I am currently typing this lying in my hammock, eating popcorn… seeing the screen is proving hard through the glare of the sun and my scratched up sunglasses… note to self: investing in some decent non scratch sporty type sunglasses might be wise before going mountain biking in a dirt bath…
There has just been a short interlude, during which (and I lie not) my hammock has broken… I was just lying back and the next thing I new the ropes snapped and I was on the floor… ooops…I have either become incredibly fat or the ropes have rotted… I am inclined to think the latter is true, its not like I'm eating lead bricks… popcorn is really quite light… I suppose this means I will have to buy a new hammock…tomorrow is another public holiday (Queens Birthday) so I shall go a shopping!
Since I last wrote I've had a couple of amusing experiences that I thought I might write about… the first one was at the beach. Anyone who has spent much time in Asia will know they’re mad crazy about karaoke… karaoke here involves renting a room and then just singing or dancing with your friends (I’m not sure if you could rent a room on your own… but possibly?)… the other thing about Asian karaoke is that pretty much most karaoke bars seem to double up as brothels… so anyways we went to the karaoke on our last night at the beach. We went to a pretty high class establishment (identified as such by the large numbers of mercs and land cruisers outside)… even so I was slightly concerned about how old some of the ‘beer girls’ looked… ho hum… lets just hope they were having safe sex. Once in our Karaoke room we probably disappointed the staff by just drinking water and not ordering any ‘extras’… being with mostly Khmers we mostly did Khmer karaoke.. Khmer just looks like squiggles to me… so no chance of singing along… however of course the time came for me to sing a song… what to sing was the problem… for some unknown reason I opted for ‘locomotion’ by kylie, everyone was waiting with baited breath for the song to queue… I had the microphone ready and was watching the screen intently… however the opening words revealed that there was some error, the qued song was certainly not locomotion, but something random which I had never ever heard before… there followed 3 painful minutes whilst I hacked my way through a random unknown song, my colleagues laughed at me and scantily clad women danced on a ski slope on the karaoke screen (I really don’t know what the ski slope was about)… so kylie take2… in retrospect choosing kylie was a mistake… I know the chorus to locomotion, but the rest of it I haven’t a clue… I’m not even a big Kylie fan… hmmm… anyways it was entertaining, especially as the karaoke movie this time around was scenes from Saltsburg (singing Kylie to scenes from the sound of music is soooo wrong)…
Enough about karaoke bars… next excitements happened today, when I took advantage of my half decent Vietnamese bike and went for a ride with a friend. Oh how I love riding my bike. It was a great ride up a dirt road alongside the river, passing through some little villages, wooden houses all higgledy pigildy on stilts… neither of us are going-back-the-way-we-come types… so we determined to find a nice loop back to the main road… this involved riding along ever deteriorating mud tracks… through rice fields… we were hoping that the land markers were not actually land mine markers, we knew they weren’t, but thoughts of being blown to bits do float across your mind… anyways it was a bit bumpy but the tracks were not a problem in itself until it started to rain… it didn’t even rain that hard, and my initial concern was the degree to which my clothes would go see-through… however I soon realised this was really a secondary concern as the mud started sticking to the wheels… and then more mud started sticking and soon, as soon as I had unclogged the mud with sticks even more mud had got attached… I should perhaps note that the soil is like clay… so in effect my bike was fast becoming a clay model… sticks were proving ineffective at declogging so I just was pulling off the clay with my hands… getting myself more and more filthy… in the end, after going less than 30meters in 10 minutes I realised the only choice was to carry my bike, it wasn’t going to be ridden or pushed anywhere the mud-clay was so thick. My nice orange Vietnamese bike isn’t that heavy, but the added weight of the clay made it a little tricky… as did attempting to stay upright, whilst lugging the bike walking barefoot through the slippery mud – I had to carry my sandals as they were fast turning into high heels the amount of mud they were collecting… anyways so we are slowly slip walking along a mud track, bikes in the air, in the middle of Cambodian nowhere when my bike slips and the front wheel fork swings snap shut onto my wrist… ooops. The outcome of this was that I nearly passed out and had to crouch with my head between my knees to stop meself throwing up… anyways we had to go onwards, couldn’t just stop… we really were in the middle of no where useful…I estimate we walked for 1.5-2km carrying the bikes which was increasingly hard with my left wrist being slightly buggered… I know our mud covered appearance caused much amusement to bystanders… proving to Khmers that fancy foreign bikes are just as useless at dealing with mud as their grannie bikes.... Eventually we met the graded road… and a power hose (there are power hoses all over this country… presumably as mud clogs up everyone’s motos?)… the bikes, shoes and feet and hands were power hosed sparkly clean and ride-able whilst we supped sweet sweet sugar cane juice (dad will appreciate this)… then back to Phnom Penh along the main road… tricky as by this time I was really only able to cycle one handed as the vibrations from the road annoyed my wrist… my friends cartilage in her knee was also causing problems… it might all sound rather messy, but it was soooperdoooper fun… its good to have adventures me thinks, stops life getting too dull…
Now my wrist has had a little rest it feels marginally better but its fairly bruised and my hand tingles… however typing this isn’t too hard… I shall see if it improves, before considering attempting to find a doctor… I don’t think
I think that’s enough from me
Love and lovely muddy bikes
Me x x x x
No comments:
Post a Comment