March 3 2012. Tay Ninh - Kraek (75 of 179 km) – Day 2


It happened like this:while starting and stopping for our ritual bike fine-tuning,riding for a while then making a pause to talk about it...we got distracted and went on the wrong way.Must be the heat...we get on the right track  towards Xa Mat,a Vietnam-Cambodia border crossing point known for being less crowded than the Moc Bai one down South.
We spend about one hour going through the six checkpoints on the border(3 vietnamese,3 cambodian).We try to save our picture ID's for the next border crossings,everything gets settled with a "free offer".

Taking pictures is forbidden.



Crossing the border on our bikes has been quite stressful.Cambodia looks different than Vietnam from the get-go.The scenery is different.More open spaces.



In the inhabited areas you can see many wooden shacks built like stilt houses to avoid floodings.These groups of houses have something wild about them.There's something wilder about the people too.People look like they have been scattered around by some kind of devastating explosion.We can still see small fires here and there.People are sociable and hospitable though.Smiles keep coming our way and so do unending greetings and expressions of surprise when we pass by.Language is not really a problem.We comunicate with hand gestures.They take money from our hands when we have to pay for something and we trust them.


It's late for today.We stop at a Guest House.Something that sounds like "pkei pech" in cambodian.Thankfully we read the actual "Guest House" words.We got someone to write down "place to sleep" in their cambodian alphabet but recognizing these "letters" is beyond our capabilities for now.We eat a fine fried chicken and mixed rice dinner.We reintegrate our fluids with some cambodian beer named "Angkor".
Tomorrow we will have to make up for the kilometers we lost today.

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