Roast spider, anyone? At couple inches across, they weren’t small. Their little black bodies and furry legs had been nicely grilled. The perfect snack food to go along with a cold beer? Tastes like chicken, or so they say.

At the risk of being oh so boring and disappointing, we didn’t try the roast spiders the ladies were selling in the market just north of Phnom Penh. They seemed a popular munching option though, judging by the huge baskets of the critters on offer in Skun.

We did think about it for a fraction of a second before deciding that supper was very unlikely to stay down if we tried a spider. Better not to risk these things after a long day on the road. Maybe next time….

When we were confronted with the spiders we’d just finished our longest day of the trip so far – a full 144km on a silky smooth road under rare cloudy skies. Gone are the days when the rainy season meant disaster for bicycle travel in Cambodia. With asphalt now being laid on previously tretcherous roads the cycling is smooth and the intermittent storms are just the thing to wash off a bit of sweat and make long days possible.

All in all the journey from Siem Reap to Cambodia’s capital took us just two and a half days. The flat terrain helped a lot as well as a paved shoulder. Some could call this ride boring – there are few true tourist sights, just one village after another – but we enjoyed waving to the literally thousands of kids who popped out of every house to yell ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ to us and admiring the lush, green rice fields on all sides. The new crop of rice is still being planted and families are out everywhere doing the difficult job of putting seedlings in the ground.

Taking the plants from start to harvest is an undescribable amount of hard graft under an omnipresent sun, something we always knew in the back of our heads but didn’t truly understand until now. We’ll never see a bowl of rice the same way again when it eat it with a curry or stir-fry. However much the price of rice has gone up lately, we suspect not nearly enough reaches the farmers who deserve it most.

The ride into Phnom Penh was straight forward. The city is still one of the poorer capitals in the region and although traffic is growing it hasn’t reached the critical point yet. We also find the Cambodian people very laid back. Aside from a few bus drivers, most people go relatively slow and don’t seem fussed by two cyclists blocking their path for a moment or two. It’s the complete opposite of Central Asia.

Without any trouble we arrived at a hotel, noticeably offering less than our digs in Siem Reap for a higher price but very central and as we’re only spending a couple nights here it’s not a big deal. We could have gone for the very cheap backpacker options in another corner of the city but lately we are craving a bit of luxury. Not a lot by anyone’s standards – we still try and find the $1 lunch specials on the street – but we think a good bed and a tranquil atmosphere are worth a bit of splurging.

It’s hardly surprising that a few people are trying to cash in and in a way it’s quite nice to see when you think that many Cambodians try and raise their families on less than the average backpacker’s beer budget.

Of course all this exists because of the magnificent temples of Angkor Wat, just a few kilometers north of the town. It’s a pilgrimage site for Cambodians and hundreds of thousands of tourists from around the world every year. The South Koreans take top spot in the visitor stakes - so much so that the landmine victims performing music near the temples play Korean songs to elicit donations. Then come the hordes of Japanese, Europeans and Americans.

The guidebooks say you should devote at least three days to the Angkor park and most tourists follow that advice. A one-day ticket is ‘a crime’ according to the Lonely Planet but we shamelessly went for the criminal option, knowing that we get worn out quickly by temples and ruins. We guessed our threshold correctly. After a day of pushing our way through the crowds to take in the wonders of six different temples and past the patter of the souvenir sellers - “You want water lady? Lady, you buy my water. Lady, over here. Lady…” - we’d seen enough ancient glories.

And now we’ll commit an even greater crime than buying the one-day ticket and say that Angkor was not our favourite experience of the past few days! While other tourists spent three days or more roaming around the temples, we split our budget and devoted the other half to a trip around the Tonle Sap lake. This lake - the largest in Southeast Asia - swells dramatically in the rainy season, so much so that all the houses are built on stilts and the road to the towns on the lake’s edge disappears under a meter of water when the monsoons come.

With the rainy season only recently started, we were able to go by tuk tuk to Kampong Khleang and then on by boat down a waterway leading to the lake. The day was beautiful and our camera clicked over and over as we watched families on the water, all of them waving, smiling and friendly. At the moment, few tourists take the time to see Kampong Khleang.

The families who don’t have a house raised several meters in the air make their home instead in houseboats. They run TVs off generators, keep their chickens and pigs on floating rafts and are served by floating shops that come by selling everything from household goods to freshly mixed iced coffee.

It was a fascinating trip and one we’ll remember for quite some time, even more fondly than the temples of Angkor. So too with the charity we visited on another morning, set up to provide landmine victims with prosthetic limbs. We were truly touched by the work they were doing as well as by the information they provided on the landmine problem in Cambodia and the problems faced by amputees. We spent the rest of our days wandering through the markets and leading a hunt for the best street food. Both fun ways to spend a few hours.

Although we only spent one day at Angkor, our five days in Siem Reap were quickly over and now it’s time to head for Phnom Penh, three to four days away. The roads are apparently in good condition so the daily showers shouldn’t hamper us too much. Actually they feel quite nice at the end of a long day! So, next time from Cambodia’s capital, where we’ll go on a visa hunt (should be much easier than Central Asia) and explore some tragic Khmer Rouge sites.

It’s been a long day on mostly dirt roads. We started out in the early morning hours from Anlong Veng and now we are covered in a fine layer of red dust, sweat and sunscreen, struggling to pull off the final few kilometers and wondering if a hotel will ever take us in this state. We watch the darkening sky in anticipation and then cheer out loud when the heavens finally open, dropping buckets of monsoon rain over our heads.

At first we rejoice in the rain. The torrents of water wash away all the heat our bodies built up over the day. We don’t care that all our clothes and our shoes are saturated. Every time we spin the pedals around there’s a squishing sound from the puddles around our toes but we are happy to feel so refreshed and the Cambodians are also amused to see two foreign visitors as soaked as they are, going home on bicycles in the opposite direction. We start to rue the rain a little though when the water drips into our eyes. All the grit from the day that’s plastered on our faces flows in along with the water and soon our eyes are stinging so badly we can’t see a thing. We pull over, rub our faces with our shirts and start off again. We have to do this at least five times.

As always happens when we tackle long distances, it’s the finale that seems to take forever. The rain stops but we are still not in the town of Siem Reap, despite having spent over an hour being passed by tourists in tuk tuks. How far can a tuk tuk go in a day? We must be getting close. We’ve gone through the Angkor Wat park and down a long, wide boulevard and now we’re at a large roundabout where all the signs have mysteriously disappeared. Which way to Siem Reap is anyone’s guess. We decide to follow the tuk tuks and our bet pays off, dropping us just short of the main hotel district. We don’t have a map but we’d seen one online a few days earlier and amazingly Andrew – who Friedel has taken to calling ‘Mr. GPS’ – shouts out ‘turn right’ and ‘left down this alley’ and we are at the door of the hotel we wanted to stay at. How does he remember these things?

The hotel agrees to take us in their one remaining room and we slosh up to our bedroom where we linger in the hot shower and down two cups of coffee. We know the next few days will be expensive – entry to Angkor Wat alone is $20 U.S. a day – but we still decide to opt for eating in the hotel restaurant instead of venturing out in search of cheaper food and this time it’s a very good experience. The fish we order is well prepared, full of flavour and something we would never find from the street vendors.

Finally, we relax. It was a long and exhausting journey, over seven hours in the saddle, but now we are ready to start exploring one of the world’s true wonders and we are excited for what’s in store. We book a tour as well out to see the fishing villages around the Tonle Sap lake and then feverishly start checking our email with the free wifi connection and doing all those other things we think about but never get around to when you normally only have an hour of internet access once every few days. It’s midnight before we fall asleep, exhausted but pleased with our first day on the road in Cambodia.

We set off for Cambodia this morning, slightly concerned about the roads ahead but encouraged by the ever-smooth asphalt on the last part of our journey through Thailand. The last few kilometers went steeply uphill and not so long ago we would have been climbing, or more likely pushing, on gravel but now it was reasonably easy to inch upwards in low gear. Only the hot sun beating down our heads gave us trouble. For the first time, we didn’t see any bus stops to seek shelter under and it was a good thing we had plenty of water on board, both to drink and to pour over our sweating bodies. This would be a very easy section of road to get heatstroke on.

A small wave of jitters ran over us as we entered the last tiny village on the border. The nicely surfaced road ended abruptly, leaving a dusty dirt track in its place. We weren’t even sure where the border crossing was. No signs indicated the way and any one of the forks in the road could have been the right path but on local instruction we headed for a cluster of huts. In the distance we could see a Cambodian flag fluttering on a makeshift building but first we had to get through Thai customs.

“You speak Thai?” said the hopeful official. We had to disappoint. Beyond a few basics like ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ our Thai hasn’t advanced very much in the past three weeks. Our man actually managed quite well though, asking probing questions like ‘where are you going’ (Hmmmm, Cambodia??) before quickly putting our exit stamps in place. Now for the other side, where we’d been warned to expect plenty of poorly disguised request for bribes. First we were directed to a hut with a sign for a ‘visa service’ on it. Our suspicions instantly rose as this sounded very much like a business venture where someone charges you a few bucks to fill in an application form or lend you a pen but it was all legitimate and we watched as a middle-aged man slowly pasted visas into our passports. So far so good but we still didn’t know the asking price.

Conveniently, the stamp on the visa that should have shown us the cost was poorly inked so we could only read ‘USD’ but not the actual figure. We passed over $20 U.S. for one visa – the real fee although more is often demanded – but we didn’t have enough in American currency for the second visa so we had to pay in Thai baht and for this our man would accept no less than 1,000 Baht, about $30 U.S. and a nice profit for him. Still, we couldn’t really complain as we were soon on our way with practically no hassle. We were only the third and fourth foreigners through the border by lunchtime, which meant we doubled that day’s workload for the border guards!

Off we went onto more dusty roads but it was only a few hundred meters before we discovered a fantastic paved road all the way down the hill, past the woods where Pol Pot once hid away, and into the small provincial town of Anlong Veng. There is a noticable increase in poverty here from Thailand but the people are exceptionally friendly and can’t see very many tourists. It’s only in the last few years that improving roads here have in any way made the area accessible from the rest of Cambodia. Undoubtedly the town will soon explode in popularity with its Khmer Rouge background and the celebrated temple of Prah Vilhear. We had a walk through the market, which wouldn’t even have existed ten years ago when Khmer rebels were still in control and got many fits of giggles from the merchants and quite a few ‘hellos’ from young women minding the stalls. Now we have a long slog to Siem Reap, maybe long enough to get our heads around the basics of yet another language!

We woke up with a little less spiritual tranquility than we might have hoped for after a night in a monastery. Novice monks were running in and out of the large hall we were given as a sleeping space until late in the evening, giggling at us and every so often attempting a few questions in broken English. As they came and went, a few mosquitos moved in and with we went to bed tucked well into our cotton sleep sacks despite the heat, trying to hide from the malaria virus.

We decided long before we arrived in southeast Asia that we wouldn’t take any preventative malaria medication. Too many side effects, too many regions where the virus has already become resistant to many of the drugs and anyway, our motto on this trip has always been do as the locals do and they certainly don’t pop pills year round, nor do many of the foreign NGO workers living here long-term. Avoiding bites has been our tactic but that’s a little difficult when someone has let the mosquitos into your room for you. Thankfully the risk in Thailand is very low so we didn’t lose too much sleep over it.

We did spend a bit of time though thinking about the local couple who showed up and started setting up their home for the night near the picnic tables just outside the hall where we were sleeping. We watched this obviously reasonably impoverished man and woman spread out their meager belongings and contemplated how lucky we were to be spending a night in a monastery by our own choice and because we were on a marvellous world tour while some people come to the monastery because they really have no other option.

When we finally got to bed, it was a few short hours before dawn arrived to the tune of a metal grate being rolled up and pots banging around in the adjacent kitchen, where local women were cooking breakfast for the monks. We packed up quickly and then searched for a place to make a donation to the monastery. We didn’t see any donation boxes so we asked in the kitchen by waving our money around. “Tamboon, tamboon,” the women said, looking pleased and rushing off to get one of the young monks-in-training from the night before. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old and was very shy as he sat down, legs tucked behind him, and placed his large silver offering bowl in front of his lap. We dropped in a few bills, attempted a clumsy ‘thank you’ in Thai and ran off to the local market for an iced coffee. By this time it still wasn’t even 6am but there were plenty of people in the market, who all had a good laugh at the crazy foreigners trying to wheel their bicycles between fried rice sellers and people lugging tons of pineapples on little carts.

After a quick shot of caffeine and loaded up on sugary donuts we set out for Surin, amazingly managing to find the back roads instead of the busy main thoroughfare and even more amazingly managing to find toilets at all the right moments. Friedel’s guts were doing topsy turvey things for the first time in ages (we have been very lucky where tummy troubles are concerned) and let’s just say that’s not much fun on a bicycle! Once in Surin, we called up Sarmun, a local man who we met on the Couchsurfing site and who had a ‘treehouse resort’ he’d invited us to stay in.

Soon we were settled into Sarmun’s home in the sky – quite an impressive collection of buildings and rooms built several meters up around a forest. And then Sarmun did something no one has ever done before and welcomed us to his city by taking us to a political demonstration. Now, being sensible travellers we always read the British government’s advice for every country we go to and on the FCO website it clearly points out that there is a risk of a military coup in Thailand at the moment and there are a lot of protesters because they believe the government is corrupt and this little primer ends with the words: “You should exercise caution and avoid any demonstrations.”

Well, yes, that would make sense but good reason got ripped to shreds by that Canadian desire to be polite and not cause any trouble for our host so we didn’t protest when Sarmun said he just had a little party for us to attend and that it would only be a couple hours. He mentioned something about it being political but we thought it was a private event of some sort and then we got there and discovered it was actually a march around the town. The next thing we knew, someone was tying bandanas around our heads with slogans printed on them that we couldn’t even read and another person was handing us two flags saying ‘just hold these’ and before we knew it we were being told to ’stand here’ and ‘isn’t it great you’ve come’ and then the crowd was moving and then it was really too late to do anything about it.

“Don’t worry. My husband’s a lawyer,” one woman said reassuringly as we set off, although we weren’t really reassured by the fact she felt obliged to tell us that and we wondered if we should just step off to the side then and there but someone else saw our nervous looks and laughed and tried to tell us it was really very safe. Safe or not, we did learn some very helpful Thai words like ‘nay’ and ‘kop’ which, when you put them together, apparently mean ‘to jail’ and if you add the name of the former prime minister in there, well, you get the idea… This language lesson took our minds off the rain, which was pouring down in fine monsoon style and had us all soaked to the bone just five minutes after the hour-long march began.

We thought that was the end of it but Sarmun had another rally to go to again that evening and before we knew it we were once again at the scene, although this time it was more of a relaxed affair with people serving food and speeches and concerts but we understood little and with a line of police in riot gear separating us from some opposing protesters we decided to make an early exit. Unlike the afternoon, this time we had our bikes with us so off we pedalled back to the treehouse in the darkness, happy to have survived our baptism into Thai politics unscathed.

After a day of relaxation, we set off from Surin quite early but we didn’t get too far before we came across a string of box stores and ran in to stock up on things before we go to Cambodia. We piled the panniers full of Snickers bars and other snacks in anticipation of a potentially difficult journey to Siem Reap. Midday was already approaching by the time we cleared the city limits and we soon took shelter in a bus stop for the shade. They are everywhere here, always clean and big enough that we can roll our bikes in, lay down on the benches and still have plenty of room left over for actual passengers but there are so many bus stops we rarely have to share.

The rest of the afternoon was spent rolling over flat roads with rice fields on all sides. Finally we arrived in a bustling little town and we set about asking if there was a hotel nearby. “Just 500 meters down that road,” said one man with quite good English. We think he meant 5km and it took us ages to find because no one could give us good directions but eventually we arrived in our $10 U.S. a night suite complete with a huge double bed, a large fridge and a shower big enough for six people, not that we tried it. When we remember what we endured in France for five times the price it’s hard to believe such good accomodation can be so cheap.

Dawn had already broken when we first cracked open our eyes, remembered our pledge to make an early start the evening before and then rolled back over for another hour of sleep. Getting a move on before the heat rises is easier said than done but it’s a habit we should probably work harder to form.

The cycling is pleasant before 8am in Thailand. Up until 10am it’s still reasonably comfortable but afterwards even the mildest exertion has us breaking out into a puddle of sweat. Our skin itches. Our shirts are soaked. Our faces are so wet they shine. To the Thais, who never seem to sweat, we must look a real mess when we get off our bikes for a bite to eat or to see a temple.

All we read about cycling in this part of the world before we arrived was universally positive: fantastic food, friendly people, a cheap cost of living. Those things are all true but for us the humidity and high temperatures are taking their toll. We still have to come up with a good strategy for offsetting the weather’s less appealing side effects.

Until then, we’re likely to arrive at most places like we did the historic temple of Phnom Rung this morning – perspiring all over. It’s built on top of an extinct volcano so there was a steep climb to the entrance from the rice paddies down on the plains. We quickly found the toilets and after a splash of water we felt refreshed enough to explore this amazing site. The temple itself isn’t so big but the detail is breathtaking. Every tiny square is covered in carvings, going up many levels into the sky.

We timed things just right and managed to be on our way out as a few tour buses pulled in. By the time the masses were crowded around the temple, we were already on the hunt for lunch. We found our midday meal at a humble canteen, wedged between the rice fields and the road. Our table was shared with two women who were taking a break from farming and judging from their weathered faces they’ve planted more than a few crops of rice over the years. We were welcomed first with surprise but then with plenty of smiles. We’ve never had a bad meal eating where the locals are and this was no exception. The Thai version of chicken noodle soup – the only thing on the menu – with rice noodles, beansprouts and fresh herbs was delicious and only cost about $0.60 a bowl.

Our stomachs satisfied, we carried on down the road, intending to stop long before we actually did pull over for the night. First we missed our initial turnoff but decided to carry on for a second one. Then we didn’t see anywhere to sleep for ages. We went through a small town but with the word ‘hotel’ rarely appearing on the signs it’s hard to figure out where we might get a room for the night. We asked around but the drunk policeman we stopped wasn’t much help and many Thais became quite shy when we tried our poor language skills out on them.

By now it was getting close to dusk and just as we were wondering what to do we spotted a temple. We have a little note in Thai that says ‘please can we put our tent here for a night’ so Andrew showed it to the monks who were only too happy to give us a huge room where we could lay out our sleeping mats.

For the rest of the evening we were surrounded by young monks in training, some of them from Laos and Cambodia, who took an immense amount of interest in their strange foreign visitors. All of what we’d been led to believe about Buddhism was turned on its head. The monks had no problem speaking to Friedel, for example, even though we’d been told they weren’t supposed to talk to women. On the contrary, many of them initiated conversations with her. Some had new music players and mobile phones, making us wonder about our impression that they were supposed to renounced worldly pleasures. And although we’d been told never to touch anyone on the head as it’s seen as the highest part of the body, spiritually and literally, we watched the teacher of these young monks-in-training give them playful taps on the head when they were cheeky or too boisterous. Proof that we shouldn’t take what’s in the guidebooks too literally?

It was past midnight and we were in our tent. We should have been asleep but we were listening to the rain come down and wishing it would go away. And between the drops of water pitter pattering on our home we also heard the birds having a late night chat in the trees and thunder rumbling off in the distance. Then we checked the time and realised we really should try to get some sleep so we rolled over to doze away. Andrew brushed his cheek just before we turned in our beds. “What’s that?” Friedel asked. “Oh, just an ant,” Andrew mumbled. Just an ant. We’ve camped plenty by now. One ant roaming free is no big deal, we thought, as our eyes closed.

What happened next was like a scene from a horror film where the pincers of a giant ant reach out around a beautiful woman and slowly squeeze the life out of the heroine. In our nightmare scenario we saw not ‘just an ant’ but a whole ant highway. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of ants, flowing in through a minuscule crack where the zippers come together to seal the door to our sleeping area.

Out went the lovely, warm, fuzzy feeling of just waking up and in came shock and disgust as we realised the full scale of the invasion. Ants were everywhere. On our sleeping mats. In our clothes. On the tent roof. On the floor. When we finally shook enough ants free to get dressed, we noticed everything else we owned was crawling too. Our shoes. Our panniers. Even our water bottles.

That was quite enough for us but the ants wanted more. As we moved and started shaking and brushing the ants started biting. So tiny, barely a few milimeters long, but their tiny jaws packed a sting and we screamed a few unprintable words. Out we jumped from the tent, looking at our belongings with eyes wide open. Ants were clustered so thickly on Friedel’s swimsuit that the fabric was barely visible. It was just a swarming brown mass. The buggers even chewed several holes through the groundsheet, leaving parts of it looking like a slice of Swiss cheese.

Three hours later, without a drop of coffee to fuel our frantic cleaning, we had used several litres of campsite water to clear most of our things of ants but not all. Through the day a trickle of ants continued to emerge from various cracks in our bags and we wondered what kind of pet we could adopt to eat them all. A lizard? A bat? We’d watched thousands of bats fly out of their cave near Khao Yai in search of a sunset meal. We could feed a large extended bat family with the ants that attacked us.

On the move now, we cycled past rice paddies and waved hello to the friendly Thais running food stalls and gas stations along our route. “Need any help?” one called. “Want to take some ants off our hands?” we thought. Several hours later we still felt phantom stings on our arms and legs and that tickly feeling you get when something is crawling over your body.

Totally cured of any desire to camp, we sought out a hotel in the afternoon and used a strong spray of water to wash the last few ants out of our bags. Now, like any crime victim, we just wanted to know why they chose our home in the first place. We didn’t cook near our tent. We had almost no food with us and what we did have was all unopened. When we removed the tent, we didn’t find an ant hill underneath. Was it just our bad luck? Were we particularly juicy targets? With a string of forest parks offering camping in our path, we’ll have to work up our enthusiasm if we’re going to try tenting in Thailand again.

“Twenty baht for photo,” said the man on the elephant as he strode past, looking at us hopefully. What seemed like half a house of things – a table, some chairs, a washing basin – was piled on the elephant’s back and we couldn’t help stopping our bicycles to take a better look. That’s when the clever fellow recognised an opportunity and tried to get us to pay for the honour of taking his picture.

We were disappointing customers, refusing to get out our camera and encourage the idea that all tourists have money coming out of their ears. For us it was a wake-up call, that escaping off the beaten path of backpacker hotels and karaoke bars in heavily-visited Thailand was going to be harder than in any country we’d visited so far.

That morning we’d left the city of Ayutthya, famous for its temples, and headed out on rural roads along a small and winding river. Under a beating sun, which had us covered in sweat before 9am, we watched as little by little the population disappeared, leaving just thick forest on either side of the road and grazing water buffalo to look at.

We were just starting to enjoy the tranquility when an intersection appeared and with it a return to civilisation that wouldn’t have looked out of place in California: a whole string of fancy restaurants, wineries, spa hotels and resorts followed along a road that was supposed to boast a waterfall and something called a ‘tree tunnel’ although we didn’t manage to find either of the natural attractions.

When we reached the main highway connecting Bangkok to Thailand’s second biggest city we were even more surprised to be greeted by a Western theme. “Come live like cowboys and indians,” said one sign beside a teepee. If that didn’t tempt us, we could always have lunch at the Chokchoi Steakhouse or go visit Uncle Bill at his Texas Ranch. Was this what Thai people craved or what they imagined foreign visitors wanted?

Near dusk, after navigating around dozens of steakhouses, we found ourselves in front of Grandpa’s Cottages, where a sign advertised bangers and mash as the nightly special. We stopped not for the food but for the campground they boasted alongside the cottages.  After asking the price we found ourselves blurting out: “You want how much?”

In hindsight it wasn’t the most polite response but fatigue and shock overtook our good sense as we  listened to a figure that wouldn’t have been out of place in Europe. Grandpa wanted 12 euros for his tent pitch; more for camping than we’d paid the night before for a room in a four-star hotel.

“Well, like, we have, like, separate bathrooms for men and women,” our would-be host explained. We weren’t exactly swayed by his eloquent argument and made our appologies to search for something cheaper. Thankfully we came across the perfect little guesthouse just a few hundred meters later and ended up staying to do a tour of Khao Yai the following day.

The entrance to the national park isn’t cheap but the tours are reasonably priced and we enjoyed some trekking and wildlife spotting – snakes, spiders, scorpions, birds and quite a few monkeys but no elephants as they’ve all retreated into the jungle with the rainy season. We’ll do another half-day tour today and then continue on our quest to find the hidden Thailand, if it still exists somewhere out there beyond the steakhouses!

Sweat just for the sake of it doesn`t appeal to us anymore. Goodness knows we`re going to be sweaty enough over the coming weeks cycling through hot and humid Southeast Asia.

We navigated the city streets to the main station easily – bless the Thai drivers who are eternally polite and easy to get along with – and bought a ticket within minutes for the grand sum of 15 Baht. That`s just under $0.50 cents for a ride an hour up the line. Our decision to take the train was looking even wiser. Tickets in hand, we rolled past a string of ladies cutting hair to the end of platform 10 where a woman sat in a booth, waiting to sell us a cargo ticket for the bicycles. We were a bit surprised when the cost of taking our bikes worked out to six times as much as our seats but we couldn`t complain when the total barely came to $7 U.S. for everything.

Two happy station workers even laughed and joked with us as they helped us lift our bikes up the steep steps and into the impossibly narrow aisle of the train carriage. “No problem,” one of them seemed to be saying as he grabbed one of our bungee cords, lifted Andrew’s bike onto its back wheel and quickly strapped it vertically into position. “He’s done this before,” we thought as we watched him use a creative combination of train door hinges and our bottle racks to make sure the bike was tightly secured. What service.

Soon we were chugging our way towards Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Thailand and renowned as a UNESCO World Heritage site for its many temples. But before we got there it was the train that caught our attention. We were in the last carriage. Our third class seating came with simple wooden benches, surprisingly comfortably despite their spartan appearance, and at the back we could stand in the fresh air on a little balcony, letting the wind ruffle our hair. We took some pictures, munched on the fruit we’d bought by the platform in Bangkok and watched the city disappear behind us.

By the time we arrived in Ayutthaya we were very relaxed and it didn’t take us long to settle into a room in one of the many backpacker havens. Every luxury can be enjoyed here. Clean accomodation, with air conditioning if you like. Thai and western food in the trendy restaurant. A foot or back massage, sir? Wireless internet. Plenty of English speaking staff.

It’s both wonderful and slightly disconcerting after so long in relative obscurity. We are revelling in the ease of it all and yet in some ways also missing the challenge. Trying to get to know local people is harder than it`s been in some months because the Thais are understandably accustomed to tourists arriving in their thousands. Having said that, we can’t help but fail to be impressed by their continually cheery dispositions and we’ve yet to feel overcharged in a shop or market – something we’re told is common in nearby Vietnam.

It’s a credit to the Thai people that they welcome so many visitors far richer than themselves every year and at the same time have failed to develop the ‘cash cow’ mentality and aggressive salesmanship we’ve seen in other countries. We are looking forward to our exploration of Thailand, which should start in a couple days as we pedal towards the Khao Yai national park and the border areas near Cambodia.

Our good mood has been helped to no end by a flight that went smoother than we dared hope. Full marks to Air Astana, who only charged a modest fee for our 35kg of extra luggage. On the other side, we were astonished to see all our bags and both bikes in perfect condition as we emerged from immigration. When we lived in London it seemed every trip ended with an interminable delay before our bags appeared. We’d forgotten airports could be so efficient.

A quick ride into the city centre by taxi (no point trying to brave public transport when you’re as loaded down as we are) and we arrived at the home of Michael, a welcoming American we’d met in Tashkent just a few weeks earlier. We’re going to stay in his flat for a week or so, trading cat-sitting duties for a pad in Bangkok while we get our bikes fixed up and buy a few things for the next leg of the journey.

We’ve done very little research on this part of the world but our inclinations are to head north from here, along the Burmese border, through at least two of Thailand’s national parks and past some stunning waterfalls. It should be a good introduction to our first cycle trip in the tropics.

While you’re waiting for us to start pedalling again, why not listen to our latest podcast. We put it together just a few days before leaving Bishkek and it features an interview with David Berghof, the owner of the Stantours travel agency. We’ve used them a few times and always had great service. David has a wealth of information about Central Asia so his thoughts are a good starting point if you’re considering a trip to the region.

We’d travelled all the way from Karakol, some 300km, with the plan to turn right at the end of the lake Issyk-Kul. We were going to Bishkek. That’s what we’d been planning to do for over a week. It’s what we told Tamara, who runs a peaceful guesthouse in Tamga where we spent two days, reading in her garden and meandering down to the water for an early summer swim. That’s also what we said when a troop of twenty German cyclists passed us on their way to Beijing. But when we were nearly at the end of the road two French cyclists came along and changed our minds. “We’re going to Lake Song-Kol,” they said. “You can come with us.”

The decision to make the left-bearing detour into the Tian-Shan mountain range with Mathieu and Sandrine to a lake frequented by nomads and shepherds was a quick one. From Bishkek we want to fly somewhere (destination so far undecided) and we feared that if we got to the Kyrgyz capital we might not gather up the energy to do a loop around the country before leaving.

Our choice was an excellent one. The following nine days took us through some of the most stunning scenery we’ve seen yet on our trip. From the end of Lake Issyk-Kul we travelled first on asphalt to the bustling town of Kochkor, the last stop before the next stage of our journey that took us a day and a half up a dirt track. Up, up, up we climbed. Around several switchbacks, past a huge bag of potatoes that had fallen off a truck (we picked up a few extra kilograms – who can resist free potatoes?) and through the thunderstorms that seem to gather almost every afternoon.

Late on the second day after leaving Kochkor we arrived at the snowbanks marking the top. We later learned the peak was at 3,600 meters, our highest yet.

With dark clouds gathering behind us we sped downhill towards the lake, fording a small river in our bare feet to reach its north shore. We arrived without much time to appreciate the clear water and pebbled beach. The storm that had been chasing us was quickly approaching. A fierce bout of wind and rain followed, finishing an hour or so later with a rainbow and a fresh dusting of snow on the nearby mountains.

The weather improved overnight and early the next morning we carried on around part of the lake, past the first yurts of the season where nomad families invited us in for tea, bread, butter and a glass of kymys, fermented mare’s milk. It’s the national drink of Kyrgyzstan but, for tourists like us, kymys is somewhat of an aquired taste – sharp, slightly fizzy and with the occasional unidentified animal hair included. We politely finished our share but didn’t gulp it down with the enthusiasm of the toddler sitting beside us.

The remainder of our second day was spent simply sitting by the lake and enjoying its beauty. The whole area is a paradise for photographers and we filled our memory cards several times over with images of the still lake water, the mountains, the flowers, the yurts, their families and farm animals. These two days by the lake alone would have been enough to justify the detour but we still hadn’t seen the half of what Kyrgyzstan has to offer.

Relucantly on the third day – our supplies of food and gas for cooking running low – we left the lake on an old Soviet road running north. Well, technically it had been a road sometime in the past three decades but now it was more of a grassy track and we mostly pushed our bikes away from the water to a peak 3,300 meters up in the sky. A whole valley unfolded beneath us, offering a stunning view over mountain tops and grassy pastures. We averaged just over 3km an hour as we headed downhill on a rocky path.

Now on lower plains, we took an afternoon off to regain our energy and headed out the next morning for another set of mountains, the rocks this time forming the bright red walls of a canyon that ran along the Kochkor river. We were almost alone on the road and a good thing too. Its washboard surface sent us from side to side, back and forth in search of a small section that wouldn’t make us feel seasick.

The slow climb soon brought us to the main Bishkek-Osh road, where we sadly said goodbye to Mathieu and Sandrine. In a week we fast became good friends and wished we were continuing in the same direction. They turned south to Osh and we headed north, up 10km of switchbacks on the first paved road we’d seen in almost a week. Nearly three hours later we reached a tunnel at the top. Dimly lit, narrow and in a rather run-down state, we were glad it was going downhill and therefore quickly overwith.

Now came our reward for several days of hard work – 70km of steady descent from 3,200 meters all the way down to 800 meters. Even a fierce headwind blowing up the valley didn’t put much of a dent in our speed. It was over all too quickly. Back in the lowlands and the sweltering heat, we miss the mountains already but we have to turn our mind to other things: how to leave Central Asia. As much as we’ve heard wonderful things about Tajikistan, we don’t feel we have the energy to tackle it this time around. We are ready for a change of scene and since the Chinese don’t want visitors right now we’ll hunt instead for a flight to somewhere. Our mission for the next few days is to find out where exactly that might be.

Where to start on a journey that’s taken us across some of Kazakhstan’s more remote and beautiful places over the past eight days and through the back door into Kyrgyzstan, where we sit now on the edge of one of the world’s largest alpine lakes. How about with the sound of two hundred hoofs thundering on the ground around us as a troop of at least fifty horses, their glossy coats gleaming in the afternoon sunshine, raced past us in a high mountain pasture?

Or maybe we should begin with thunder of another kind; thunder and lightening that chased us over bumpy dirt roads into Kyrgyzstan where we dashed for shelter under the eaves of a farmhouse. As the rain poured down from the heavens, over the edge of the roof and into our shoes, we found a local teenager standing next to us, eyeing us up with surprise and a smile. Apparently they don’t get many tourists in his tiny village.

Then there was the lady who insisted we come in for tea when we arrived in her shop to buy some food. “Chai, chai,” she said, beckoning us over with a wave. Out came two cups of tea accompanied by bread, sausage, cookies and candies on the small and rickety table in her crowded kitchen, which served doubly as her bedroom.

We were ushered in for tea as well in the farming town of Zhalanash. Our early morning arrival meant the shops weren’t yet open. As we waited, a man with dancing eyes smiled and pulled us into his home where a second breakfast of homemade pastries, bread and butter magically appeared before us.

These beautiful experiences made a nice change from a part of the world that, to be honest, was starting to leave us feeling slightly annoyed. We’re fast coming up for two years on our bikes and so far we’ve never met so many sour-faced people as in Kazakhstan, our waves and smiles from the saddle gathering only blank stares in reply. Shopkeepers tended to be particularly icy and we took to buying our food in the market from the first stall owner who smiled at us. Even people who approached us, shepherds who trotted up on their horses and cars that pulled up alongside as we rode, often barely managed to mutter a reply to our greeting.

Getting off the beaten track seemed the key to finding a better side of Kazakhstan and we weren’t wrong in our assumption. From the time we left Taldykorgan, the roads were so quiet we had them almost to ourselves; exactly what we needed after being literally pushed forward by an SUV in downtown Taldykorgan. The man behind the wheel wanted to wait for the green light beyond the stop line and the pedestrian crosswalk and decided the best way to do this was to push his bumper up against our panniers before stepping on the gas.

Our stress melted away as we left the city and slogged over a seemingly endless series of steep hills to find camping by fresh mountain streams nearly every night, set against snowy peaks and green pastures. We still wouldn’t call the Kazakh people outgoing but the smiles certainly seemed to flow more freely as we pedalled into increasingly remote areas. The change of tone put us in such a good mood that we didn’t even care when Andrew’s back rack broke. Zip ties are holding it together until we can find a welder.

Maybe it was our choice of route that kept the farmers grinning. We entered Kazakhstan on the best roads we’d seen for some time but our last days in the country took us into very rural areas where the smooth asphalt quickly turned to bone-rattling dirt and stone-covered tracks. Bump, bump, bump went the panniers, the bikes and our bodies. Sometimes the roads were so bad we gave up riding and pushed, both downhill and uphill. We rejoiced when we reached the main road into Kyrgyzstan and found it was paved but shortly after we crossed the remote checkpoint our little slice of heaven ended. Bump, bump, bump we went again, all the way into Karakol, some 100km down the road.
That last stretch was one of our hardest rides yet. We fought winds in every direction, thunder and lightening, pouring rain, hail and roads that sometimes deteriorated into a steep, slippery mud track. We had no food left to speak of, aside from a few cookies and a bottle of soy sauce, and no gas to cook food on anyway. We were also devoid of any Kyrgyz money that would have allowed us to stop at a store or cafe.

When we finally reached the last few kilometers into Karakol on real asphalt we found hordes of hyperactive teenagers, fresh from their high school graduation, in our path and they all wanted to shake our panniers as we passed. We played leapfrog with a tractor, whose young driver liked to ride alongside us and honk the horn constantly. Dusk was falling as we approached the city, found our hotel, revelled in a lukewarm shower and borrowed some money from a fellow traveller so we could buy supper. We were exhausted. A few days of rest in Karakol is definitely on the cards and then we’ve a whole new country to explore.