Angkor by bike

Dopo un giorno passato a rilassarci (ne avevamo davvero bisogno dopo il viaggio del giorno prima!) e a visitare la citta' e i mercati di Siem Riep, ci alziamo ancora a notte fonda (4h30) per iniziare la nostra prima giornata a Angkor Wat. 2 ragioni per andare cosi' presto: uno, si evita la massa di turisti giapponesi, cinesi, coreani, etc; due, la temperatura e' ideale (alle 10h ci sono gia' 30gradi). Decidiamo di andare in bici per muoverci un po' ma anche perche' e' il mezzo piu' economico.
Passiamo tutta la giornata visitando i templi e alla sera siamo distrutti. Con le ultime forze che ci rimangono andiamo a mangiare al mercato locale, prima di ritornare alla nostra guesthouse e metterci a dormire. Il secondo giorno, di nuovo sveglia alle 4h30. Questa volta decidiamo di noleggiare un tuk tuk (una specia di carrozzella trainata da una moto) per poter visitare un tempio a 30km da qui. Devo dire che in tuk tuk la vita e' molto piu' facile: si sta a sedere tranquilli tutto il tempo e si cammina solo quando si visita il tempio. Niente male!
Domani, comunque, ritorniamo alle noste bici per visitare il tempio di Angkor Wat. Abbiamo lasciato il piu' bello per la fine. Vedremo...

As part of our accommodation deal here in Cambodia we get free bikes to use at our will. Nothing more welcome than that for us bike-aholics as the city and the Angkor sightseeing region is roughly of similar size than Kyoto and we so thoroughly enjoyed our cycling days there. But what a different experience cycling in Cambodia's traffic mayhem is to the organised roads of Japan! It's beautiful, you just make up your rules as you go and improvising at every corner and every slip-road. It's beautiful! Just like driving in Venezuela just with a larger variety of vehicles. Scooters, bikes, pedestrians, cows, cars, tractors, trucks, tuk-tuks...all somehow find their way through this daily maze. For a tourist on a bike it's an eye-opening experience into road-etiquette. First rule: When in doubt smile and floor it! Ooooh Visaka! I think of you and understand better now how you managed to drive in Luxembourg with ease and cool with a cigarette in one hand and a phone in the other and somehow still making conversation to your co-pilot... :-D
Taking a tuk-tuk is also fun and most tourists take them here. We found the experience a bit too colonial for our taste. It felt a little like being the first one into a Japanese shopping mall in the morning and everyone bowing to you... I don't know, it's very comfortable and convenient and it brings the locals some money, but we stick to our bikes most of the time.
So our cycling experience has been nearly as enriching as the sites we've seen. We explored the architectural colonial leftovers of Siem Reap (I can't help but feel that this must be like Havanna in Asia) and all but one of the Angkor sites. They are beautiful and I can only compare them with Pompei... Much of our enjoyment has also come from the fact that we took our landlord's advice and leave every morning for the Angkor sites at 5am. Sounds ridiculous, but there are three very good reasons (apart from seeing the moon reflect on the Angkor lakes at dawn). One: Tourist groups start arriving towards 9am and that's when Angkor turns into the Louvre, the National Gallery or the MoMa in terms of crowds. So before that you have them almost literally to yourself (they open at 5am). Two: The heat from 10am starts getting really, really penetrating and at noon it is nearly unbearable so that after every temple visit of 20 minutes you need to take a break of 40 minutes to drink a litre of water. So in the evening the temples you remember as best are almost invariably the ones you saw early in the morning. Three (most importantly for me): Light. The light you get early morning really shows the temples at their best. Every day we look back at the pictures we took during the day and the best are always the ones at dawn. After 9am the sun shines down hard and the reliefs on the walls of the temples become to contrasted and nuances become too difficult to see (to our untrained eyes, anyway).
Anyway tomorrow we'll do our last early morning to see the main highlight, Angkor Wat. We've kept the best for last. More about that soon...