Pearls

We say goodbye to the cosy couple Sander and Simone, and to the salespeople hanging around the hotels the entire day. They vary from rickshaw riders: "Rickshaw sir, very cheap, bring you everywhere!", the eternal book children: "Wanna buy a book?", the tuktuk men: "Hey man, I know you want a tuktuk, I can see!," to the motor boys: "Sir, sir, wait, don't walk, I have moto, very fast. Wait, sir!"
From Phnom Penh we cycle to the Thai Gulf where Sihanoukville, the promised pearl, is situated. It takes us almost an hour to leave the hustle and bustle of traffic and town, passing six-hundred-and-fourteen schools, shops, hospitals, banks, factories, residential and industrial areas. Everything accompanied by clouds of diesel fumes and other human-unfriendly odours, but being a cyclist you consider yourself healthy. Then finally it's quiet.
Halfway during the day there are two ancient Khmer temples on our program. The first we miss, because there isn't any sign to be seen. The second we barely don't miss because we suspect in time that we've reached the right turn-off. This one also lacks a sign. The Phnom Chisor temple sits on top of a hill at the end of a five kilometres sand path. My right knee is hurting, so I let Peter climb the 503 steps on his own. Out of nowhere two little guides appear, a boy and a girl, who start telling him a lot of facts. Not just the amount of steps, but also how far he has reached at certain moments ("This is step number 200 sir, only 303 to go"), the age of the temple, which Hindu god is hewn out of which lintel and that the Americans bombarded the temple during the Vietnam-war because they were convinced the Vietcong were hiding in it. The result of the bombardments, on what once must have been a pearl of a temple, was disastrous. Wouldn't it be fair for the Americans to restore the temple? Sounds reasonable to us.

The view from the summit is spectacular. In a straight line from Phnom Chisor two other ruined temples are visible, in a straight line from them, very far away, not visible to the naked eye, lies the Angkor Wat complex. A long time ago the Khmer, without using Google Earth, satellites or airplanes, really saw the bigger picture. Just like the Egyptians.
On his way down the long stairs, two ancient berries come up to Peter. They are sitting here every day to beg for their daily bread. Peter still has a one-dollar note he gives to them. He tries to tell them they have to share. Excited they shuffle down behind him, to change the note in the village. It turns out to be quite a large donation, because tourists, especially white ones, are rare.

These are true cyclists-days. In Takeo we have a nice drink with Roel and Esther from Kortgene, who take three months of leave every year, to make a nice cycle tour somewhere in the world.
In Kampot we share our dinner with Jill Lundmark from New Zealand.
April this year she'll turn seventy, she is three weeks younger than Peter's mother and cycles six months per year through the world, on her one.
A true pearl.

The last stage southwards, about 107 kilometres, leads us to Sihanoukville, Cambodia's largest sea resort. The route is beautiful and mixed.
We pass the Elephant Mountains, which are partly covered in clouds. The landscape changes when we near the sea. We smell the salty water and discover forests of mangrove. Mango and cashew trees also grow well in the silty, humid air. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the Thai Gulf and the Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc. The impoverished fishing villages we pass stand out for their fish and shellfish markets, with the accompanying smell.

This whole region is poor, thus the multitude of charcoal ovens. When there is no other means to earn a living, people make charcoal or cut stones, like we saw in many other Third World countries.
Peter and I both have no appetite at all, and get our energy from the fresh sugarcane juices. At the end of the day we both drank eight of those, for one and a half euro in total. Where else can you find this?

Eight days of beach holiday follow, during which we swim a lot, regularly burn our white parts despite the fact that we're laying in the shade, take beautiful hikes over coastal rocks and white beaches and devour French bread with cheese. Sihanoukville is a pearl at the Thai Gulf.

Laying on a soft beach bed under a big umbrella salespeople and beggars approach us the whole day. This becomes quite irritating after a while, but those people aren't doing this for fun, we keep reminding ourselves. The salespeople - men, women and children - try to persuade the tourists to buy their fruit, fried fish, jewelry with phony pearls, books, knickknacks made from shells, sunglasses and massages. Sometimes we buy something, often we don't. The beggars are mostly landmine victims, who miss one and sometimes even two legs. We always give them something, every day again. Our philosophy is simple: people who are not able to work in their own country but depend on begging to sustain themselves get supported by us. And others are not.

Many western tourists around us, mostly elderly and about thirty kilos overweight, completely ignore the salespeople and beggars, who keep greeting them friendly time and again. Despicable behaviour; you don't have to buy or give something, but pretending the people don't exist is degrading.

On the beach we meet Roel and Esther for a second time, who, just like us, are taking a relaxing time-out from cycling for a couple of days. At night we share a delicious Cambodian dinner and say goodbye again.
They reminded us to go snorkeling and the next day we take a boat to one of the most beautiful snorkel and dive sites around.

At first there doesn't seem to be a lot of colourful life in the water and the visibility isn't great. We are spoiled by the Red Sea. But slowly it becomes more and more beautiful: on the rocks grow flat corals in all colours, hundreds of kinds of anemone, tropical fish studying us curiously, sea-Christmas-trees retreating in their holes faster than the eye can see when we touch them, coral shrubs, schools of fish that seem to devour us, black sea cucumbers laying immobile on the seafloor, a frightened octopus, sea-butterflies fluttering swingingly through the water, parrotfish with their special snouts.
Most beautiful are the shells the seize of a human head, of which the zigzag-openings all seem to have different colour-combinations. Once in a while a shell opens up, until a narrow gap is visible. And when you look very carefully, really really carefully, you can see a beautiful round white and shiny stone inside.
The pearl.