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.

Our boat was leaving at 7:00 am, but we were told to be ready for a van to drive us to the docks at 6:15. In retrospect it might have been more prudent to wheel the 10 km to the boat dock. But not knowing exactly how to get there and capitulating to our affinity for sleep, we decided to take the van.

At 6:00 am we were in the comfort of our room at the Mandalay Inn, scarfing down cheap German corn flakes from two small hotel water cups, when there was a knock on our door.

It was one of the Mandalay’s staff members. He informed us that the bus was waiting for us, and we proceeded to finish our cereal and hurry down. By 6:15 when we walked out the door, the bus was already filled with sleepy and grumpy looking tourists. The driver proceeded to unload all their stuff from the back of the van in order to best fit the Speed TRs, and the grumpiness level increased.

People on board were worried that they were going to miss the bus; they were tired, grumpy, and about to spend the whole day on a boat together, so would do well getting over it. And they did, but not before the tension in the van reached a near breaking point, as one straggling German fellow sauntered up 20 minutes late, claiming ignorance of the 6:15 departure.

The tension began to soften as we pulled onto the road. We stopped once on the way to fill up a tire with air, and I looked back to see the rest of the passengers snoozing happily with Scott in the back. When we finally pulled up to the dock, it was more of a cluster of fishing boats than a passenger ferry dock. It consisted of some bamboo planks next to a medium-sized open air fish and seaweed market. I scanned the area for the boat that had been depicted at the ticket office. It was nowhere to be found. Interesting. I climbed out of the van and went around back to help the driver unload the bikes.

The driver began vehemently working to extract some sort of extra bike charge out of us. The man was unabashedly slimy about it. Though he had previously referenced a fixed “bike charge” of $5.00 per bike, he quickly reduced his price to $1.00 for both bikes when I offered.

We followed the rest of our groggy fellow tourists down the sandy banks to a small boat, which for lack of a better name, I shall call “The Minnow.” She was probably eight meters in length and about two meters across.

A large metal awning covered the passenger compartment, which consisted of two long narrow wooden benches.  Behind the passenger compartment was the engine from a Nissan pickup truck that had been retrofitted to power the boat.

The same old Nissan steering wheel was fixed to a large metal pipe, through which ran a number of wires leading back to the rudder and propeller unit. The propeller and rudder themselves were another three or four meters from the rear of the boat, held at this distance by an intricate set of welded pipes, which also served as a frame for two rudders.

She was a lady to be sure. Scott and I climbed on and loaded our bags into a bin behind the driver’s seat, where they were tied down with rusty cord and covered with a few bits of tarp to keep the spray out. The boat men — there were two of them — helped us strap the Speed TRs to the roof of the passenger compartment, using our Sri Lankan bungees to secure them.

We climbed down into the passenger compartment. Though one was forced to sit rather upright, there was plenty of room for eight passengers. And there was actually a tiny door, no more than a meter high and less than a meter wide, which said WC, at the back of the boat. No lie there. No one dared venture in.

We were just getting ready to go when a man appeared, carrying a giant wad of tickets, which suggested he played some administrative role in the operation. In bits of English, he proceeded to explain to us that we would need to buy another $20.00 ticket for each of the bikes. The fact that the bikes would need their own tickets was, of course, a blatant and ridiculous attempt at over-charging us. We had not even paid $20.00 for our own tickets. But the guy was a real stickler, frowning at us, selectively understanding our communications, waving his stack of tickets around like a pom-pom, and holding up the departure of the boat. We, of course, didn’t want to pay him anything and kept explaining to him that there was no bike charge, pretending that we had confirmed this with external parties, even trying to change the subject or pursue other technicalities about our tickets or the nature boat. All was to no avail. Finally, we felt it better to just get out of there, so we laid into bargaining. And eventually pulled away from the dock paying $2.50 per bike. Another case of highway robbery here in Cambodia.

As we, dear reader,  discussed before, Southeast Asia is experiencing one of the worst droughts in its entire history. So the water level was low. Very low. We got stuck in the mud twice just trying to get out of the small canal that had been dug to increase the size of the dock. Each time we got stuck, our driver would instruct the other boatman to get out a long pole which widened into a kind of mini-paddle at one end and plunge the pole into the muck. Meanwhile, he would gun the Nissan engine sending plumes of mud flying into the air, often soaking passing fishermen with rust colored muck. Eventually we would depart, and the fishermen would simply roll off their boats and plop into the river, washing themselves clean, and then climb back into their tippy little crafts.

When we crossed the Tonle Sap, it was about a meter and a half deep at its deepest point, but you would have no idea as you crossed it, for in terms of latitude and longitude, it is a giant sea of a lake, and the water is a totally opaque sedimentary brown. We ramped up to cruising speed as we made our way across the lake. Soon we were totally out of sight of the shore.

The Tonle Sap is a very interesting lake. As Scott snoozed inside the boat, I climbed out on the roof to read a little about it on the WikiReader. It is the largest lake in Southeast Asia and is the source of 60% of Cambodia’s protein intake. It is also one of the most bio-diverse ecosystems on the planet. The muddy waters are astoundingly rich with life. As we rode, we saw hundreds upon hundreds of people fishing in the river, with nets, lines, and even their bare hands.

Soon we had crossed the lake and found our way into a section of floating villages. These must be what our great helmsman was talking about. As we entered each one, our driver would slow down, and I would climb once again onto the roof, or hang off the side of the boat to see the action. Most of the locals looked at our boat full of white people with distrust, but a few were willing to smile and call out greetings.

We had not yet had any coffee that day, and I was beginning to regress into a primordial torpor. Luckily I had a Red Bull Energy Shot laying in my bag. I sucked the thing down, grimaced, and wiped my face with my sleeve. Whenever I drink one of those potions, I feel like Han Solo drinking a strange alien liquor.

Somewhere around the third floating village, we started picking up passengers. Now each time we entered a town, we would pull up to the local passenger hut, which usually had a bunch of boats parked out front. People would emerge in strikingly dressy clothes. These were villagers in their Sunday best, getting ready to head into Battambang for a little bit of the old “Bright Lights, Big City.” They carried little luggage, but sometimes many small children. Our driver would negotiate our boat reasonably close to the dock, then wait as the new passengers picked their way out to us, walking or hopping from boat to boat, until they had made it far enough to be picked up by one of the many 12-year-old boys who were operating little wooden water taxis, which they propelled using smaller versions of the large pole/oar device that our boatmen used to get us out of the mud in which we frequently got stuck.

Perhaps our 12th time getting mildly stuck, our driver attempted to turn the rudder when it was submerged deep in the mud. The rudder and some parts of the pipe frame around it snapped. Now the entire rudder/propeller contraption rattled terribly, and both the man poling and the driver were required to work full time controlling The Minnow.

Luckily, we were able to find a village just around the next bend, where there was a boat repair and makeshift welding station. A number of men took off their shoes and climbed into the water. First they took a few long metal poles, and began to use them for leverage in bending the metal of the cage back into alignment. With that done, they called over to a one-armed man who put on a pair of King-of-Thailand-style sunglasses and grabbed a length of wire and large alligator clip, which he plugged into an electrical generator. He then perched himself, balanced on a boat next to ours, and took out a length of wire. He clamped the wire between the jaws of the electrified alligator clip. He took another clip (presumably of opposite charge) and attached it to the frame of the boat.

Now whenever he made contact with the frame of the Minnow’s rudder, a huge shower of sparks would fly into the air, and some red hot melted metal would be left behind.

With that problem welded away, we kept moving upriver, picking up more and more passengers, all of whom were paying far less than we had paid for even just the Speed TRs. Around 1:00 pm, we stopped at a floating restaurant and convenience store.

Scott and I purchased some more coffee, thanks be to Jah, and a couple plates of rice and boiled chicken and lake-weeds. It was delicious.  From there, we kept going up the river. As we putted farther and farther up, the river got narrower and narrower. We began to get stuck more and more often. One time all the men on the boat had to take off their shoes, get out, and push us through the mud.

Then suddenly, we had stopped. The guys were tying the boat to the banks and we were asked to climb up a ladder made of sticks, then catch our luggage as it was hoisted up to us. We piled our stuff on the grass and looked around. This was certainly not Battambang, but none the less everyone was getting off. Where were we?

Well, at least part of it was a cabbage field. There was also a small grass hut, under which a few locals lazed, escaping the searing afternoon sun. There was also a single medium-sized Toyota Hilux pickup truck. People were beginning to load themselves into the truck. A couple of the boatmen began to do the same with our luggage. Scott and I were still wrapping our minds around the situation, when we looked up to notice that all our luggage was on the truck and wrapped up with tarpaulins. The entire boatload of people was crammed onto the vehicle as well. How would we fit? More importantly, how would the Speed TRs fit?

We briefly considered unfolding the Speed TRs and riding whatever distance this pickup was about to traverse, but in light of our lack of conclusive data as to the actual length of the journey, the fact that our luggage was already well stowed and tied down underneath a tarpaulin, and the certainly dubious quality of the road, we chose to squeeze into the back of the truck with all the rest.

The fellows in the grass hut began to stir, and produced a great length of cord made of cut up truck tires. They used this to strap the Speed TRs to the back of the truck.

They did a good job, and I felt confident they would not come loose. The elastic nature of the tire strips, however, did mean that the bikes did a fair bit of bouncing around. We crossed our fingers and put our faith in the cycle’s fine Chinese craftsmanship.

I climbed in and essentially dove into the center of the crowd, allowing myself to be slowly sucked in, as though in quicksand. As everyone squirmed around and shifted their personal items, I eventually found a place amidst the mass of bodies. Scott took a seat on the side of the truck bed, with his feet inside the pool of humans. However, as we drove, the roller coaster-like quality of the road, the many giant potholes we were forced to traverse, and the giant low-hanging branches that threatened to sweep those in the highest positions right out of the truck, forced him to eventually join me on the ground.

We rode on for about three quarters of an hour. My knees were about to explode from the strange position they had worked their way into. Each time we went over a bump, my head grew closer and closer to whacking one of our fellow passengers in the crotch. Extreme.

But then we stopped at a roadside stand and everyone climbed out for a little break. I thanked the powers that be for relief from the knee pain. We strolled around and stretched a bit. All in all, the entire group was in rather high spirits. Certainly today had been an adventure.

Another 30-minute ride brought us to the outskirts of Battambang, where the boat would have dropped us off, had the water level not been so low. We were instantly surrounded by a horde of touts offering us tuk-tuk rides, hotel discounts, bus tickets, drugs, and prostitutes. We were able to silence most of them by merely unfolding the Speed TRs. The now quiet horde placed their hands behind their backs and watched patiently and intently as we put the pedals back on the bikes, and removed the protective padding from the rear transmission. We bid them farewell and took off into the city.

We had no idea how this city was laid out, but we knew that we needed to find the bus station. We stopped from time to time and asked people where the bus station was, using pantomime and various languages. All attempts were inexplicably unsuccessful. Finally, we stopped by the side of the road, and bought two cans of Coca-Cola from a nearby lady. My stomach was making a recovery, but for some reason the Coke was still appealing.

She pulled them out of a cooler full of murky gray water and went to great lengths to clean a thick layer of slime off  each can before giving them to us. She did not overcharge us, and was more than happy to let us set up shop on the curb near her stand to investigate the Lonely Planet PDFs on Scott’s machine.

We looked into the distance and identified a large statue of Shiva in the center of a roundabout. This allowed us to ascertain our exact position. From there, we were able to make our way easily to a delightful Chinese business hotel (we are, by the way huge fans of the Chinese business hotel), which offered us a double AC room for  $10.00 a night. It also happened to be right across the street from the bus depot.

The pieces were falling into place. We purchased a ticket the rest of way (about 6 hours) to Phnom Penh for $4.00 a person, and confirmed that there would be no bicycle charge.

With all that done, it seemed fitting that we wheel Battambang. And so we did.

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.

Sim City 2000 rang out, just like it always does, calling us back into the world of the living. We obliged, knowing that if we did not hustle we might miss the 5:30 am bus from Nakhon Ratchasima to the border.

The sun was still not up, so we wheeled through the Thai night toward the station. Traffic was very light, and the streets were essentially deserted. As we drew nearer to the station, we started to see fellows on motor bikes coming in from the country, already in uniform for their jobs as desk clerks or factory workers. We made it to the station just in time to load our things on the bus, buy our tickets from a woman who had erected a little wooden stall next to the platform, and pay a little $3.00 graft “bicycle fee” that we were quite certain did not technically apply to the folding cycles. We considered it a $3.00 donation to the cheerful women who were overseeing the operation, and feeling quite triumphant, relaxed into our seats.

I slept so soundly I did not even notice when the bus attendant brought water and cookies around to all aboard, and only barely noticed when the bus was suddenly loaded completely full to the hilt (I’m talking people packed in, standing in the aisles) and then subsequently unloaded a few stops later, in a tiny place called Ban Dan. A little more snoozing and suddenly we were the last passengers on the bus and were being dropped off at the giant border market called the Cambodian Friendship Market.

The market was sprawling with hundreds if not thousands of small stalls selling all kinds of goods for exchange between Cambodia and Thailand. A section of the market near the center was belching smoke, indicating to us that it was either a smelter or a food court.

Either way, it would be of interest to AsiaWheeling, so we threw on our bags and unfolded the speed TRs.

There was a fellow on a pink child’s bicycle across the street yelling at us as we unfolded the cycles and started into the market. As we made our way in, the fellow on the bike came up to us. He explained in nearly immaculate English that recent changes in Cambodian law had closed this border crossing’s visa-upon-entry station, and that we would need to get a visa issued on this side.

We were dubious, but a few factors lead us to consider his argument as truth:
a) on our previous entry into Cambodia, there had been no visa-upon-entry station
b) we saw many of these visa outfits, and they all seemed to be packed with people (with foreigners getting visas)
c) we had been too long traveling in the land of the honest salesman

So we forked over about 150% of the cost of a visa-upon-entry and our passports. He helped us to fill out the necessary forms, our entry and exit cards, and ran across the border on a motor bike to get our visas.

We drew the line when he tried to tell us that without a Cambodian ID card, we would not be able to buy sim cards across the border, and that we could only buy them from him for $15.00 a pop.

Armed with our newly issued Cambodian visas, we headed toward the border, by way of a Thai-Cambodian friendship chicken satay stand. We ordered a bunch of chicken grilled on a stick, with two plastic bags of sticky rice to accompany them. This food was tasty enough, and effective in its primary mission of sustaining our energy.

Thailand let us out with little fuss. While sweating profusely in line, we ran into a German/Hong Kong/Israeli fellow who agreed to share a cab to Siem Reap with us. We also ran into the visa-upon-entry counter, which was completely operational. Well, you can’t win them all, can you?

When we finally had made our way through a large stretch of casinos, catering to Thai who wish to get around the prohibition of gambling in Thailand (express buses from Bangkok to here are called the Gambler’s Express), we found ourselves at the health check station.

Here we filled out a form indicating that we were in good health, then headed to the passport control line, which was very slow; once we finally made it to the front, it was quite straightforward. They took a picture of my face, checked my visa, and let me into the country.

On the other side of the border, I bid goodbye to our German/etc. fellow as he climbed onto a tourist shuttle to the bus station. I waited for Scott to finish his processing, passing the time by doing folding bicycle schtick with the many touts who were interested in providing me with everything from cab rides, to hotel rooms, to prostitutes. When Scott finally emerged from passport control, we discussed our options. We had been on a bus for a while, so wheeling to the station, rather than taking the tourist bus sounded more our speed. We had told our German/etc. friend that we would meet him there. Little did we know, however, it was the last we would see of the man.

We wheeled across the city, periodically asking for directions to the bus terminal. We got some strange responses, which appeared to be sending us in two different directions simultaneously, but we decided to use the Indian method of averaging all responses to produce the verdict. So we rode on, straight through and out of Poipet, into the countryside.

It was hot, and we were going through our water at an alarming rate. This would prove to be the theme of our time here in Cambodia. So far, I would deem it the most dehydrating country of the entire trip. Even when we stopped for more water, we were told to keep going, only four more kilometers ahead.

Cambodia is flat as a pancake. We rolled along on a well maintained road, lined with new looking electric lines. It was brutally sunny, mildly humid, and the landscape looked dry. If you had plopped me here out of the blue and told me this was Nebraska during the summer, I could easily have been convinced.

But the real question was: who would build a bus station way out here in the countryside? What cruel joke were the locals playing on us? We let these questions whirl around in our heads, but kept riding. The voices were promptly silenced when, low and behold, we arrived at a giant bus depot. A totally deserted bus depot.

We parked the bikes and got off, feeling something like characters in a zombie flick. We wandered into the empty interior of the depot. Almost all the shops were closed, including the ticket counter and the information counter. There were a few people wandering around doing nothing in particular, zombie-like. Interactions with them proved that some of them spoke a bit of English.

We were able to ascertain that there were two bus stations in this city. And for reasons that still remain a mystery, the Poipet officials switch between the two stations on a daily basis. One station is right in the Poipet city center. The other is this one that we had managed to find our way to.

Luckily, everyone in the station seemed to be friends with a guy who would be willing to drive us to Siem Reap. And after a fair bit of bargaining with the crowd, all present proceeded to completely forget the agreed upon price, upon the arrival of the cab driver. Scott and I looked at each other. We hadn’t really made much progress in the bargaining, so we just capitulated and climbed into the cab.

Our cab driver was a great chap, and the cab was reminiscent of a certain Toyota Camry that my friend Joe had driven in high school. I felt comfortable in the car. The cab had no radio, but proved to offer great acoustics for the ukulele. As we drove,  I sat in the back and played most of the songs I knew. We were beginning to notice a peculiar thing about Cambodia: all the cars were Toyota Camrys. And while I am, of course, mildly exaggerating here, the percentage of Camrys really was astounding, likely 90%. Any reader who can shed light on this is most heartily invited to do so in the comments.

We stopped for petrol and provisions at a road stall along the way, and watched the pump work as the hose snaked through our Speed TRs into the back of the car.

By the time we finally reached Siem Reap, the sun was beginning to sink low in the sky. On the ride we had selected a hotel from our Lonely Planet pdf and pulled up to find it quite a beautiful structure.  It was on a gravel road in the city center, and went by the name of The Mandalay Inn. It proved to be staffed by strikingly friendly and capable characters, to be totally affordable, spotlessly clean, and featured free wifi. An instant seal of approval.

That evening we wheeled into the city in search of food. We realized that we had not eaten since the friendship chicken, and were well past the point of blood-sugar-related madness. We finally sat down at a restaurant, which was in no rush to serve us, lacked the ability to make many of the things on the menu, but despite all, won us over with its charming staff, strange music, succulent Khmer curried shrimp, strange fruit smoothies, and ridiculous interpretation of the hamburger (called the Crazy Beef Burger –which Scott instantly re-dubbed the “Mad Cow” Burger).

From there, we figured there was just enough light left to take an evening sunset wheel.  We chose a direction that we guessed was not on the way to the Angkor complex, and began wheeling. Cambodia was beautiful; and the roads were smooth as silk.

We had not been able to attain speeds like this in some time, due to either bad roads or thick traffic. It felt fantastic to just let the Speed TRs eat.

And they were hungry. Once the sun began to hang low enough, we circled back, finding ourselves once again on the main road that had led to Siem Reap from Poipet. Traffic was thicker here, but manageable. We wheeled by giant hotel after giant hotel, finally finding our way back to the Mandalay Inn just as the sun ducked below the horizon.

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.

Sim City 2000 rang out once again, calling the AsiaWheeling team to action. We didn’t even grab a cup of coffee, we just hopped on the cycles, bungee-ing  our poor Speed TR’s wounded front wheel onto the back seat of Scott’s  rental bike. Our first stop was this place, Top Cycle, rumored to be staffed by a knowledgeable Frenchman by the name of Willy.

It was strange to see Scott on this huge-wheeled rental cycle. The wheels seemed so big for a seat that was so low. I was troubled by this new problem with Scott’s bike so soon after our ill-fated adventures in Bangkok, but it felt good to wheel. And, man-o-man were we wheeling hard. A good hard wheel always has a way of calming me down, putting things into perspective and focus. Paired with a good cup of coffee, the cocktail is downright miraculous.

Well, the coffee was yet to come, but by that time we’d arrived at Top Cycle. We thanked our lucky stars to find them open for business. When a Caucasian fellow came out the front door, Scott asked “Are you Willy?”

“Yes,” he answered in a thick French accent. We explained our predicament, and Willy frowned down at the Speed TR’s dynamo hub. He began to unscrew the lid of the thing, murmuring in the way only a Frenchman can when wrapping his mind around a new mechanism. Very early on, he identified the bearing was indeed the problem, as our fellow yesterday had hypothesized, and seemed to think it was a reasonably standard size bearing.

“I think I can fix it, but this wheel is very complex… I also will need to go to the Chinese market and buy a bearing. Come back this evening. Maybe 4:30.”

Scott and I could barely contain our glee, and headed off in search of celebratory breakfasting, coffee, and some unexpectedly free wheeling.

What had yesterday seemed like an insurmountable problem was so quickly solved! Once again the gods of wheeling had shown us mercy.

Unfortunately, now it was a holiday Sunday, and when we stopped at a local hotel to ask directions we were told COPE and MAG were closed. Without the convenient folding capabilities of the Speed TR, catching a bus to the gardens that Motta had suggested we wheel would also be tough. I guess some good old-fashioned unplanned wheeling was the move, then.

Feeling like kings, we headed toward the Mekong and rode along it, making our way out of town. Scott’s bike featured a special passenger seat over the rear tire, which when not occupied could be used for extended rough rider calls. In honor of a good friend of ours who goes by the peculiar name, G-Money, we indulged…

We wheeled out of town and into a neighboring village perched on the banks of the Mekong, where we took advantage of Scott’s rental bike’s large front basket to purchase a gross of people’s waters. From there we took the road until it petered out into more of a dirt path, where we stopped to drink water and chart our next waypoint.

From there, we wheeled away from the river, up into the modest industrial quarter of Vientiane. We passed the giant factory where all Lao’s cigarettes are made, and for a while the entirety of the countryside stank like a humidor. Past there we called a random lichtenschtein onto farm roads, where we promptly got lost.

By this point, the roads were made mostly of packed dirt, with large inexplicable puddles forming major hazards from time to time. We decided to rely on our compass and the kindness of strangers in an attempt to cut through this stretch of agricultural land back toward the city.

Using the aforementioned aids, we headed onto ever smaller and more treacherous tangled Lao farm roads. My Speed TR did an admirable job of this totally off-road wheeling, fording large mud puddles, and climbing through uphill stretches over loose gravel and rotting farm waste.

Soon enough the road started to get bigger, and traffic started to appear in the opposite direction. We had made it. We stopped for a celebratory snack at a strange convenience store. I had a milk-box; Scott had a strawberry chocolate ice-cream. The convenience store seemed to have been erected in proximity to and in preparation for a giant real estate development that was springing up out of the rice paddies. It seemed this land would soon be agricultural no longer. As dirt turned to gravel, and gravel to road, we made our way back to that good old hamlet, Vientiane.

Willy was waiting with a smile with our wheel. “Good as new,” he explained. He expressed some interest in the dynamo hub. “It’s full of very strong magnets,” he explained, “and though it’s got a large coil inside, it is not sealed.” I asked what he meant by this, and he explained that the interior of the wheel is merely covered by an aluminum cab, with no rubber gaskets to ensure water does not get inside. Despite this, he assured us that the interior of the wheel looked very clean and tidy, except for the broken bearing. This was not too surprising, since we had just bought that wheel brand new to replace the one destroyed in Scott’s accident.

Though only one of the bearings was broken, he replaced both. When we asked why, he said that the default bearing in the wheel is a Chinese knock off. He showed us the bearings that he put in. The brand was called NSK, and they said “Japan” on the side. Most good bearings come from Japan, Germany, or Switzerland, Willy explained. Here was your bearing, he held up an almost identical looking bearing, “NBK” it said on it. “This is a Chinese copy bearing.”

Interesting… perhaps Scott’s collision with Motta in the lead-up to Pi Mai Lao had had nothing to do with the bearing failing… more experimentation would be needed…

Though we could not test it right away, once we returned to the Heuan Lao  Guesthouse we found the dynamo even still generated electricity. Top Cycle? Giant AsiaWheeling seal of approval.

The journey from Luang Prabang to Vientiane would be no small feat.  The buses would no doubt be crammed due to the Pi Mai Lao holiday, and with no bus schedule to speak of, it was simply the luck of the draw for when we would leave and what bus we would find ourselves on.  After an incredible downpour, which took place while we were nesting in a cafe, we took to the soaked streets and wheeled up to the bus station.  There, we bought a ticket for the next bus and folded up the cycles; the bus would be leaving in 20 minutes.

The bus was packed, but it seemed we had received the two best seats in the house, right in front, despite having purchased the last two tickets available.  Together, we marveled at the freight loading process in which giant wire frames, motorcycles, and other cargo were hoisted to the bus roof rack.

Of course the journey would not be complete without mechanical and natural mishaps on what we referred to as “the best road in all of Lao,” a winding collection of switchbacks and washed-out embankments, 430 km through the jungle.  The bus stopped occasionally for the crew to inspect the fuse box.  When the bus was moving, the driver peered through the windshield, seeing no farther than a few feet in front of him because of the thick misty fog that saturated the mountain air.  The temperature difference between the interior and exterior of the bus caused the windshield to fog up from within as well, warranting a full-time crew member to wipe down the windshield so the driver could see.

But alas, by the grace of Lao, we arrived the next morning safe and sound before sunrise.  Coffee and a small feast seemed to be in order, so we ordered two fried whole baby chickens, rice, and the black gold we were so very much in need of.

Upon finishing, we wheeled south to the Mekong to scan the riverside for guesthouses.  We passed the great French style archway, as morning joggers stayed honest around the park.

Wheeling a bit farther, we came across some fellows transporting pork in what seemed like the Chinese part of town.

Finally, after traipsing back and forth past embassies, we ventured down an alley and found the perfect guesthouse, which featured a large brickwork project in progress.

After settling down and unfurling ourselves in the room, we snapped into action on the day’s first order of business: Project K9.  Our very own head of marketing and newly christened member of the team had requested “elephant” goods that could be worn or placed in the home for good luck.

In Luang Prabang, we had located items that satisfied these requirements.

First, was an elephant mask, strikingly god-like in nature.

Second was a handbag with an engraved elephantine seal,

and finally, a  peach-orange canvas bag featuring an illustrated elephant.

We wheeled to the post office, cargo strapped to our side.

There we began wrapping the goods.

Of course, the postal workers were sweet and friendly, helping us weigh and wrap the package.

After sending it off, we hit the road.  Vientiane was crying out to be re-explored.

We had a lot of waypoints, which had been suggested to us by the knowledgeable and judicious Mr. Stewart Motta, and only a couple days in which to hit them all. Scheduled for that day were COPE and MAG, two organizations dedicated to bettering Lao, by addressing problems created by the gargantuan bombing of that country by the US, and other destruction associated with the Laotian Civil War.

Few people know that Lao is the most bombed country in the world. To be precise: more conventional explosives, by weight, were dropped on Lao during the US-Vietnam War than any other country in history, including Germany and Japan during WWII, or Vietnam itself during that ugly conflict. Many of them still remain unexploded in the landscape, and much of the population of Lao that survived the bombing did so by spending years of their lives in caves in the mountains while fire and thunder fell from the sky onto their beautiful homeland. And all this while, Lao was (at least officially) respected by the US as a neutral country in the conflict.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail Through Lao, Vietnam, and Cambodia

The recent history of Lao gets even hairier when you consider that in addition to extensive bombing in the south and northeast of Lao, the US CIA had taken up the old French habit of organizing small armies of Lao to fight against Communist forces in the region. You see, dear reader, the NVA was supplying its southern troops (also called the Vietcong) via an amazingly resilient supply route called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This was a treacherous mountainous road that snaked through Vietnam, Lao, and Cambodia, and was the main lifeline of the indefatigable Communist army. The US felt it could win the war if it destroyed this supply line, which it tried and failed at, using all kinds of war machines. All this occurred at a time of internal strife and civil war in Lao, as they were too thrown asunder with the sudden end of French Imperial rule. The large and violent American part of this struggle is commonly referred to as “the secret war”, and at its height featured what some estimate to have been the busiest airport in the world at the time: a secret air strip operated by a fake civilian airline called Air America, run by the CIA. Originally, the US was training Lao Royalist troops, mostly to aid  the French who were still fighting for control over Lao against wave after wave of Vietnamese troops.

Later on, after the French were soundly defeated by the Viet Cong, we began to take over more and more of their role, paying the salaries of the anticommunist part of the Lao army, and flying all kinds of equipment around using that puppet airline. The entire story is just too long and too unbelievable to fully recount here. Instead, I recommend the Wikipedia page, and also, if you can get your hands on it, a documentary called “The  Most Secret Place on Earth,” which AsiaWheeling is hard at work acquiring for distribution to you, dear reader. Also probably worth saying, before closing this fascinating tangent, is that this secret CIA-funded proxy war is only the second largest CIA-funded proxy war in US history. The largest was the Soviet-Afghan war… but that’ll have to wait for AsiaWheeling 3.0.

Meanwhile, in present day Lao, we were wheeling the streets of Vientiane in search of breakfast and a few bottles of what we were coming to call “the people’s water.” The people’s water is commonly the cheapest way to buy bottled water in Lao and Thailand.

It is packaged in semi-translucent malleable plastic rip-top bottles, and if you buy enough of it at once, it ends up being only a few cents for each bottle. Finding the people’s water was easy; and after drinking a few of them down, we were ready to find noodles, which also in time presented themselves to us, after a fair bit of wandering, in the form of the Chinese style of chewy freshly stretched street noodles. Ah noodles, the fuel of AsiaWheeling.

Not long into our wheel, Scott’s bicycle started to complain somewhat more vehemently in the front wheel-piece. Though we had much to do, we decided we had better stop and take a closer look. We flipped Scott’s Speed TR upside down on the side of the road and began to spin the front wheel by hand and scrutinize it. It would randomly emit this pinging noise, however, as far as we could tell, nothing was in the way of the wheel or the spokes;  we concluded it must be the hub of the wheel itself.

Feeling dark and troubled, we climbed back on the Speed TRs and went off in search of a Lao bike mechanic. Soon we found one who was really more of a bike parts dealer. He agreed to take a look. We spun the wheel around and he began to peer into its depths. Not too long into his inspection, he decided that the explanation lay in a certain scuffed up bit of the fender that he claimed was being pulled into the wheel as it spun.

It was a strange diagnosis, but we were glad to hear it was not a big deal; we bent the fender a bit and kept wheeling. Somewhere into the wheel, the noise started up again at new heights of sound and fury. It was definitely not the fender. We flipped the bike over again and removed the wheel. This time, with the wheel some feet away from the rest of the bicycle, Scott was able to spin it while I was holding the axle pegs, and it still made the sound. This was bad… something inside the dynamo hub was very sick…

So we returned to the same mechanic, and began to remove the wheel, bringing it over to him. The man spoke no English, but communication seemed fluid enough as we mimed and pointed to bits of the wheel. He seemed to immediately realize his previous mistake, and grabbed a few wrenches to began to tear the wheel apart. Some way into the process, he discovered confirmation of a new diagnosis. He looked up at us.

“Bad bearing.”

This was as much English as the man would ever speak to us. We’ll never know how much he spoke or understood, but we did buy a bike lock from him as a kind of thank you, and to relieve us of the constant hassle of the Indian lock we had bought, which had gradually grown a number of sharp pointy spikes, threatening to slice all those who dared use it.  We named the new lock “Cambodia,” since we had been told to lock the bikes more securely while in Cambodia. We named the old lock “Barack Obama,” after his highness.

All new locks and final diagnoses aside, we had a problem on our hands, and it was time to solve it.

Sometimes, dear reader, AsiaWheeling has to switch into Crisis Mode. Now was one of those times. It was still a holiday here in Lao. Tomorrow was Sunday, and we were planning to leave for Cambodia on Monday. This meant we needed to fix this wheel tomorrow.

Over one of those delightful Lao baguette sandwiches, we began to hatch a plan.

Tonight we would establish and draw up a map of all the cycle shops in Vientiane. Tomorrow we would rent a bicycle from the Heuan Lao Guesthouse and strap Scott’s wounded wheel to the back of it. We would then wheel the city in search of:

a) A bike shop that would repair the wheel
b) A bike ship that would sell us a new 74-mm (20-inch) wheel, or hub. In the event that we could not find these, we would move to plan c)

c) Go to Bangkok the next day and refit the old hub left at ProBike, the local Dahon retailer, to the new rim.

A little Googling suggested that our best bet would be a fellow by the name of Willy, who worked at a bike shop not far from the parts guy who had diagnosed our problem. With maps drawn, and fingers crossed we reserved a rental bike for the next day, set our alarm for sunrise, and prayed.

The previous night, Motta had opted to sleep with his old host family across the Mekong, in a nearby village. He returned to Luang Prabang the next morning toting his surrogate little brother. We were quick to give him a squirt gun.

Scott was finally recovering from his two odd days of illness, and while he executed the last bits of pulling himself together, Stew and I took off into the city. It was early, so many of the merry-makers were still setting up their water battle stations. Stew rode a full-size rental bike, which had a seat attached to it. His host brother had set up shop on the seat, and as we rode, we would call out potential targets to him and he would spray them down. The little tyke showed amazing promise with his use of the weapon. Having never owned a squirt gun before, he was very quick to learn to lead his target, and how to arc the stream to increase his range. A smart kid to be sure.

When we finally got a call from Scott, we returned to the guest house to meet up with him.

By then the madness of the day before had once again begun to reign, and we found ourselves pinned down on the steps of our guest house, where they turned on the hose, leaving it to drain into a large metal basin from which we could refill dippers to be used in soaking those who drove or walked by.

Without planning to do so, we had now established our own little Pi Mai Lao battle station. We took great pleasure in representing the home front, and managed to become quite soaked, covered in tapioca and black-faced in the process. It was glorious.

We bid goodbye to our little friend, and headed out wheeling on our own. We found more of the same, but with Scott back in action and along for the ride, we can present it to you with a richness of imagery that was previously unavailable, so perhaps I had best let the images speak for themselves.

We rode that evening to the bus station to attempt to purchase tickets for the next day back to the capital city of Vientiane. As we rode, we began to notice that Scott’s bike was emitting strange noises, almost like something was intermittently hitting the spokes of his cycle. When we stopped we were unable to diagnose anything, so we decided to monitor it and keep wheeling. At the bus station, we found that all the scheduled busses from Luang Prabang were booked for the next few days, presumably by other Pi Mai merry-makers on their way home. We would need to show up at the bus station and get on another one of the unscheduled-type buses that we had used to make the original journey. Fine by us – that’s why the AsiaWheeling mobile pharmacy includes anti-anxiety medication. Scott and I wheeled back to town and feasted at the same night market that had eaten and then regurgitated my backpack.