Surely not vanilla

We woke this morning under the full golden moon still in the sky, so that we might brave the mess of the capitol city of Phnom Penh with a chance of it being less appalling. We'd been hoping to avoid the city entirely, but all roads going around it were unpaved. And that would mean jostly, gritty, bouncy, with everything coated in red dust afterward.

So we rode in on National Road 3 and out on National Road 5.

I thought, marveling, how it was all my parents could do to get me to go with them, as a child, on bikes on the main road outside our house. Just one mile down. For icecream. Once there I would eat one and only one flavor: vanilla. Because I was too scared to try anything new.

Now I was smoothly dodging motorbikes, weaving around bathtub sized potholes, and unfazedly being roared past by trucks. Exhaust, noise, and dust, but we made it! We made our one necessary left-hand turn, blessedly, in a rare traffic-free window. Even at 6:30am the traffic was zoomy, and market stalls and umbrellas bled onto the street. The city had an entirely different feel than the small towns we've ridden through: more tall buildings, a KFC (?), plenty of imposing looking banks. Lots of billboards, advertising obvious things like beer and less-obvious things, like maybe face-whitening cream.

In a way I enjoy the mash of humanity, the concentration and flow needed to smoothly move along with it all, being a part of something so wildly different from "my" normal.

We put in 96 kilometers today; credit goes to the wind at our backs. Buddy Lissy and I rejoiced in this wind at every rest break. We are staying in another high-ceiling guest house (built during the time of the French protectorate we reckon) near the south end of the lake Tonle Sap. We continue in our journey north towards Siem Reap!