station looking for breakfast foods and coffee. This search was hampered, however, mainly because the buses surrounding us numbered so many and burned so much oil even while idling that the air was an acrid brown mist, which removed even the most hearty appetite immediately, and tempted all to seek shelter with haste.

Despite these obstacles, we were able to find some canned coffee and a few Cambodian baked goods, all variations on the combination of baguette, a white cream similar to the filling in Oreo brand cookies, and pork floss.

Aboard the bus we found that, for the first time since Thailand, it actually possessed a bathroom, as advertised. The apparatus itself, however, was a strange retrofitted bathroom system, sporting a full-sized, western-style porcelain toilet, which used a startling amount of water for each flush. Where they were hiding a reservoir to support this kind of system, I may never know.

The bus had two crew members: a driver and a kind of steward. As we made our way out of Phnom Penh and into the country, the steward came on the loudspeaker. He began, not for the last time, to apologize for mistakes that had either been made or not yet been made. He then put down his microphone and made his way through the bus, collecting the passports of all passengers and making sure that each had a Vietnamese visa. He kept the passports and ordered us to fill out immigration cards. These too he took, explaining, in barely intelligible jumbled bits of English, that he would need to do special paperwork to smooth our way into Vietnam.

Outside the border, we stopped at an overpriced restaurant full of grumpy staff and mediocre Cambodian fare. The poor value for money was, however, mitigated somewhat by the fact that a long line of urinals in the back of the restaurant were all filled with big chunks of ice, a trick they no doubt stole from the Ritz Carlton.

When we reached the Cambodian border, we found that just like in Poipet, it was a wasteland of casinos and giant signs explaining in English how frowned upon child prostitution is in Cambodia. Exiting the country was quite simple. In fact we were merely given our passports by the bus steward, already stamped. We then had only to hold them out in front of us and walk by a small booth, where they presumably were checking to see if our face matched that on the passport.

As we queued to get back on the bus, I could see the entrance to Vietnam looming in the distance. It was a large Soviet-style archway, with a great many red and gold communist sculptures attached to it. We had been told many Vietnam-related horror stories by other travelers, our dear bureau chiefs, and even by the all-knowing Steve (may his beard grow ever longer). So it was not without some anticipation and trepidation that we crossed the stretch of no man’s land and entered Vietnam.

Inside the passport control building, we were herded with all our luggage into a large  room full of sweaty people. We had given our passports back to the bus steward, so we were without documentation. We were instructed to wait for the steward to call out our names and then rush with all our luggage to the front. My name was called rather early. When I heard it, I hustled to get myself, and my folding bicycle into position. I presented myself for inspection while the bus steward handed my passport over to the Vietnamese officials. They looked at it and then back at me and then flagged me through. On the other side, I was asked to put my bike through a large metal detector, but something about the Speed TR inspired trust in this fellow, and at the last moment, he decided that I need not remove my pack, and waved me on into the hot morning sun.

I loaded my cycle back into the belly of the bus and waited for Scott who emerged similarly unscathed. We looked around. Here it was… Vietnam. So far so good.

The bus landed in Saigon a couple of hours later, and we climbed off to find ourselves in the most developed city we’d been to since Bangkok, which had by this time descended into violent street warfare.

We had been getting emails from friends in Bangkok, and reading articles about the violence. It seemed so hard to understand. We had been in Bangkok with the red shirts and had felt so safe. They were just smiling people driving around in pickup trucks, dancing to pop tunes. How had that turned into urban war?

Meanwhile in Saigon, we unloaded our belongings from the bus and spent the next few minutes vehemently declining offers from old women selling all kinds of goods from large wooden trays, which they carried by means of a long pole yoked over their shoulders.

We took a moment to collect ourselves before wheeling off in search of a hotel. We had selected one from the Lonely Planet pdfs while on the bus, and after a bit of meandering, we were able to find it.

Even in that short bit of wheeling one thing became crystal clear: We needed to get helmets.

After Scott’s accident in Bangkok, we swore that helmets would need to be added to the AsiaWheeling kit. Yet since then, we had been traveling through such rural and lightly trafficked places that the need for helmets had faded from its central role in our consciousness. Now in Saigon, the need took on a new importance. The streets were filled with motorbikes, swerving and plowing forward in a great swarm. The motorbikes obviously ruled the road. Cars were the vast minority and crept along nervously, allowing the motorbikes to flow by them like water around a stone. The speed of the traffic was just slow enough that we would be able to keep up, given the somewhat constant state of highway speeds. But increased speeds demanded an increase in the technical quality of our navigation.

We checked into our room at the Blue River Inn, which was quite comfortable, and was positioned with access to a few unsecured wireless networks. This we were soon to discover was the norm in Vietnam. Wireless networks abound;  securing them is not something people do. Vietnam did, we found, block a few sites that we use quite regularly, including facebook.com. However, all which was required to overcome the censorship was a simple change of DNS. That little bit of haxoring out of the way, we headed out for a wheel.

The first order of business was acquiring a couple of tickets on the Reunification Express. This is the train that connects Saigon in the south of Vietnam and Hanoi in the north. The fall of South Vietnam at the end of the U.S.-Vietnam war is generally referred to as the reunification of Vietnam, and so the word is often tacked on to large public projects. We had consulted our hotel about tickets and they assured us that we could visit a certain ticketing agent around the corner and purchase tickets for the same price as at the station. And since we were none too keen to battle the seething motorbike traffic over to the train station, we decided to take her word for it.

Buying the tickets was no problem, though we soon discovered that we could have purchased them for much less had we gone to the train station.

But here at AsiaWheeling, we are not ones to stew over a few lost dong. So we proceeded on to a nearby Pho place. Pho, as you no doubt already know, dear reader, is what one might call the national soup of Vietnam. It is pronounced more like Fa, rhyming with the 1990s parlance “duh.” We made the mistake of visiting a pho spot that had come highly recommended by the Lonely Planet. It was resoundingly mediocre. AsiaWheeling was continuing to lose faith in the Lonely Planet. It was, perhaps, high time that we learned it could only be counted on for supplying consistent mediocrity.

As I slurped the last of my soup down, I could easily think back upon four or five restaurants in the U.S. that served a much more delicious version of pho. This place, by the name of Pho 23, had a tasteless faux chic vibe to it, and skimped so shamelessly on the usual large pile of greens that accompany Pho, that we were simply fed up. The only thing that could have lowered our regard for this joint further was their dastardly misrepresentation of Vietnamese style coffee.

Sure enough we ordered a couple, and so heinous was the resulting brew that they produced for us, that we briefly considered the possibility that food and coffee might, in fact, be not so tasty in this country. Of course, this would prove to be resoundingly false.

Refueled, albeit with disappointing grub, we headed toward the Saigon river, which we followed north for some time, until the city began to change around us. Soon we were siphoned onto a network of much larger roads that threatened at times to turn into a full on elevated highway. As we wheeled along through traffic, I did my best to keep up with the speed of my fellow (motor) cyclists. This meant we were going fast, all the while looking out for a helmet retailer.

Saigon is full of motorcycles carrying all manner of wild cargo: pigs, loads of bricks, huge stacks of vegetables, multiple kegs of beer… it’s amazing what the people of this city can load onto a moto. But just when I was beginning to become familiar with the mad diversity of cargo that surrounded me, a motorcycle joined the pack and outdid them all. It appeared to be carrying a load of some 30-50 Styrofoam cooler chests. The giant stack was banded together and perched on the back of the cycle, which teetered its way down the road at a surprising clip. The wind resistance of such a giant brick of Styrofoam was nothing to scoff at, and this chap was flying, burning a fair bit of oil.

So fascinated was I with this heavily laden vehicle, that I leaned into the Speed TR, pedaling as fast as I could to catch up with the fellow. I was unable to catch up completely, but I did get close enough to capture a little video, which will soon be featured on the blog.

Scott pulled up behind me just as the sun was beginning to sink into the giant apartment buildings all around us. We pedaled our way around a roundabout and started to work our way back toward the hotel.

On the way, we happened to stumble upon a vendor specializing in motorcycle helmets. We began to peruse and try on her wares. Eventually we settled on two helmets that sported rather German colors, with backwards American flags and large cartoony bald eagles on them. We bargained for a while with the owner of the shop, and finally settled on a price that we later found was likely a huge price gouge at $8.00 a pop. Well that was two for today.

The sun was beginning to sink low as we made our way back toward the Blue River.

We got there just in time to get a text message from a certain Ms. Trinh who had been recommended very highly to us by our dear Malaysian Bureau Chief, Smita Sharma.

We had just enough time to relax a moment in the room before we took back to the streets, in search of a certain restaurant specializing in gentrified street-style food. We could not help but think that birds of a feather dine similarly, for Smita herself had taken us to a very similar gentrified street food court when we arrived in Kuala Lumpur.

The meal was delightful and the company entrancing.

Ms. Trinh, we humbly thank you for your hospitality. We climbed back on the cycles to head back to the Blue River feeling like kings. It seemed high time to indulge in a little night wheeling. Our night wheel was made all the more intense by the fact that we got hopelessly lost trying to find our way back to the hotel. It was something about Saigon… normally we are able to quickly get our bearings in a city, but the ability to navigate this one continued to elude us.

It was fine, though. We eventually made our way back. And being lost caused us no great discomfort. Our faith in Vietnamese food had risen to new heights. We were beginning to build a little mental map of the city. And Vietnam was proving not to be the terrifying nightmare that had been portrayed to us. Instead it was proving a manageable, organized society, very affordable, and full of people who, while they are willing to rip you off at every turn, at least did so with a gentle smile and a good sense of humor.

We woke up bright and early on our first full day in Phnom Penh. We began the day by enjoying the delightful in-room coffee service at the Amari Watergate, and with the beginnings of a proper caffeination well underway, we headed out onto the brightly sunlit and bustling streets of Phnom Penh.

We headed first in the direction of a local market called the Russian Market, so named because (rumor has it) back in the day, it was where all the Soviet expatriates used to shop. We stopped on the way at a rather down-home little street corner Cambodian diner.

We ordered a bowl of rice noodle soup, a bowl of nice salty, thick rice porridge, and a Vietnamese dish of what looked like raw ground pork, pickled in a kind of sweet soy sauce. This was accompanied by a couple of crispy pieces of baguette. All in all, a magnificent breakfast.

From there we managed to somewhat circuitously find our way to the Russian Market, by way of a great many similarly gigantic markets, all specializing in everything from automotive components to vegetables.

When we finally found ourselves at the Russian Market, we did our best to lock the cycles securely to a nearby lamp post, and headed in. We were completely blown away by the things we encountered inside.

A vile of cobra liquor proved enticing, though we opted to pass at the moment.

And while we did find some interesting decommissioned Cambodian currency that we could not resist throwing into the K9 purchase, we were unable to locate any Cambodian military surplus. We stopped in the middle of the market at a sign advertising the best coffee in Phnom Penh and had another cup before getting back on the cycles to explore deeper.

The next place we found ourselves was Orussey Market. Orussey is a giant sprawling complex of goods sellers, spanning many floors of a giant warehouse that was once part of the Khmer Rouge’s feeble attempt at organized industry.

We made our way inside and were instantly immersed in a world of color, smell and sound that was so saturated and engrossing that it threatened to completely erase our current mission to find Cambodian military surplus from our minds. For what must have been close to an hour we wandered endless tiny walkways between giant market stalls.

While this market had proven once again quite the fascinating waypoint, we had yet to see even one piece of Cambodian military equipment. Finally, in the middle of one of the giant textile sections (this one was I believe dedicated to brand-name-knock-off duffle bags), we decided to elicit some help from the locals. You see, dear reader, since we speak no Khmer, and are traveling in a country with quite the war-torn past, we had been reluctant to delve into a pantomime about military surplus. But it was past noon now, and we needed to get this show on the road. After communicating with one shopkeeper who called over another, who called over his daughter, who spoke a bit of English, we were finally able to get the point across. One of the shopkeepers wrote down the name of a market for us on a piece of paper where he assured us we would be able to find the treasure.

We asked him to show us on the free tourist map we had procured thanks to Vicious Cycle. He shrugged. Another shopkeeper then came over to us to try to assist, but her communications too were just vague waves at the map. We decided this likely meant it was too far away to be shown on our map of central Phnom Penh, and bid everyone our very best regards before venturing back out into the world.

We headed toward the market, initially missing a turn that brought us to a giant round-about. In the center of the round-about was a great statue of a revolver pistol, with the barrel of the pistol tied in a knot.

From there, we backtracked a bit past the French and Cuban embassies, and got back on the correct road. We took this road for quite a while, stopping from time to time to show the piece of paper on which the shop-keep had written the name of the market, confirming the validity of our trajectory. Except, as you are no doubt already aware, proof of validity is only as good as the mouth that spits it. And it seems some of the people who we talked to were either in cahoots to send us deep into the middle of rural Cambodia, or of a mind to save face and just wave us on our current trajectory rather than admit they did not know the way.

Regardless, we found ourselves quite suddenly ravenously hungry in the middle of nowhere near a long stretch of used truck lots on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. Food was nowhere to be found. Then suddenly we passed a frighteningly American looking gas station complete with a little convenience store inside. We decided that this would just have to be lunch. So we selected from the puzzling assortment of overpriced snack food, and sat down to eat.

It was not the tastiest meal of AsiaWheeling, not by a long shot. But it did the trick, and for that we were both quite grateful. Not another customer came in the entire time we spent there selecting foods and eating them. So in the process, we became quite close with the man running the cash register. He was a young Cambodian fellow, and appeared to be quite proud of and dedicated to his job. The amount of care and effort that he put into microwaving our individually wrapped hot dogs, and artfully dressing them with mayonnaise and chili sauce, was quite touching.

Such an experience really highlights the emerging view of AsiaWheeling that Cambodian people share a fair amount with the people of Lao in the kindness-in-the-face-of-historical-hardship-and-mistreatment department. I dare say most Cambodians have quite a few decent reasons to dislike outsiders and avoid connecting with them. However, we experienced quite unreserved kindness in the vast majority of our encounters with strangers. A fine type indeed.

We loaded up on more water before bidding our dear convenience store worker goodbye, and heading back onto the road. This time we asked a cluster of traffic police for directions. They were most helpful, and lead us back a few kilometers where we found a somewhat hidden market off a side street.

The mall was mostly full of small tailoring operations. We parked the Speed TRs outside of one of these, and a beautiful young woman speaking excellent English emerged from the shop and offered to watch them for us. We thanked her, and headed into the market.

The interior consisted of a great many small winding crumbling streets lined with many small shops. Most of them were a few tables with sewing machines on them, backed by a crew of Cambodian men and women, cranking out military and police uniforms. Behind the sewers were examples of the types of clothes they could make, reams of blue and green fabrics, and giant boxes of patches.

It seemed that Cambodian military and police units had to have their own uniforms made, rather being issued them from a central source like in the U.S., for all around us were police officers and military types selecting garments, packs and satchels, belts, patches, hats, equipment and the like.

We wandered on through the market, taking out time to inspect various goods. What was perhaps most amazing was that fact that most of the military-type clothing was actually made with little (obviously fake) tags and labels indicating it was the property of the U.S. army. For one reason or another (and I would invite speculation in the comments), the Cambodian military was outfitting itself with a fair amount of fake U.S. military equipment. Perhaps the fake U.S. military labeling would be removed when the Cambodian patch or embroidery was selected?

As we walked along, a woman caught my eye as I was inspecting a number of belts she had on display. She was removing something that looked like a early 2000s brick cell phone from a black canvas carrying case. As she removed it and brought it toward me, I became more interested. Was it a cell phone? Or perhaps a rechargeable battery of some kind? I put my face a little closer. She then pressed a button on the side and a giant arc of electricity burst between two metal contacts on one side. Along with the arc came a haunting sizzling noise that sent a rush of chills up and down my spine. I hopped back in surprise and fright. It was a very large and scary taser.

She giggled at my response and apologized for scaring me. She explained that I could buy it for $20 if I liked. I declined, attempting to be both polite and to indicate that I completely abhorred such devices.

Finally, we selected a number of items from the market (a small, cell phone-sized equipment pouch, a kind of military fanny pack, a belt, a mosquito hammock, and an embroidered military hat) and a number of patches. With these we returned to our friend, who had so kindly watched the Speed TRs for us while we were shopping.

We asked her whether her shop could apply these patches and embroider the top of the fanny pack to customize them for Project K9.

This she arranged for us at great speed and astonishingly tiny expense.

Thanking her most heartily, we took our belongings and headed for the post office. Part way through the ride, we noticed the sun was sinking low, and realized the post office would most certainly be closed by this point.

So instead we wheeled Phnom Penh aimlessly until we found a street restaurant full of people squatting on tiny red plastic stools and eating what looked like garlic bread, fried meat and cole slaw.

And sure enough, this was more or less what the restaurant served. There was no menu, but we were able to communicate our wishes pretty easily, since everyone was eating the exact same thing. It was delicious and markedly different from anything we had eaten to date. There was even a kind of baked-beans-esque condiment that accompanied the bread. I might even dare say this meal shared more in common with down-home Iowa cooking than any we had hitherto discovered in Southeast Asia.

Quite satisfied, we headed back to the Hotel Amari Watergate to get a little rest. Having not yet sent the package off for K9, we were still behind schedule for Phnom Penh, and tomorrow would need to be a sprint to the finish line. Phnom Penh was treating us well though, and we had every reason to believe the pieces would fall right into place.

We woke up plenty early in the comfortable room at our local Battambang Chinese business hotel, a place called the Hotel Asia,  and lugged our things downstairs to find a pleasant surprise: it was raining. It had not rained on AsiaWheeling for months, since Kuala Lumpur in fact. The smell and the sound of the rain were invigorating in a totally unexpected way. We folded the cycles up in the hotel lobby. As we were doing so, the owner approached us and offered us a thank you gift for visiting his hotel: a couple of locally made silk scarves. We thanked him as humbly as we could and headed across the street to the bus station.

Some miscommunication with the ticket seller had resulted in an inadvertently early arrival. From there we had only to wait and take in the wonderful smell of the rain, which paired very nicely with a totally bizarre Cambodian cartoon show that was playing on a TV, bracketed to the wall of the station building. Next to the television was a glass case, inside of which were a number of tasty looking baguettes. We did our best to purchase some, but were instead met with some very stern remarks delivered by a child. The kid was certainly no older than 12, but he swaggered around, sticking out his belly like a 40-year old man. He spoke to us in a forcibly lowered voice, indicating that this was not his bread stand, that the owner was not around to transact business, that he was disgusted that we would even ask, and that, if we were interested, he was selling cigarettes and batteries right next door. He waved his hand at us as if to say, “Ah, forget it, you two chumps are a lost cause.”

I instinctively looked back at our luggage, which still lay where we had piled it on a station bench. We might be worthless idiots, but at least we had not lost our stuff. We returned to it, and from his bag, Scott produced some biscuits and cans of Nescafe. This would have to do.

When the bus finally arrived, it was an old decommissioned Incheon Airport Express. Though they had claimed at the ticket counter that the bus would have a bathroom, it did not. This was not the first time we had experienced this kind of bait and switch in Cambodia and Lao, but the seats were pretty comfortable, and we were able to load the bikes on board with no attempts made to elicit extra fees.

The ride was relaxing and scenic. Cambodia seemed to be drinking in the rain and greening up so fast you could almost see it happening in real time. As we drove on, the rain stopped, and we eventually climbed off the bus to stretch our legs and use the facilities at a makeshift rest area.

We got back on and continued our crawl over the vast flat pancake that is Cambodia.  At the lunch stop, we serendipitously crossed paths again with Elya, who was en route to Phnom Penh as well.  She lamented the road width and traffic chaos, but was clearly a seasoned wheeler.  We wished her the best and headed back to the bus.

Soon the fields turned into squat little housing developments, and those turned into apartment blocks, and all of a sudden we were in Phnom Penh.

We climbed off the bus, and attracted a giant crowd of people that watched with great interest and patience as we unfolded the bicycles and consolidated our belongings. We were not sure where we were in Phnom Penh, but from our research of the general geographical layout, it appeared that as long as one headed east, one would eventually hit the river, which appeared to be where the largest cluster of hotels was.

So east we rode, making our way through a number of truly giant street markets. One of these appeared to be solely devoted to fruits and vegetables. It was a morning market, and was nearing its end while the sun crossed past noon. With the end of the market, many vendors had simply deposited giant piles of rotting vegetables on the street, where they were being swept into larger piles by a great many old women. This made for quite the hazardous wheel, where we took our chances at times, riding the Speed TRs over slippery stretches of mushy cabbage.

The bus must have dropped us off at the western-most extremity of the city, for we needed to wheel for quite some time before finally making it to the water. Once we made it there, we quickly began the process of comparing rates at hotels, finally selecting the Amari Watergate Hotel. We had stayed at a great many guest-houses, even a few of which might be halfheartedly called resorts, but this was a real hotel, perhaps comparable only to the Hotel Nippon in Colombo in its level of hotel-ness.  What does that mean, you ask? Staff, a front desk, phones in the rooms to call the front desk, ice, coffee makers, do-not-disturb signs, maid service, bellhops, Internet. I’m talking Hotel here with a capital H.

It was glorious. And right smack dab in the center of a very interesting neighborhood, something in between a red light district and a central distribution center for the city’s sugar cane juice vendors.

With our things safely stowed at the Amari Watergate, we headed out to find some grub. The first place we saw was a rather posh looking Chinese-style noodle joint. Falling once again prey to the Cambodian dollar valuation problem, we sat down to some $3.50 bowls of noodles. They were quite tasty.

We didn’t have much time in the city, so as our stomachs began to dig into the noodles, we hatched a plan to maximize our time in Phnom Penh. We had an outstanding project K9 order for a collection of Cambodian military surplus goods, and we needed to find some. We had determined the location of a few large markets in Phnom Penh, and with any luck we would be able to find the merchandise that day and mail it off the next.

We climbed back on the cycles and headed toward the Phnom Penh central market, a giant golden-domed monstrosity at the center of town. It was then that Scott noticed his front tire was missing one of the bolts that held it in place. This was not an acceptable state of affairs, so we pulled a lichtenschtein and headed in search of a bike shop that might have a spare bolt on hand. We wheeled for a while before finding the Vicious Cycle Cafe and Laundry.

We pulled in and requested a bolt. They brought out first one then another. None of them fit. Despite our protests, however, one of the workers at the shop took off in search of the correct bolt. He was gone for quite some time. We had read cover-to-cover both copies of the Cambodia Daily by the time he returned.

So long did his mission take, that we would likely have simply left the Vicious Cycle Cafe and Laundry, except that he had taken our only remaining nut with him to compare, rendering Scott’s cycle useless.

Finally our man returned with a frown and an empty hand. He had driven all over and been unable to find it. “It’s a Chinese size,” he explained, “we only have Thai sizes here.” whatever that meant (and by all means please speculate in the comments). Then he had a final idea. Before we could explain to him that we would just go find the Chinese bike shop and speak to them in Chinese and get the nut, he was off again, on another long ride. Eventually he returned, victorious. But we had eaten the noodles so long ago, we were badly in need of another meal.

He put the nut on Scott’s cycle, cranked it on real tight, apologized, and charged us $1.00.

We thanked him and headed off. We were hungry again, but there was enough time to maybe eat quickly and still find some surplus military goods. We really laid into the Speed TRs, making up for lost time and heading for the market when we heard a terrible noise. We knew immediately what it was: Scott’s bearing was busted again.

I felt my insides melt into despair for a moment. Again, so soon? What could have caused such misfortune? We got off the bikes, and walked them over to a nearby park, overlooking the Tonle Sap river. We tried to sit down, but a security guard started yelling at us from across the park. Perhaps no bikes were allowed inside? Regardless, we apologized, and trudged defeatedly over to the parking lot of a nearby restaurant. Once there we sat down on a crumbling colonial wall, and with great effort shrugged off our despair and started to form a plan.

Why would the bearing be broken again? Willie had put in brand new expensive Japanese bearings. Well, we had one replacement bearing back at the hotel, the one Willie had given us to show how the originals had been NBK brand rather than the Japanese NSK. We could have the same guys that just helped us find a new nut put that one in the bike. That would get us back on the road. So we headed off, walking the cycles, toward the Vicious Cycle Cafe and Laundry. As we walked, we chewed through possible explanations. Likely it was not the collision with the one-and-only Stew Motta that had caused Scott’s bearing to break… it must be something else. Then it came: the nut! Both days when the bearings had broken had been when the nuts had been recently tightened. I looked down at the nuts on my bike, and they were covered on one end, making over-tightening impossible. Scott’s bike, on the other hand, had normal nuts.

When our man on the “Lao side” of Luang Prabang had trued Scott’s wheel after the accident with Motta, he had tightened the heck out of the nuts that held the wheel on. Then the bearing broke. Now we get a new nut, and the fellows at Vicious Cycle had re-tightened the nuts that hold the wheel on, and once again the bearing broke! Willie must have known not to over-tighten the nuts, but gone too far in the other direction. The nuts were so loose that one just fell off!

How’s that for Encyclopedia Brown (not to be confused with Leroy Brown)?

Back in Phnom Penh, I hopped on my bike to get the spare bearing from the Amari Watergate, while Scott walked his bike the rest of the way to the Vicious Cycle Cafe and Laundry. Once I got there, he was already in the back of the shop, knee deep in axle grease with the Vicious Team, tearing the dynamo hub apart.

Willie had been careful, gentle, and tender with the Speed TR wheel. These guys were much more of the Shock-and-Awe school of cycle repair. They were hammering on the wheel like crazy, before realizing that there was one more nut to loosen.

Needless to say, the hub would never again produce electricity. But the bearing went in, then all the other pieces went back over it, and we gingerly tightened the nuts. Scott took her for a ride. All seemed okay. Our man asked only another $1.00 for the job, since he had, after all, caused the problem. We were just happy to now know what had been happening with Scott’s bike. We gladly and insistently paid three times what he asked, and headed back onto the street, still able to get a little wheeling in before dark.

The K9 mission would need to wait for the next day. It would be full, as there was plenty else planned, but we thought we might be able to do it. It was time then to just enjoy the operability of Scott’s cycle.

We headed north, up the Tonle Sap river until the city started to peter out and the sun was sinking low. With that we turned into the interior winding streets of the city, relying on our compass, and making our way generally back toward home. It was about then that we realized we were starving. We stopped first at a tiny street stall, selling little scallion pancakes, with a spicy vinegar sauce. We had first one round, then another of these.

With a little food in the stomach, we headed deeper into the city, indulging in a bit of night wheeling.

The traffic in Phnom Penh is wonderful: very welcoming and forgiving, with a nice slow average speed. The main streets are well lit, so we began to stick to those, which greatly improved our ability to navigate. We came across a great many vendors selling chicken, and decided to buy a small chicken.

The woman packed it up for us with a giant handful of basil and mint leaves. From there we wheeled back toward our house, stopping at a sandwich stand to buy a couple of small baguettes.

We feasted that night outside a little general store on chicken, basil, and baguette. Feeling like kings of kings, we strode proudly into the Amari Watergate.

When we got inside, a clearly disturbed man was screaming at the front desk clerk. “No! Go Back! Show me another camera! His face, God damn it, I need to see his face!”

I peered over his shoulder, and the clerk was reviewing some security camera footage. “Who is he?” the man bellowed, “What was he doing in there for so long?”

“Checking your room”

“Checking should only take 30 seconds! He was in my room for a full two minutes!”

Scott and I exchanged puzzled glances and went upstairs. I was about to go to sleep when my curiosity got the better of me. I pulled on some clothes and ran downstairs. The man who had been bellowing at the clerk was outside, smoking. I approached him.

“Excuse me, sir. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help but overhear… what happened?”

“Sensitive Data! I am traveling with confidential sensitive data, and they went in my room and copied all of it!” He drew closer to me and I could smell the thick malt whiskey on his breath “If you have anything, anything confidential at all, don’t leave it in your room. They’ll copy everything.”

I bid him my best, turned around, and returned inside. The clerk looked like a battered ghost. I attempted to give him a look which said, “Don’t worry, I won’t yell at you; I’m on your side,” then went upstairs.

Luckily, they had already copied our passports at the front desk, which left only the unpublished AsiaWheeling content for them to take advantage of. And frankly, we’d be flattered.

The next morning my stomach was still not interested in food, but other than my recently pervasive lack of affinity for culinary experiences, we were doing great. Our conversations with our new cycling friend, who turned out not only  to be American, but also a recent immigrant to Russia, had led us to believe that today was a day for revisiting our Borobudur-style of wheeling. The waypoint was a far off temple by the name of Banteay Srei. It’s true that it’s much smaller than the other Angkor temples, and that it lies another 25 km northeast of the main Angkor complex, but we had been hearing again and again that this was one of the more amazing places to visit in Cambodia. And it was only a mildly savage wheel away, which after all is what we’re here to do.

So once again we climbed onto the Speed TRs, this time wisely skipping breakfast at the otherwise positively enchanting Mandalay Inn. We wheeled into the dusty tourism-driven monstrosity which is Siem Reap. The sun was once again blasting, and the temperature was quickly rising. We needed to put something in our stomachs (whether they liked it or not) and lay into the wheel.

We finally selected a little faux French cafe which offered $3.00 breakfasts.  This is by no means cheap, and blows the average AsiaWheeling cost-of-breakfast index by at least three times. But it seemed to us a reasonable deal, due to an interesting part of the Cambodian monetary system, which, if you will humor me dear reader, I’d like to discuss.

Namely, they use US dollars as the national currency. Now I know, dear reader, that you’ve heard of something called the Cambodian Riel, and AsiaWheeling can vouch for its existence. We’ve seen them, even used them. But when it really comes down to it, the Cambodians use good old Â¥amaguchi $pending döllÃ¥rs. The Riel and the Dollar are locked in a kind of strange kinship, in which dollars are used for most pricing and to pay most debts over a few cents. Even large Cambodian corporations, like our cellphone provider, Beeline, use the old greenback in all their printed documentation. In our experience, the Real is used essentially to replace coins. American coins are not welcome in Cambodia, and any change that requires increments below $1.00 is given out in Riel, at the rate of 1000 Riel to the quarter-dollar.

An interesting side effect of being back in a land of dollars, is that we were not able to build up a new value structure based on the price of goods in the local economy. We already had a good idea of the value of a dollar and how much was a fair price for, say, a bowl of fruit and muesli.

It was by exploiting this weakness in our own ideas of value, that the Cambodians were able to get away with charging significantly more for some items than we had been used to paying on the previous portions of the trip. All this aside, there was something comforting about the dollars in my wallet. They felt more like real money and less like Monopoly money, somehow more solid. Interesting.

Back in Cambodia, we had ordered two bowls of muesli and fruit. When they arrived we discovered that here muesli was much more expensive than fruit, making each bowl more like a giant tropical fruit salad, covered in yogurt, and sprinkled conservatively with muesli.

As we were eating, a number of landmine-related amputees came over to our table to offer goods to us or to panhandle. These fellows (all that we met, strangely enough, were men) were beginning to become a normal part of our lives here in Cambodia. Cambodia has had in the past, and continues to have (to a slightly lesser degree these days) a truly heinous problem with landmines. Cambodia was very heavily mined during past times of war and political strife. Now, as farmers attempt to turn over new land and children play, from time to time they get blown up.

We read that on our way to the Banteay Srei temple, there would be a landmine museum, where we could learn more about the situation and donate money to help remove landmines from Cambodia. This would be an important waypoint.

We forked over our $6.00, what would have been deemed a giant expenditure in Indonesia or India, and climbed onto the cycles. My stomach was still not so hot, but the food seemed to be providing me with energy, so off we went. We pedaled hard over the smooth new road to Angkor.

We decided to skip the secret herb garden entrance and made our way directly into the park through the main gate. They stopped us briefly to check our tickets, and with that we were free to ride on. We made our way quickly around the main Angkor Wat complex, heading east and north into the more far-flung regions of the park. As we made our way out of the main section, the road quality diminished slightly, though it was still quite rideable, even at full speed.

The concentration of touts and roadside stands also fell off in no time. Soon we were wheeling through a thick forest, where our solitude was only interrupted by the occasional tiny settlement (likely housing for the employees of the organization that maintained and operated the Angkor complex, an outfit by the name of APSARA).

As we rode on, the road become markedly worse, though still quite smooth by AsiaWheeling standards, and nothing the Speed TRs couldn’t handle. We passed out of the Angkor park proper, and into a more agricultural land. Here there was no more jungle; all had been turned into farmland or villages. We passed through a number of small villages, where the street was lined with stands selling everything from fresh fruit, to gasoline, to handicrafts. In one of these villages, we took a lichtenschtein and began heading slightly uphill. The Banteay Srei temple was located in the foothills of the more rocky region where much of the sandstone was harvested to build the many temples in the Angkor complex.

The condition of my stomach was strange. While I was wheeling, I felt reasonably fine, thriving on the physical exertion and the strikingly beautiful scenery, but when we stopped to drink water, I would instantly be hit with waves of nausea and exhaustion, which made it quite unpleasant to sit or stand. This, as you can imagine, dear reader, made me none too eager to stop for water breaks. Scott, however, took on the noble task of keeping us from becoming dehydrated, for we were sweating buckets. Somewhere in the sweating haze of the last few kilometers of the ride, we managed to pass right by the landmine museum.

When we finally reached the temple, I climbed off my bike, and instantly curled up on a long wooden bench in the shade of the welcome and information center. I lay there for some time letting many sour feelings wash over me and eventually fade. When I once again sat up, Scott was at my side with a can of Coca-Cola.

I am normally not one to drink sugared sodas, but this proved to be exactly what I needed, giving me an instant blood sugar boost, and being the only thing in the last day not met with animosity by my stomach.

From there we made our way into the temple. It did not take us long to realize why this had come so often recommended.

It was truly glorious, covered with more ornate carving than we had yet seen in Angkor.

Much of the temple was in very good condition, and I found myself becoming quite engrossed by the some of the smallest parts: the edge of a doorway or a bit of gutter.

Truly an incredible place.

One of the great things about Coca-Cola is that it causes a sudden spike in blood sugar. One of the not so great things is that the spike is followed by a crash. I began to crash just as we were leaving the temple through its back door. On the other side of the door, we found a musical ensemble consisting completely of land-mine victims. Each was playing a different instrument based on the degree of dexterity he or she still possessed. We sat down to listen for a while.

They were great. We were sure to put a few dollars in their tray before leaving in search of more sugared bevarages and perhaps a bathroom.

We found both in the same place. We sat down outside the bathroom, and began fishing though a large red cooler, out of which the bathroom attendant was selling beverages. After a fair bit of bargaining, Scott had a can of coffee, and I decided to roll the dice on a can of Malaysian soy milk. The soy milk seemed to be doing the trick, but I had to take my time. This was fine because the drink seller was soon joined by a woman, and they were both interested in learning more about AsiaWheeling. While we chatted with them in bits of English and plenty of pantomime, a group of British tourists came over and used the bathroom. We greeted them both on their way in and on their way out.

When I had finally finished the soy milk, I stood up to go and suddenly felt an emptiness inside of me. My Maui Jims! Where were they? I patted all my pockets and then remembered I had washed my face in the bathroom and removed them in doing so. I dashed back into the room and looked on the counter, but my glasses were gone. I came back out, quite distressed, and asked our two new friends if they knew where my Maui Jims had gone, pantomiming a pair of spectacles. They replied, indicating that the British fellows had taken them.

Bloody well then. Scott jetted toward the gate to cut the buggers off before they could escape. I sprinted back toward the temple in case they had returned that way. Chances were low that they’d been able to make a getaway already, so we still had a chance.

I removed my wallet as I ran, taking out my ticket so that I could show it to the guard without having to stop.I ran into the complex, narrowly dodging a Japanese tour group that appeared out of nowhere. Once I reached the center of the temple, I sought high ground and began to scan for the scoundrels. And then I saw them… lurking toward a less visited section.

I headed over and at first could not tell if any of them were wearing my beloved glasses. But as I grew closer, I could see that one of them was looking particularly sharp. He was a pasty chap in an Indian kurta-style shirt, wearing a pair of beautiful golden spectacles. I walked directly up to him.

“Hey, brother,” I said as I removed my glasses from his face. He stammered a bit in response. “Cheers,” I replied, and headed back toward the entrance.

I met back up with Scott and shared a brief moment of triumph. Scott munched on a few nuts, and I pondered why even with this great victory, my body was not accepting food.

Back on the cycles, we pedaled hard toward home, keeping our eyes peeled for the landmine museum. We had missed it on the way here, but managed to catch it on the way back. The entrance to the place was lined with old bomb and landmine casings. It cost us $2.00 each to get in, but was well worth it and a good investment.

The museum was started by a former Khmer Rouge child soldier, named Aki Ra, who had defected to the Vietnamese near the end of the rule of the Khmer Rouge. On the Vietnamese side, he fought hard to liberate his country from that dark time. Since then he had begun working tirelessly to defuse the many landmines that plagued his people.

The museum was, to put it lightly, intense. Most of it consisted of a number of rooms, filled with examples of land mines, large printed posters explaining the history of landmines in Cambodia, and haunting children’s drawings of people blown to bits.

The vast majority of the landmines had either Chinese or Cyrillic writing on them. This observation was corroborated by a large poster showing the word’s inventory of landmines. China had the most, followed by Russia and the US. We struggled to wrap our minds around the things we were seeing.

In many of the photos, it seemed Mr. Ra was defusing or disposing of landmines and unexploded bombs by roasting them over a flame, or actually building little bonfires out of the bombs themselves.

It’s hard to believe that this is a reliable way to dispose of such things… We ended our visit by taking in a very intense video produced by the organization, featuring a great many landmine victims.  This was an important waypoint, to be sure.

We left the museum feeling very strange, very lucky… It took quite some time of wheeling and talking before we realized that we had gotten so far off topic and onto a strange existential tangent that we both must be suffering from drastically low blood sugar. We pulled over to the side of the road and drank two more Cokes. The woman who sold them to us was exceedingly friendly, and seemed to be extremely popular with the local villagers, for a few of them pulled over while riding their bicycles to chat with her during our time at her stand. She also had some fantastically distressed Coca Cola advertising materials.

We kept, wheeling, running on Coca Cola and pure will power.  By the time we reached Siem Reap, I was beat to shreds. I was barely able to maintain common civility when we finally dismounted at a fruit smoothie stand near the Mandalay Inn. The power had been out for hours, so they had not been making smoothies, but right as we rolled up the power came back on. The owner and some of her friends who were sitting around the outside burst into applause and laughter, attributing the return of electricity to our arrival.

I was nearly unable to control myself, so intense were the waves of exhaustion and nausea. Water helped, and so did a somewhat warm (most of the ice had melted during the power outage) banana and mango smoothie. I was unable to each much of anything else that night, but we did purchase a couple of boat tickets from our hotel. Elya, the Russian-American cyclist that we had met a few days before had recommended that we take a boat to a city called Batambang. The boat would take us across the Tonle Sap and up a river. Our Great Helmsman, the Honorable Mr. David Campbell, had spoken to us during our planning meeting in Iowa, describing the floating villages of the Tonle Sap as an unmissable part of our Cambodian explorations. We were excited to get the chance to see them, and while the boat was somewhat expensive, pictures on the wall of the ticket booking agency showed it as a rather large comfortable looking vessel, featuring a bathroom.

It would be an interesting and pleasurable ride, no doubt. So I did my best to sleep plenty that night, in hopes of being able to eat the next day.

The alarm went off not long after sunrise and we made our way excitedly to the downstairs of the Mandalay Inn. The staff was again supremely friendly to us, hustling to remove the cycles from the room where they had stored them overnight. They spent the night right next to a full-sized cycle that the staff were just bubbling to inform us belonged to another American who was cycling here as well. Interesting, we thought, and ordered breakfast.

We don’t generally order breakfast at the hotel unless it’s included with the room. But we were in a rush to get to Angkor Wat to maximize our wheeling there. Plus they were so darned friendly here, we found ourselves tempted to support the venture. The breakfast was unfortunately only successful in the support-the-venture department, as it turned out to be expensive (by Cambodian standards) and consisted of a fried egg into which had been pushed four “Lit’l Smokies^®.” (For the uninitiated, I’ll have to refer you to GOMEAT.com).

Toast was limp and depressed. Coffee was flavored with some hazelnut-type chemical, and was monstrously sweet.

Perhaps some of my complaint over the breakfast comes more from internal strife. My stomach had not been up to its usual hearty patterns of behavior, and hunger and passion for food eluded me. I had little interest in food, but scarfed this mediocre meal down knowing we had a big wheel ahead of us. Somewhat under-caffeinated, and oscillating between flourishing excitement for the day’s wheel and waves of nausea, I joined Scott on the road.

Signs for Angkor were everywhere, and the wheel took us at first along a large canal that wound its way through the city of Siem Reap. We wheeled by the place where we had enjoyed the Crazy Beef Burger the night before, and followed the signs until we were dumped onto the huge central road that leads to the Angkor temple complex. Angkor is one of the most visited tourist destinations in the world, with approximately 700,000 visitors a year. The huge road was justified, but still not all that fun to wheel. The shops that lined the street were overpriced, and we had zero luck finding a decently priced cup of coffee. When we saw an opportunity to take a break from this road, by wheeling the “Angkor Herb Gardens,” we called a lichtenschtein. The herb gardens were strange, and none too full of herbs. And before we knew it, we were simply riding up a one-way street the wrong way through thick jungle. This kind of maneuver, known in the AsiaWheeling community as the “subversive garade” is commonly accepted in Cambodia, especially if the perpetrator is a motorcycle or bicycle. So we had no fear even when passing police officers headed the other way.

I checked our bearings on my compass-bell and we appeared to be following the main road, more or less, just a kilometer or so to the east. So where were we? This was no herb garden… in fact it was such dense jungle that the amount of traffic on the road seemed unjustified. Then suddenly we came around the corner and found ourselves looking out on a giant rectangular lake, with an old stone wall around it. I was still wrapping my mind around what exactly was looming out of the center of that giant moated structure, when we were promptly stopped by a police woman. “Tickets?” she asked.

It was then that we realized we had found our way somehow onto a maintenance access road of some kind, and this was the Angkor complex. We’d made it. And as long as we were not about to be arrested for trespassing or sneaking in without paying, it looked pretty cool. Scott was able to convince the woman that she had merely caught us in an honest mistake. We asked where we might buy tickets, and she motioned the way down the road. Angkor exists on a scale that is rarely encountered by humans. The temples are large and spread out, and a fine grid of newly paved roads connects them all. You could say it’s one of the most readily wheelable tourist attractions on earth.

The ticket counter was a few kilometers away, and on the ride we stopped to buy some coffee. The roads around the main temple, called Angkor Wat, are lined with stand after identical stand, selling basic Cambodian fare: lettuce wraps, fresh fruit, French bread sandwiches, grilled meats, potato and carrot soup. We struck out with the first few stops, finding no coffee, but third time hit gold. Unfortunately, it seems we were the only people to order coffee from this stand – perhaps ever. We tried to communicate that we were in a bit of a rush, because of our illegal status in the area. In response, I believe, the woman took dirty water, half boiled it, dissolved instant coffee powder in it and served it to us.

It tasted like a Great Dane’s bathwater. My stomach, which was just starting to settle a bit, took a savage turn for the worse. It was only mildly improved by the time we reached the ticket office. We wheeled out of the park then swung around to re-enter legitimately. Having done that, we headed back to Angkor Wat.

We pulled up outside the temple and were quickly swarmed by children selling drinks, food, post cards, books, and the like. We refused most of them and haggled hard with one of them in order to still overpay a bit for a book detailing the history and relevant features of all the Angkor temples.

Once we had paid one of them, the rest of the kids caught the scent of blood and redoubled their assault. It was a new kind of sales maneuver, one we had not yet encountered. It was a clever combination of the guilt-trip and the persistence hunt. One of them was vehemently explaining to me that she was going to skip going to school that day so that she could wait for me to visit the temple then come out and perhaps buy a water from her. “Don’t skip school!” I said.

“Then buy some water so that I can afford to go to school.”

Sometimes AsiaWheeling is a tough business. Locking the bikes and extracting ourselves from this swarm was one of the tough parts. But we did it, and soon we were wandering into Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat is an incredible piece of human ingenuity, a fascinating and haunting structure. It is just one of many temples in Angkor, and it is honestly best described using imagery. So without further adieu, let me give you a bit.

As we walked through the temple complex, in the peak of the hottest and driest season, we marveled at the scale and  interconnectedness of the ancient Khmer civilization.  While Hindu at the time of building, Angkor Wat’s temples were later retrofitted with bas relief and sculpture to reflect the now Buddhist religion of the kingdom.  Our conversation turned to the history of empire, as we attempted to identify any large-scale civilizations that had not used religion as a principal tool in social and ideological hegemony.

The large Communist powers of the Mid-20th Century seem to have been the first state governments to invest heavily in scientific institutions for answering the questions of human curiosity, rather than rely on religion to play such a role.  We continued to rack our brains, placing other societies on a gradient of separability from religion.  The Chinese dynasties held the mandate of heaven, while the Egyptians of 2500 BCE worshiped the Pharaoh as a god.  Medieval Europe intertwined church and state in an incredible force of social control, just as the Arab diaspora from their peninsula led them to use Islam as a tool of imperial organization and even urban design.

Finally, we reached feudal Japan, which seemed it might fit the bill, at least in a cursory analysis of Shintoism and feudal Japan on the WikiReader.

It was boiling hot out. I mean steaming, dripping hot. Scott and I were soaked. It seemed like we could not drink water fast enough. By the time we left the complex, we were all too happy to purchase water from the nagging hoard. This was, of course, not straightforward at all. And to simply pay the already over-priced fee of $1.00 for a bottle, I had to haggle vehemently for about 10 minutes.

With that experience under our belts, we decided to take a wheel. We headed away from Angkor Wat, and spotted a couple of cyclists darting off of a sandy side path. We decided to see where they were coming from, so we headed onto the same path. It turned out to be less of a cycling path and more of a sandy hiking trail that led around the giant Angkor Wat moat.

As we rode, we also found this was the spot of choice for a picnic on the lunch breaks of Angkor employees. They eyed us somewhat suspiciously, as we coaxed the Speed TRs over the sandy and treacherous path. All the lunching people around us began to spark a thought in Scott’s mind.

It was time for lunch. My stomach was still a mess, but eating is important. So we went to the only air-conditioned restaurant in the park, and I struggled valiantly to eat a few French fries while Scott worked hungrily at some Cambodian Anise-scented Pork and Egg Curry. For me the most pleasant part of the meal was the mint-scented cool towel they provided.

With eating thankfully out of the way, we poured our energy back into the wheel and the exploration of more temples.

Next on our list was Bayon.

Bayon is the central temple in a nearby sub-complex of temples called Angkor Thom.

We locked our bikes to a recently painted flag pole outside and headed in. This temple was much smaller than Angkor Wat, but was inviting and created intimate space in a way that Angkor had not.

This temple is famous mostly for the many faces on its surfaces. I enjoyed the dark and mysterious interior of the temple, which was filled with little stations where visitors could light incense and place it at the foot of one of the many images of Buddha.

As a result, the interior of Bayon was filled with a thick, scented smoke, which made for a most glorious effect when the sun cut it in thick yellow rays.

Back on the cycles, we made our way past a great many other temples, but since wheeling felt good, we kept going.

We did stop, however, when we passed Ta Prohm. Ta Prohm is perhaps better known to our American readers as the “Tomb Raider Temple,” as it was the temple used in this scene from that movie. It is one of the few temples in the Angkor complex that have been left more or less in its original state, still covered with strangler fig trees. Once again, perhaps the images will do a better job at describing it than I can with words.

This temple was perhaps the best yet. To explore it, Scott and I split up, making our ways through the many crumbling chambers, and doing our best to observe the many Chinese and Japanese tour groups from a distance.

It was getting late in the day, and we were still a little over 20 kilometers from town, so we decided to close this chapter of Angkor wheeling, and ride home. We had, however, purchased three-day passes to the Angkor complex. So there will be more where that came from.

Back at the hotel, we came up to the desk just as a woman was checking in. She asked about our Panama hats and Speed TRs, and through the conversation we discovered that she was the owner of the cycle that had been spending the night with our Speed TRs. She had been riding her bike in Malaysia and Thailand before this. She invited us to join her for dinner and we accepted. But first, a hearty round of showering. It had been quite a day, and we entertained each other over curries in the Khmer Kitchen with stories of wheeling and road-ready survival tactics.

In light of our recent successes in the departments of Wheel Repair and Rural Navigation, we decided to, for once, reward ourselves with a lazy morning. Scott packed up the last bits of his things while I headed over to the corner store to buy some lazy morning supplies.

We made like Frenchmen, drank strong coffee, ate baguettes with butter, and devoured a couple of cups of local Lao yogurt, impossibly creamy with fresh local floral honey. One of the more imperial breakfasts of the trip, I’d wager, but also quite enjoyable.

The night before we had run into the proprietor’s son, Tao, who was more than happy to share a celebratory BeerLao with us (it seems he had already had a few) and sing a few songs on the ukulele. Sometimes it was hard to determine if he knew the words to the tunes I was playing or if he just had a knack for chiming in. Regardless, we had formed a close bond by the time Scott and I had excused ourselves to go work on our pitiful backlog of correspondence for you, dear reader.

The same fellow was now wide awake and much more himself, all grins and joviality, and more than willing to take us to the Thai border in the the family van, for a small price of course.

You see, dear reader, we were on our way to Thailand in order to cut across that fine country, saving us a little time, to make our way into Cambodia near the border crossing in the northwest, near Poipet. To do this, we would need to make our way at least as far as the city of Nakhon Ratchasima that night, and catch a bus for the border the next day.

At the border of Thailand, we bid Tao goodbye, and made our way into the line of people waiting to get out of Lao. My guess is that many of them were as sad as we were to leave. Lao had been a relaxing tour of the extremes. Lao bestowed on us a final gift, when Scott managed, while in line for his exit stamp, to connect to a free five minutes of wireless Internet, offered by Lao Telecom, and achieve a 400 kb/s upload rate while syncing his offline email activity. More points for an already AsiaWheeling-approved Lao.

Also, while in line, we ran into a Thai fellow who was interested in us and the Speed TRs. He asked where we were going and offered us a ride with him and his family who would be driving through none other than Nakhon Ratchasima on their way back to their home in Bangkok. “Will you have enough room for the bicycles?” we asked, showing him the folding technique, and attracting a huge audience in the line to exit Lao.

“Sure,” he replied. We told him we would wheel across the bridge, and if we overlapped on the other side we might take him up on the offer. This would also give Scott and me enough time to talk over our general impressions of the fellow, and decide if we would trust him. Lao let us out, no problem, even waiving the exit fee, for reasons of which we cannot right now be sure.

Wheeling across the bridge proved as fantastic an experience as we had remembered, with plenty of waiving of fees and smiling of officials. In line at Thai customs was our friend with the van, standing in an adjacent line with his family. He sent his daughter over to us with a message. She handed us a crumpled piece of paper, torn from a child’s notebook, with the fellow’s telephone number written in ball point pen. I motioned my thanks to our friend, and once we had officially re-entered Thailand, we decided to take out our phones and give him a call.

Then we remembered, Lao phones don’t call internationally. So we took out our old Thai sim cards and inserted them into our phones. I tried calling, but it seems my service had expired. So I ran over to a payphone, threw in about 60 cents in Baht and dialed. In an experience eerily similar to one we had during the pilot study, I plunged coins into the phone struggling against time and the limits of human communication only to be cut off in the middle of our conversation.

We knew our friend with the van was in the Thai border city of Nong Khai, so we saddled up and headed down the road looking for him. Not long into the ride, we began to despair; Nong Khai was not such a small place, and we were trying to find a needle in a haystack. When we were just about to give up, however, he somehow magically appeared behind us in a giant silver van, and as he pulled to the side of road, he also motioned for a nearby tuk tuk (the Lao and Thai version of the auto-rickshaw) to pull over as well.

And that was how we ended up in a family van with two folding bicycles, two sweaty members of AsiaWheeling, a Canadian couple, and a Thai family, headed for Bangkok. We stopped not long into the trip at a Vietnamese restaurant for some food. Scott and I bungled the ordering process and ended up with way too much. So laden with many white plastic bags full of delightfully diverse and fresh Vietnamese food, we sought solace in sharing with the rest of the van.

We drove on through the day and into the night, drilling our way into the heart of Isan. Isan is the name for the central and northeast parts of Thailand and also the name of the majority ethnic group in that country. Although in Bangkok you wouldn’t know it, Isan people and restaurants are seen as somewhat “country.”

When we finally arrived in Nakhon Ratchasima, it was well after dark. We did our best to compensate our man fairly for his kind transport, and headed to the bus station. As we had suspected, there was no overnight bus to the border; we would need to stay somewhere in this large city in the middle of Isan for the night.

We plugged our laptops into the wall and brought up our pdf copy of the Thailand Lonely Planet. It seemed there was a reasonably inexpensive hotel not far from here and… eh! The power was cut when a security guard unplugged our computer. It seems we would need to pay to use the electricity here.

Fair enough. We paid them and subsequently were forced to endure a drawn-out receipt writing, copying, verifying, and stamping process before we were finally able to get back to work. We took note of the location and name of the hotel and congratulated the officials on their fine work extracting money from us. With that, we hopped on the cycles and headed south into the city.

It was not a touristy town, and our presence was one of considerable interest to the many local youth who were whiling away their time on the street corners. The roads were very good and traffic was light, so we made short work of the few kilometers to the hotel. The hotel proved to be $10.00 for a night with A/C, so we registered immediately without bargaining. The room was clean, and low and behold, blessed with free wifi. Our first like this in Thailand.

We made a quick trip out to get a couple bowls of delightful Isan noodles, then retired to our hotel to have a quick Internet feast before our long day of traveling to Siem Reap, Cambodia, location of the fabled Angkor Wat.

My bag was safe and sound back at the guest house and in celebration, Motta and I decided to take a quick nap. Scott, bless his soul, was still under the weather, and still in the deterioration phase, which we were crossing our fingers would soon transition to the upswing. So for the time being it was once again Mr. Motta and I who heaved out on the Speed TRs. We ordered a couple of fancy banana coffee drinks at a nearby cafe, still in celebration mode, and, fueled by those, we wheeled over to a pharmacy and picked up some electrolytic salts for our dear Mr Norton.

Pi Mai Lao was in full swing by the time we hit the streets, and were it not for the plastic bags that mercifully protected our cell phones, our robots would have been completely destroyed during the first few minutes of the wheel.

As we wheeled north in search of sandwiches, we were repeatedly soaked to the bone. In fact the entire street on which our guesthouse was built, which ran along the water, had descended into an anarchy of water warfare. Everywhere, music was playing, people were screaming, and water and powder were flying. Crowds of young people in black-face rode around in the backs of pickup trucks, jumping up and down until the trucks bounced on their springs like careening jack-in-the-boxes.

It was all we could do to keep our sandwiches dry as we scarfed down lunch at a street stall. Great parades of people were marching through the streets with hand-painted paper banners, displaying the creatures and gods that represent the new year. The winners of last night’s beauty contest were riding on great floats through the streets, still looking gorgeous, though in my estimate overly painted and uncomfortable. Children roamed the streets with water guns, and it seemed like every hose in the city was running. We were soaked and re-soaked and powdered with tapioca. Each subsequent drying left my shirt starchier and starchier, slowly turning it into a kind of crusted armor, which repelled water for a moment before giving up and capitulating to new levels of water-logging.

Foreigners were participating too. Many of the visitors had brought their children, who seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the huge water fight. Older, twenty-something foreigners were also participating, many of whom had bought giant $10 or $15 squirt guns. I found their propensity for spraying a bloke in the eyes to be a little much.

We stopped once more for another cup of coffee from Stew’s favorite coffee fellow in Luang Prabang. For a little less than a dollar, that man will whip up a large paper cup filled with a mean blended coffee drink, made from ice, startlingly strong Lao coffee, and sweetened condensed milk. Quite tasty and invigorating.

As we wheeled on, we started to notice that the streets were emptying of merry makers. This meant that everyone was headed to this large sandy island in the middle of the Mekong for the sand stupa (a structure that houses Buddhist relics) and the Bosi ceremony, the traditional Lao ceremony of well wishing. The island was a new addition to the Luang Prabang landscape. With this 50-year drought, the river had fallen so low as to create a new land mass. The people of Luang Prabang had decided to take advantage of this during the festival. The Vietnamese president was even flying in for the occasion. The people were gathering to continue the party, build sand stupas, and complete the Bosi ceremony, at the end of which white cotton threads are bound around the wrists of the participants.

We piled onto a longboat along with a whole bunch of locals and putted across the Mekong.

On the sand island, we found ourselves once again immersed in a giant crowd, while some water was still being thrown (for instance, I found it impossible to buy a bottle of water and drink more than a third of it before a beautiful woman would come up to me and dump my bottle over my head or down my back). But the weapon of choice here was the white tapioca powder and the black-face. They were selling bags of the white powder everywhere, and I was soon covered with it.

We ran into Stewart’s interns on the island. They had bought some powder and were completely covered in a starchy encrustation. Now in a larger group, we began to roam the island, taking in the many stupas being constructed on the shore, and craning our necks to see into the Bosi ceremony. It seemed the ceremony was closed to the public. Inside, we could barely see a decidedly stuffy procession taking place, while well dressed dignitaries looked on or dozed, decidedly not covered in white powder.

Meanwhile, outside that strange vortex, the party raged on. They were firing homemade rockets into the air, smearing each other with black make-up, and jumping into the Mekong to cool off. We did all of the above, save the rockets.

There were also many traditional music groups marching around the island playing Lao music. Along with these, there was usually a fellow wandering through the surrounding crowd with a gourd filled with some kind of homemade firewater, doling out drams by pouring them into a little length of horn, out of which passers-by could drink.

Having thoroughly enjoyed the sand stupa party, we headed back to the other side of the river on another longboat.

Back on the other side, the madness was in full swing again, with giant speakers pumping deafening music into the streets, a savage upping of the water fight, and even impromptu stripping poles erected in the streets.

The extremes of experience, to be sure.

The next morning the three of us, Mr. Motta, Mr. Norton, and myself, awoke in our room at the View Khem Khong. The evening before, in an effort to make the two-person room more egalitarian for three people, we had overturned the  beds and spread the mattresses on the floor, allowing us to sleep three abreast, each man with his torso on one mattress and his legs on the other. This was marginally successful, but I dare say all three of us were quite glad to be awake and out of that strange arrangement. A better solution would need to be found for the next night

We made our way across the street from the View Khem Khong to have a seat on the banks of the Mekong. We shared some sandwiches and some very strong dark black coffee. So strong was the coffee, in fact, that it seemed completely impervious to milk. It was the kind that we run into from time to time on AsiaWheeling, which is brewed in a sock, this one for quite some time. A healthy shlop of full cream milk had essentially no effect on the color of the brew. But while the color stayed the same, the flavor was perhaps slightly softened, which was important, for while the strength was high, the quality was not.

Motta left us to attend to his affairs with the Dragon’s interns, and Scott and I climbed back on the cycles. The festival was still a few days off, but squadrons of Luang Prabang natives and even some foreigners were already convening on the street corners with buckets and the ladles one uses to wash one’s self in this part of the world, ready to soak any and all passers by. We pulled over and acquired some plastic bags with which to protect the contents of our pockets and pedaled into the fray.

It was quite intense. We were dripping wet by the time we made it into the central market. In addition to the stationary teams with large buckets and dippers, there were rogue squads of little boys and girls with Chinese-made super-soaker style squirt guns. Luckily it was boiling hot outside, so getting wet felt just fine. We also seemed to dry off in a matter of minutes. It was boiling hot and pretty dry. The sunlight was bright but comfortably diffuse, thanks to the thick shroud of smoke hanging over the region.

First things first. We needed to find a place to repair Scott’s wheel. At Stewart’s suggestion, we headed to the “Lao” part of town (the not touristy part of town) where we found a little shop that sported a welded metal shape that looked like it could be used to aid one in truing a wheel. A grinning old Lao man appeared from down the street  and greeted us. “Sabaidee.”

The Lao have a delightful habit of greeting one another when they meet. And they take such pleasure in it, elongating the word and stretching it out into a long honeyed syllable. “Saabaaaideee.” I took great pleasure in greeting people in Lao, for they lit up with such glee at the greeting and returned it so lusciously, nuanced with the understated song of Lao’s tonal language. Even a very small child would almost invariably return your greeting. Ah, Lao, really a gem.

Sure enough, the man was more than happy to help us with the wheel. While he went to town on the rim, Scott and I produced a canister of paint thinner we had purchased earlier, along with a couple of toothbrushes, and went to work on our derailleurs, cleaning large clods of the red dust of Tamil Nadu, whetted with Indian typewriter oil, from the inner workings of the machine.

About the time that we had gotten the derailleurs back to ship-shape, our fellow had finished with the wheel. He asked only about a dollar for the work, and we were thrilled to get back on the road.

Back in the old-city, the water fighting in the streets had taken on a new fierce intensity. It seemed it was time to arm ourselves. We wheeled back to the vicinity of our wheel truing shop, and haggled our way into three Chinese-made super-soaker style water guns.

With one of them strapped to the back of the cycle, and the other two loaded and in hand, Scott and I headed back into the fray.

Now we were able to participate in the action. Soon the game became spotting those people who were about to soak you, and stopping them in their tracks with a well aimed drive-by. Often though, I was still caught unaware, and was forced to whip around and fire a stream of retribution as we pedaled on, dripping wet. The traffic was very light and quite slow, which was great because wheeling and water gunning (I’m talking to you kids) is not advisable in any kind of technical wheeling situation.

Growing peckish, we ventured into an alleyway off the touristy main street to sample some spring rolls.

To finish off the snack, we enjoyed one of the famed Franco-Lao baguette sandwiches, with ham.

We met Mr. Motta at an Internet cafe that evening.

We had been soaked and dried over 100 times, and I felt as though my clothes had been laundered on my body. Stewart appeared with his interns, the three of them were a little wet around the edges as well, having arrived by longboat from across the river, and shortly thereafter been ambushed by a few water gangs of their own.

“It’s wild out there,” we agreed.

That evening, Scott began feeling under the weather, likely with the same virus that had laid me up during our eleventh hour bicycle repairs in Bangkok, so Stewart and I let him retire early, and went out night-wheeling together.

We called a dinner waypoint at a vast night street food market, where we ordered some fantastically delicious Mekong fish. The fish was gutted and its stomach filled with lemongrass. It was then sandwiched between two slivers of bamboo, which were secured tightly around the fish using bits of wire. The fish was then slow roasted over a charcoal fire. Paired with Lao eggplant mush, which one could dip bits of Mekong seaweed sheet into, the meal was to die for. Two frosty bottles of the local BeerLao, an incredibly tasty golden lager they produce in this magical country, completed the meal.

Since we had been working in an Internet cafe earlier, I had been carrying my backpack with me. Inside the backpack was my computer, my passport, a bunch of cash in about 20 different currencies, my Maui Jim sunglasses, my camera, a bottle of Michael’s Paraherbs and about everything else of value I’ve brought on this odyssey. When I got up to leave the wooden table where we had been eating fish I left my bag behind, leaning against a greasy stone wall in one of the largest and most crowded night markets in Lao. And I didn’t even notice.

After that little occurrence, we made our way to a night carnival being thrown in honor of the impending New Year. It was giant and sprawling, next to where we had purchased the Chinese battery charger the previous day. It was jam packed with Lao people, and on the center stage, a beauty contest was taking place to determine the most beautiful maid in all of Luang Prabang Province. The women on stage were quite beautiful, but covered in makeup. They also seemed uncomfortably packed and cinched into their costumes. A couple of giant spotlights, operated by two fellows hovering overhead chain smoking cigarettes in the basket of a cherry picker, played over the women. I felt very aware of the differences between Lao and Western concepts of beauty as we walked through the crowd. Many of the women  walking by in tee-shirts and jeans appeared to me much more beautiful than what was happening on stage. But, I guess, there’s no accounting for taste….

We wiled away the rest of the evening playing five- and ten-cent carnival games, such as throwing darts at huge banks of balloons. We also tried our hand raging around in groaning and twisted bumper cars while thundering Thai techno-dance music played in the background. The bumper car rink was incredible, festooned with many flashing lights, and pulsing neon shapes. The rink reeked of ozone. The carts had no throttle and no seat belts; they were just always going, powered buy a giant sparking snarl of wire that extended to the electrified ceiling above us.  To reverse, one simply turned the wheel far enough to begin thrusting backward.  Depending on which part of the ceiling you were touching and collecting power from, the bumper car would vary in speed from very slow to downright breakneck. A giant painted sign proudly exclaimed “TUBULAR” in English characters above the rink.

All at the carnival appeared to be in stupendously high spirits, screaming and laughing and generally letting loose in preparation for the impending New Year. We wheeled home feeling like kings and generally enamored with Lao. Meanwhile, my poor yellow bag languished in the ether, lost and forgotten.