Up at 6am again with baguettes and omelette for breakfast, the French legacy still going strong, then it was a long and quite difficult morning of cycling towards the Cambodian border. Mostly flat again but long and straight, greeted all the way by the tiny kids running to meet us on the street and scream 'hello' at us. It never gets old.
The heat was well over 40 degrees as we arrived at one of the most striking and bizarre border crossings I'm ever likely to see. Lots of pre-cast concrete but on an epic scale, complete with intricate decorations, imposing columns and lots of flags. A bit grubby and tired up close, though.
We had VIP visas, which seemed to boil down to good old fashioned bribery, but it let us wander past the queues of Vietnamese and Cambodians waiting patiently. They seem a very patient, sedate, unruffled set of peoples as a general rule.
Then it was headlong into Cambodia, the difference in poverty levels striking. Cambodia is exceptionally poor - yet everyone we meet has a huge smile and a lovely approach to life. The kids in particular are gorgeous and they're all fascinated by the 20 odd fat white people in orange shirts on bikes.
It's oddly humbling to see how, at least at the very superficial level we experience them, Cambodians seem to get by with a huge grin with next to nothing to their names.
There are very few towns or even villages, just little pockets of shacks every few miles with very little happening other than women preparing food and kids running around. There is a noticeable lack of older people and teenagers, the first apparently accounted for by Pol Pot's genocide, the latter by I have no idea what.
We eventually managed the 98km and stumbled to dinner, stuffing our faces for the 10th time that day and throwing a few beers back before collapsing into bed in a stupor.
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