Pailin Adventure

On Saturday we rented motorbikes and rode to Pailin. After a 5 minute lesson at the abandoned airport on Alexa’s bike and a trip to Kamping pouy last weekend on an automatic bike I decided to hire a semiautomatic bike (gears, no clutch).

The ride to Pailin is about 2 hours, so after waiting around from 8am to 09:30 for everyone to turn up we got on the road and headed out to Pailin. The landscape changes a fair bit between Battambang and Pailin and it was so beautiful, I kept wanting to stop and take pictures but didn’t want to slow everyone down. We had a few stops on the way down for snacks and flat tyres and just to let our assess get some blood in them, and then we made it to Pailin. The idea was to ride out to the waterfall so we headed down a dirt road that turned into more of a mud puddle than a road. A couple of people fell, and Jason got splashed all over with mud by some amused locals riding by. When we got to the waterfall the bridge was out and we were pretty hungry, so Mark and I jumped in for a quick swim, but we didn’t walk up to the top of the waterfall, and we decided to head out and get some lunch. We rode out to this beautiful spot with a little lake with a swan boat on it and an orchard between these hills but the place was eerily deserted and so we headed off to somewhere else. On the way back from the waterfall Mark slipped out in a particularly muddy area and ended up in the bushes with a 3^rd degree burn on his leg. We didn’t have any cold water so at Untac’s suggestion he covered it in toothpaste J “khmer traditional medicine”. I offered him some codeine I had in my bag but he seemed to want to keep his wits about him while riding so he just toughed it out.

Sitting at the new lunch place in a grass hut I was super hungry and tasted the tasty beef with lime and pepper… so tasty! (sorry cows) then I wanted to eat all the lime and pepper beef, and we ate food there for a few hours and generally talked crap as usual. Afterwards we were going to head to another waterfall but it was getting late and some people wanted to go home, so they headed back and we decided to head back by a back road that had some other waterfall on it, with Untac as our trusty guide we turned around and headed through the most stunning rural areas of Cambodia, I am so desperate to go back and see it all again slower. It was the kind of riding I like where you have to pay a lot of attention because the road is mostly potholes with the odd excited dog or flock of cows. There are lots of plantations out here which I hadn’t seen before and I am so keen to go back and spend some more time out there. Eventually we reached a little gate around a puddle, we followed Untac through it and soon the road disappeared and we were just riding through grass… which quickly gave way to a track which fairly resembeled a mudslide and eventually we had to stop and just walk. As we walked away from the bikes we heard a big thump and turned around to see a monkey pushing over a bike. Mark was concerned that they would steal the keys to the bikes so he went back, armed with a stick, to get the keys, but got ganged up on by a bunch of monkeys and had to turn tail (Untac later informed him that these are all the wrong things to do with monkeys).

When we got down to the waterfall it was beautiful, and we jumped in and it was so amazing, so refreshingly cool and nice and we swam under the waterfall and got waterfall massages. Then tried to drown each other a bit… just for fun J  I could tell people were starting to get antsy about the (at least 2 hour) ride back, so soon enough we started the ride back. Riding in Cambodia at dusk is never fun, it is very hard to see, people often have no lights or the lights don’t work on their vehicles, there are fires everywhere burning off the day’s rubbish, releasing toxic smells and reducing visibility further…  riding on an unknown dirt road full of significant potholes was no easier, luckily for me Jason soon ran out of petrol so I stopped with him and we spent the rest of that dusk time trying to figure out what to do. We decided I should ride off and get petrol and bring it back, by this time it was dark and the visibility for me much easier. I went and bought two coke bottles of petrol (spilt it all over my hands) and rode back with it in a plastic bag… As I rode I noticed an odd thumping happening with my bike and realised I had a completely flat tyre. By this time the rest of the gang had heard what was going on, and when I asked Untac what to do about the tyre they all decided to come back. We rode slowly up the road looking for anyone who could help us (tricky, especially in the countryside). Eventually we found some lovely nine-year olds outside a little wooden shack who replaced my inner tube somehow without removing the wheel and then asked for 50c for their troubles. The rest of the ride back was long, dark, involved getting a lot of bugs in the eye, had a few more stops for petrol etc, and eventually got us into Battambang around 09:30pm.

Over the next few days 8/10 of us also contracted a lovely pink eye conjunctivitis!

All in all I had a great time, I love adventures and being potentially stuck in the countryside, and waterfalls and mud and being a little unsure of what’s going to happen. In fact I think I may have had more fun than anyone else …

The bikes before the monkeys started pushing them over.

Waterfall no. 2 (In Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitts nature reserve place)

Riding through a flock of Cows.

Waiting to get the tyre fixed...