The roads were spacious, and far less terror-inducing than driving in Phnom Penh. The street food was plentiful and inexpensive, and the locals friendly. Some of this red light spill must have overflowed into our little guesthouse, because the moans of quick sex wafted through our walls in the evening.
Did I mention it was clean? Well, it truly was. We were pleasantly surprised. Dary turned out to be a wealth of information. She gave us some home-made printed maps in French and told us more places to visit that we could possibly see in our short time. The bike we rented was a little old, but all the gauges worked rare for rentals , and the engine purred smoothly. It had obviously been taken care of. Dary also arranged bus tickets without a markup, and so we bought our onward tickets through her too.
She was so lovely that we even ate there one night โ she cooked a mean pizza. We tried to make the best of our motorcycle, which sometimes meant driving to particular attraction, and sometimes driving down random roads for an hour just to see what was there. One spot we intended to visit was Banteay Prey Nokor, where the Angkor-style Wat Nokor Banchey temple sits in a relatively dismal and overgrown compound, strewn with rubbish.
We tried our best to ignore the plastic bottles and focussed instead on the beautiful, ancient carvings. The wat was built in the 11th century, and the legend of its construction involves incest and murder. I can recite the full story in the comments below, if anyone cares to ask. Spots of rust were present, and it looked far too unsafe to ascend. Naturally, we climbed it. An hour of driving led us to Wat Maha Leap, a wooden wat more than years-old.
It had fallen into dismal repair, which made it all the more appealing. Half the joy of this trip was getting there, as there were no signposts, or even paved roads for the jouney. We bumped along, following the east bank of the Mekong through gorgeous little villages and sparse fields, past rubber orchards and over bridges.
