We crawled our way through Vietnam on the Reunification Express. At times I found myself unable to do anything but stare transfixed out the window.

Vietnam has a great piece of land. Really it does. It snakes along the entire eastern coast of southeast Asia like some great dragon, with mountains, productive plains, and biologically rich coastline.

The train line gives a most flattering view of this country, which already needs no flattering to be impressive.

Our compartment had emptied out early that morning, so for most of the day Scott and I had the place to ourselves. Eventually, a woman appeared, nervously offering us fruit. We refused a few times, and then accepted, to her great delight. The fruit was great. I believe it was durian, or another variety from that glorious family of gym-bag/fruit hybrids.  Then she revealed some sliced dragon fruit, which proved particularly tasty.

This woman kept returning to our bunk from time to time. Soon we began to suspect that she was, in fact,  a new bunk mate. We quickly rearranged our belongings to make room for her. She seemed to confirm our assumptions by sitting down, and we began attempts to communicate our welcome to her, offering food from our bag (all of which she refused), and posing together with her for a team picture.

The picture may have been a step too far, though it came from a kind place, for she began to blush uncontrollably and scampered off. She did reappear again and again, however, throughout our journey, mostly to offer us more fresh produce (sweet corn, dragon fruit, bananas, cucumbers). We felt bad about scaring her earlier, and did not want to eat her out of house and home, but at the same time she was pushing the food quite vehemently on us. We did our best to walk that line, leaving some food behind for her. But we never saw her eat.

Then all of a sudden, night was falling and she was still nowhere to be seen. The woman had been absent for some time. We never saw her again, though her plastic bag of fruit stayed with us for the next day or so.  To supplement the fruit, we ordered some of the tasty train food offered by the kitchen.

At about 11:00 pm, just as we were crawling into bed, a group of elderly Vietnamese people with tons of luggage made their way into our compartment. It turns out they were to be our bunk mates for the night, and were none too keen on our monopolization of the under-the-bunk storage. It was no easy task, but with some reorganization we were able to get everyone’s luggage into the compartment, and soon all concerned were once again asleep while the old magic carpet made of steel drew ever closer to Hanoi.

We awoke on our last morning at the Blue River Inn in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Scott was not feeling well. Wheeling, it seemed, would be out of the question. He was unable to eat much, and felt too delirious to mount a cycle. We lounged around our room giving Scott as much time to rest as we could; then it was checkout time.

We moved our stuff downstairs and stashed it behind the front desk. From there, we set out on foot, in hopes that a bit of gentle strolling would help Scott’s condition. We wandered around slowly, getting fairly lost, wandering into shops, eating more Pho, and eventually finding ourselves once again in a giant grocery store. There is something about being a foreigner in a grocery store that I find monumentally engrossing. Time just slips by you. Given this strange phenomenon, you would be not surprised to find that we exited the grocery store quite some time after entering.

We were laden with a great bag of snacks to eat on that night’s Reunification Express. We would be in the train for the next few days, so plenty of food seemed appropriate.

We were just sitting down to a cup of overly sweetened coffee at a little shop outside the grocery store when I decided to take a trip to the bathroom. As I walked toward the john, I found myself suddenly walking within a group of Vietnamese police officers. I looked around, but they all had very stern expressions on, and refused to make eye contact. I briefly considered aborting the mission to the bathroom, but such a mid-swing reversal seemed, perhaps, a suspicious move. After all, I had nothing to hide.

So I made my way inside and settled my business. I was about halfway back to Scott at the coffee shop when I heard a bunch of screaming. I snapped my head around to see a bunch of cops screaming and running. One of them knocked over a display advertising crock pots, and as it clattered onto the ground I felt the electric shock of adrenaline pour into my system. Was there a bomb? A man with a weapon? I dashed around a corner and sought cover behind a large display about exercise machines. I whirled my head around.

The people inside the shop were confused and looking around. The cops were running out the door. It seemed calm was returning. I called over to Scott, “What just happened?”

“A guy just ran out of the shop with something he’d stolen. The cops are after him.” A crowd had formed outside the shopping complex. People were now smiling, joking around, enjoying the return of a feeling of safety. I certainly didn’t need another cup of coffee, so we headed back toward the hotel.

We got there, and had about three hours to kill. Scott was drifting in and out of consciousness in a chair in the lobby, when the woman at the front desk offered him a free room to sleep in for a bit. If the Blue River had not already been in seal-of-approval territory, it certainly was now. Going for a bit of a stroll, we came across a Banh Mi sandwich stand and indulged in some quick dinner.

I worked on correspondence for you, dear reader, while fireworks went off all around us. It was Independence Day here in Vietnam, and the people of the city had poured into the streets to sing patriotic songs and celebrate the reunification of Vietnam. I took a break to watch the fireworks on the lobby television. Just as they were getting into the grand finale, a thunderstorm broke out in the city.

The rain kept falling, and was still doing so when it was time for us to head to the train station. Because of the rain, we decided to take a cab. It was our first time experiencing the streets of Saigon in a car. It certainly hammered home my previous observation that the automobile is merely tolerated, and not quite welcome here in Saigon. Motorcycles poured around us, cutting us off, and generally making our traversal difficult. Multiple times, our cab driver stopped to yell insults at the motorcyclists. They generally paid him no heed.

At the train station, we were forced to wait for some time as the train was late. This, we were told by the locals who were waiting with us on the platform is actually quite abnormal. By the time the train arrived, I had been standing for quite some time with my pack on and must have been quite the sweaty mess.

We finally got onto the sleeper, and I threw my bags down on the bed. We had gotten two opposing bottom bunks. The train was set up with three levels of bunks, separated by thin walls into six-person compartments. The cycles just barely fit under the beds, which were presumably communal luggage space. We were quite glad to find that our bunk mates arrived with minimal luggage and did not need the space. They were quite friendly, and spoke a tiny bit of English. The six of us chatted for a bit before turning off the light and letting the rhythm of the rails lull us to sleep.

Ah, trains. It had been so long since we had ridden one.

What a fine way to travel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This video should corroborate:

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this was it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pho, official Vietnamese soup of AsiaWheeling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The meal was delightful and the company entrancing.

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

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

We awoke at the Amari Watergate bright and early. There was much to do this day, and we were eager to get under way.

After our complimentary cups of coffee, we set out towards the Cambodian National Postal Authority.  En route, we stopped at a roadside stall with umbrellas and deck chairs to attempt to enjoy breakfast.

The coffee was an alkaline slurry of sugar and brown milk, and our food consisted of instant noodles, and old rice. Well, you can’t win them all…

Once we got inside, we began walking from counter to counter allowing them to weigh the package of Cambodian military surplus that we had purchased the day before for project K9.

The pricing and readout of the scales at the post office seemed to be tied to no standardized system. When none of the front windows would offer us a price we were interested in, we began to dig deeper. Behind the post office, we found a group of postal workers wiling away their day playing Pétanque (likely a hold-over from the French). From there we wandered in a back door, where we met a fellow who was lounging and snoozing on a wooden chair. He kindly showed us around to the far end of the post office, where we found yet another bank of counters.

The readout from the scale at these counters was much more favorable. The woman at the front desk was also overwhelmingly friendly and grinned and giggled while she packed up our items in a Vietnamese instant noodles box, taping it redundantly with brown tape. We hung around a while after paying, in case she needed us to make a customs declaration, but she apparently didn’t.

Back on the cycles, we headed in search of coffee and food, as the morning’s sustenance did not suffice.  Coming across a Chinese noodle joint, we feasted.

We took off from there, heading toward our third waypoint: the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. This is the notorious Security Prison 21 (S-21) that was the sight of some of the most gruesome treatment of humans to occur during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Perhaps second only to the terrible mass murders that took place at our next waypoint, a place colloquially called “the killing fields.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We rolled into S-21 in high spirits, and despite some very effective joking around with the parking guards, promptly struck out in all attempts to bargain down the price of parking the bicycles. Our argument was that the price should be somewhat in line with the relative space required to park the cycles as supposed to a car. The guard was jovial, but would not budge. So we decided to consider it a donation to the museum, and proceeded to buy tickets and make our way inside.

You see, dear reader, Scott and I knew very little about the history of Cambodia going into this experience. We knew even less about the story of the Khmer Rouge, which I had only to-date encountered in the form of a vermouth-heavy cocktail by the same name often mixed by a good friend of mine. But I am once again getting ahead of myself… let it suffice to say a poorly timed expiration of the batteries in the Wikireader had sent us into this experience somewhat blind. And my goodness were we in for a shock.

There were three large exhibit buildings that made up the S-21 Genocide Museum. We are far from sure if this was how the museum was designed to be explored, but we started on the left side and as we walked began to learn, in bits and pieces, the story of the facility, and in doing so, the story of the Khmer Rouge.

S-21 was at one point a high school. Four months after the Khmer Rouge came to power in August 1975, the complex was converted into a prison and interrogation center. The Khmer Rouge renamed the complex “Security Prison 21” (S-21) and construction began to adapt the prison to the inmates: the buildings were enclosed in electrified barbed wire, the classrooms converted into tiny prison and torture chambers, and all windows were covered with iron bars and barbed wire to prevent escapes and suicides.

When the city of Phnom Penh fell to the Vietnamese in 1979 (note dear reader how short the rein of the Khmer Rouge was), the liberating troops followed the stench of corpses to the gates of S-21. Inside they found a terrible scene of carnage, with the bodies of tortured inmates chained atop iron beds, the staff of the facility having recently fled.

Due to our choice of a left turn, our first experience in S-21 was of these metal beds; each is preserved in a state of gruesome authenticity.

As we entered the first building, we wandered from room to room. Each room was a medium- to large-sized classroom. Inside of each was a rusted iron bed, usually with a couple of items placed on it as if tossed aside in a frantic departure. Among these items were the metal spades of shovels (used as weapons and torture devices), ammunition cases, shackles, and lengths of chain.

The rooms were deeply haunting, conjuring images from movies like Saw and Hostel. Except, when I saw these movies, I approached such extremes of brutality as a piece of intellectualized hyper-violence, a kind of inhumanity that is relegated to the most terrifying corners of our imagination, or at least relegated to the distant past, and as such, sterilized to a point that one can cloak oneself in sterile objectivity and spit comments from the back row. Now it was here, staring me in the face.

The weight of this place was immense.  It felt like weeks had passed, not years, since the liberation of S-21. The museum was set up more like a crime scene than a conventional western museum, with items thrown on the ground as though they had been discarded while fleeing. Exhibits were set off-center and akimbo, as if they too were evidence that the visitor was stumbling upon, rather than calculated pieces of communication.

Explanatory placards were few and far between, leaving us to draw our own haunting conclusions from a number of yellowed and faded prints that hung in each room. The prints were from the original negatives that were taken during the liberation of S-21, and while they were often  blurry and under-exposed, we could easily see that each one was of a tortured and starved human being, sprawled dead on the very same iron bed that lay before us.

While I am not one to believe in the supernatural, there was a certain weight to the air, a certain difficulty in breathing, a certain inability to feel relaxed or completely logical, which one might have easily attributed to ghosts.

We exited this first building in which they had found the tortured bodies chained to beds, and made our way into the next. We stopped for a moment to learn more about a strange structure that stood between the two buildings. It had at one point been part of the school’s physical education equipment. It had held three ropes, which were used to test students’ ability to climb. The Khmer Rouge re-purposed the structure into a gallows and torture device.  A large placard explained how prisoners would be tortured, first being hanged by the arms until losing consciousness, then being woken by having their heads dunked into a large clay barrel of human sewage and then hanged again until losing consciousness, in a cycle of pain and terror.

Also in the courtyard was a sign depicting the rules of interrogation.

This place was seriously heavy, and Scott and I were still left somewhat confused as the what exactly the Khmer Rouge was, and why they would resort to such brutal and inhuman behavior.

We were glad to find that the next building contained a few more answers. Much like the Nazis, the administration of S-21 had taken care to photograph and document each prisoner, and though each prisoner’s dossier was later separated from his or her photo, most of the negatives remained intact.

The bottom floor of this next building was filled to the brim with large billboards filled with images of emaciated and terrified Cambodians.

Also featured in this building was the horrible chair that a prisoner at S-21 had been forced to sit in while posing for these mug shots. The chair was wooden, strangely proportioned, as though not quite built for humans, and bolted onto a large metal contraption, sporting a pointy apparatus used to steady the head. I cannot imagine a more terrifying chair.

From there, we made our way upstairs to the second floor. There we finally got some more information on the Khmer Rouge and what it was we were witnessing. Since it will continue to be relevant for the rest of the post, I might as well start with a brief rundown of the Khmer Rouge and what exactly happened in Cambodia.

The Khmer Rouge (I’d let you know how it looks in Khmer, but in an unusual display of poor form on the part of Apple Computer, the Khmer language is not supported on Mac OS X) was another name for the Communist Party of Kampuchea (an alternate name/spelling for Cambodia). It of course means “Red Khmer” in French, the colonial language of Cambodia.  Khmer people are the major ethnic group in Cambodia. Prior to their 1975 victory, the Khmer Rouge were a guerrilla force, which after taking control of Phnom Penh in 1975, became officially The Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea (RAK – scary acronym right?). The Communist Party of Kampuchea itself was a secret leadership of the Khmer Rouge. It consisted of a few extremely powerful insiders. To the populace, it called itself the Angkar, which means “the organization.” It only officially announced its existence in 1977, almost two years after it came to power.

The Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia and held it from 1975 to 1979. The Khmer Rouge were led by a fellow who called himself many things, but Pol Pot is probably what people are most familiar with. Pol Pot was originally a rich Cambodian kid who went off to study politics in France. There he became involved with French communist groups; he came back to Cambodia with a thirst for power and a hypocritically fierce animosity for the rich and educated. He became very active in the Cambodian Communist Movement and eventually, with the help of the Vietnamese, Pol Pot and his cronies were able to develop a powerful and violent insurgency.

Most historians also cite the ruthless bombing of Cambodia by the U.S. during the U.S.-Vietnam war as another important factor that lead to increased support for the Khmer Rouge, although whether the U.S. bombing was a deciding factor in the rise of Pol Pot is heavily debated. I invite discussion of this theory in the comments, however.

From there they renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea, with a flag that featured a kind of mod interpretation of Angkor Wat.

Pol Pot began a fierce campaign of social engineering focused around his contempt for urban intellectuals, wealthy folk, and religion, paired with the idea that all problems in Cambodia could be solved with increased rice production. You see, dear reader, Pol Pot thought that if he could just evacuate everyone from the cities and send them to work in the countryside, Cambodia would easily be able to double or triple its rice production in just a few years. This, of course, did not work, proving effective mainly  in ushering in years of widespread famine in Cambodia.

Not long after taking power, Pol Pot began to fall out of agreement with the Vietnamese, mostly over where the border between those two countries should be, and the growing influx of Cambodian refugees making their way to Vietnam to escape the Khmer Rouge.

Another part of this re-arranging of society was the removal of people who did not fit in with the plan. People who fell into this category were those who were not purely Cambodian by blood (especially Vietnamese-esque individuals), people who were educated (this category extended all the way to anyone who could read), people who were seen as threats to the power of the current regime (this category included mostly a random smattering of the unlucky) . People who wore glasses were even encouraged to thrown them away so as not to look intellectual or literate. Cambodia became the most isolated and backward country in southeast Asia, seemingly overnight. It also became a very scary place to live.

The cities were emptied, as long-time city dwellers were sent to work in the fields. At the height of the Khmer Rouge, Phnom Penh became a ghost town, occupied by less than a tenth of its previous population.

Pol Pot was obsessed with Cambodian self-sufficiency, so in the case of goods where self sufficiency was nearly impossible due to lack of intellectuals, supply, or infrastructure, he would simply pronounce the good to be unimportant or even evil. This madness was applied even to the national supply of medicine.  No surprise – this,  led to the deaths of thousands from treatable diseases (such as malaria).

Purging of undesirable elements of the population ramped up, along with purges of Pol Pot’s own ranks, mostly driven by increasing paranoia and distrust of his advisers. In the end somewhere between a fifth and a third of the population of Cambodia was killed, either in prisons, during forced labor, or in death camps.

War broke out between a re-united communist Vietnam (still fresh from soundly whopping the U.S. during its civil war). And while the Vietnamese were able to liberate Phnom Penh, Khmer Rouge forces still held some areas in the north until the late 90s. Let me say that again: the late 90s!

Unbelievable.

Back in 2010, Scott and I wandered through the museum of atrocities, taking in countless more torture devices and finally wandering over to the final large school building. At the exit of this building was a large picture of a fellow they called “Duch.” He was one of the masterminds behind the genocide, and also one of the few to have  confessed to involvement. As you see below, many of the visitors were none to pleased to see him.

This part had been sectioned off into individual cells using wood, brick, and concrete. It proved to be one of the most haunting locations yet. One of the most striking elements of our experience in S-21 was that it seemed not to have been cleaned since the brutal events that make it so significant. American museums are clean, sterile places. Here, the floors were covered with ambiguous dark stains, the cells were filthy, and things like hinges on doors were falling apart. Nothing was behind a barrier, it was simply set up as a space to explore.

Feeling thirsty and a bit frazzled, we made our way back out to the cycles. We paid our parking fee and left the compound. As we wheeled farther from the place, I began to feel a kind of strange relief. As we rode back into the sun, and stopped to haggle for water with a particularly friendly woman, I realized that while in the  museum, part of me had begun to give up on my generally optimistic view of humanity. Seeing the evidence, and being so immersed in a place where humanity had demonstrated such ugly behavior, had frayed my senses. And now, as we wheeled our way back through the present, through a Cambodia that was on the rebound rather than in the depths of a terrible genocidal regime, I felt good. I felt happy and grateful to be where I was. Perhaps this strange phenomenon was one of the reasons that people go to places like S-21…

Our exploration of the Cambodian genocide was far from over. We pedaled hard right through the heart of Phnom Penh and soon made our way out into the countryside. We pedaled on, keeping our eyes peeled for what we assumed would be a pretty large and blatantly marked establishment. The more official name for the place is the Choeunk Ek Genocidal Center. And though there is a pretty big sign, the proliferation of cows in front of it may have distracted us. Regardless, we rode right by and some four or five kilometers farther before we realized our error. A quick consultation with a roadside vendor had us back on track and once again loaded down with water, which we continued to drink at a frightening pace. It was still stifling  Cambodian humidity, after all.

We finally spotted the sign and made our way onto a much smaller and quite obviously brand new road. We parked our bikes near the entrance and made our way inside.

The first thing that anyone who visits the Killing Fields will notice is a giant glass and stone tower in the center of the compound. This tower is perhaps better called a stupa and is filled with skulls. And when I say filled, I mean jam-packed with human skulls. All these skulls had been dug out of the ground in the surrounding square kilometer or so.  We decided to save the stupa of skulls for last, and first tour the facility.

This is where the Khmer Rouge would bring people to kill them. It is not large, nor is it mechanized like the death camps of Nazi Germany. People were killed here by hand, using hammers, axe handles, spades or even sharp pieces of bamboo. When the deed was done, whether dead or not, the poor soul was thrown into a giant pit and covered with DDT or lime in order to control the smell and the bugs, then covered over with dirt.

If you were a citizen of Cambodia during the reign of the Khmer Rouge and you did something to bring attention to yourself, a warning from Angkar would be delivered to you. People receiving more than two warnings were sent for “re-education,” which meant near-certain death. Re-education was where those unfortunate enough to find themselves were “encouraged” to confess to the Angkar their “pre-revolutionary lifestyles and crimes.” Such crimes were usually some kind of free-market activity, contact with an outsider, or generally suspicious behavior. Those headed to re-education camps were typically told that the Angkar would forgive them and “wipe the slate clean.” In reality they were merely taken to a place like S-21 or Choeung Ek for torture and/or execution.

The soldiers who carried out the executions were mostly young men or women from peasant families, some of them startlingly young.  On the ground, bones were exposed on the surface after rains slowly washed away the earth, as many of the bodies in the shallow graves were so close to the surface.

Victims’ clothing fragments can still be found, many of which are placed below a central glass box displaying skeletal remains.

We strolled around the facility, taking our time, and paying our respects at the many mass graves therein, visiting the tree where children’s heads were bashed in, and finally visiting the skull-filled stupa.

What was strange about Choeung Ek, compared to S-21, was that I did not feel that same inescapable weight. Though I must once again refrain from talk of ghosts, I will say that it was not a haunting place the way that S-21 was. Perhaps it’s because it was outdoors, cleansed somehow by the warm breeze, or by the natural cycles of plant growth and decomposition. Perhaps also because it had been excavated, developed and packaged more conventionally. Whatever it was, as we exited the facility, I found myself feeling a solid sense of accomplishment, that unnerved feeling was being replaced with kind of steady recognition. I dare say that it was the feeling of coming to grips, in a way, with one of the more disgusting parts of humanity.

Outside Choeung Ek there was a Cambodian amputee in military clothing. He was propped up on crutches, and removed his hat as I approached, motioning to me that he was hungry and and wanted money with which to buy food. I don’t generally give money to panhandlers, but later on when Scott and I sat down to eat a couple of coconuts, I walked over to him and offered him half of mine. He smiled and refused.

We climbed back on the cycles and wheeled home. Sure, we got a few other things done, but now, as I reflect on this dark wheel, they seem all too insignificant to even waste your time with, dear reader.

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.