Day 6 (5th cycle day): Cycle 70km from Kampong Thom to Siem Reap (Angkor Wat)

After overnight stay in Kampong Thom, another early rise for 6am breakfast then jump onto coach transfer to our bikes which were North of the town.

Set off immediately onto gravel tracks of mostly orange gravel & powder.

The result of the orange tracks was by the end of day everything was coated with orange, think may of us resembled Pres. Donald Trump.

We soon encountered congestion: even the "highway to nowhere" had heavy transport causing queues:

Managing rice fields is very labour intensive

And the fields go on for miles (these were old harvested fields)

But this is a new field.

Unbelievably, they lay their rice seed out to dry, not only on their own ground around the house, but also in large sheets on the public roads 😯:

And here the mobile bazar adds to the traffic problems

There's also a flat rice which they prepare which bring cooked can be eat "as is" without any further cooking, it's carried by soldiers etc so they can grab a handful and eat whenever they want; tried some and it is nice and very similar to eating a handful of mixed seed type snack

           

Many villages have very ornate gates like this one at their entry:

Many of our stop-offs for drink top-ups, snacks & rests were at Buddhist temples, often we'd get kids visiting so had opportunity to give them some of the gifts we'd brought.