Never Always Comes Tomorrow
What a hard day today…I was trapped in the folds of the world-class hospitality of the ‘NordenHouse’ outside of Banlung in Ratanakiri… in a word; way the fuck up there. I wanted to leave by 6… but breakfast starts at 7, and I’m not usually such a weakling but Neesa, the owner, and his place, are both so quiet and magical that it was flatly impossible to beat it til handy 8.
And a long day ensued. From Banlung I rode thru ( I couldn’t make this up) : ‘Kaching’, then ‘Chrop’ then ‘Vealrump’ and finally got off my bike… virtually in tears (just fatigue and heat and shit) in ‘Pongmoan’.
I jumped a minivan from there to Kratie, where I’m at now and from where I’ll be making the mirrors look larger than life starting at 10 am tomorrow. First I have to find the clinic. I haven’t missed yet.
But it’s allll good. It’s all, in fact, super good. I’m a little sun-touched – my whole body is, in fact, scorching – it was soooo hot today. I was writing a twee travelogue while riding the bike … and the first 40 kms woulda made anyone come with anybike whatsoever; the riding was so peasy and so sugar-sweet… then I enjoyed a shortlived descent onto a sunblasted lower plateau, where I was doomed to pedal out my time in this trough of mortal error.
By now it was reaching 11 and the sun was a spear.
I reached for my empty water bottle around 3 kms into a stretch that proved to be 50 kms long of unremitting burned-out brush-land. I’ve often ridiculed westerners for their obsession with fucking water bottles, on the strong and demonstrable precept that clean bottled water is never more than, say, 300 meters away, in Cambodia. And til today that was always the case, so I’ve done a lot of chortling.
But today I ate shit.
For a teeny country, Cambodia has a lion’s share of desperately long smoking hot windblown and dispiriting sections of melting tarmac. I feel I felt all of them today. In such an itty-bitty country, how is it that often I feel I’m in Great Basin Nevada? At one point I just wanted to curl up… but there was no shade whatsoever, and I conferred with my onboard Jack London, etc., and they were all in agreement: snow or sand, the minute you curl up for a rest; the gig’s up. So I soldiered on, but I was weaving and it wasn’t too pretty… that’s for sure.
Maps in Cambodia are Highly Unreliable… and so was my day.
When I finally rode out of the scorched heart of starkness – and I saw my first umbrella and orange cooler after some 50kms at Top Heat in the Middle of Fucking Nowhere . . . well I was jubilant.
I queried the drink-stand keeper about the deadly no-man’s land that stretched out to her N EAST and she said something in Khmer that sounded, to me, like : ‘Ya several thousand hectares, slash and burn, evicted landowners, small un-noticed protest; coming rubber plantation owned many happy friends President. Hun Sen Happy, Me Happy Maybe Later.” Or that’s what it sounded like.
I drank 1 Bacchus energy drink, 3 X 500 ml bottles of water plus 2 more to load up my tanks, then, back-to-back, 2 X Black Panther Extra Special Export Stout. I got a further 70kms out of that particular combination… tho’ I feel a little dehydrated now…; -)
I’m hitting my bunk. For one thing, I have a big gig tomorrow, and, I had a super-tough day forsure. But I need to throw it out there tomorrow morning… and, really, that’s all that counts.
