Day 1 Planes and Buses It was an excellent full English Breakfast at Heathrow terminal 3 for most of us. All hail-fellow-well-met in our new blue T-shirts and black armbands to remember the lovely Andy Matthews, and almost all with the right badges too. But that would not have been as much fun as the scene in downtown Singapore where an unknown restaurateur leapt for joy as Adam Tyrer, Jason Peers and Victor Ubugo eased their joint 70 stones into one of his booths and ordered the chateaubriand for a starter. While they drank his cellar dry and sent him happily into retirement the rest of us flew through the night, sipping cocktails and snoozing so quietly that the Captain had to come through the cabin to see if we were all OK. He and Luke got chatting and agreed that we’d not stop in at Kabul, but rather all go to sleep for the rest of the journey. Dear Reader, we slept like lambs and disembarked safely to explore Singapore (well the bar at the airport or the bar atop the highest hotel, depending on whether you could be bothered or not) for a few hours, before flying on to Siem Reap. The Somadevi Resort and Spa in the middle of town may be a little dated, but the staff, like all Cambodians we met, are charming, the rooms just fine and the pool huge and dark blue and with a bar in the water to boot, meaning that within minutes of our arriving half a dozen beluga whales pulled up a stool and started challenging the Angkor...
“Any square kilometre here might hold up to 2,500 explosives, and that isn’t just mines, it’s grenades, clusterbombs, RPGs….” Right now a well-spoken American, an ex-soldier, is matter-of-factly relating the tragic legacy of Cambodia’s war-torn past, and it’s given the prospect of cycling here an unexpected dimension “The aim of most of this isn’t to kill, but to maim. Think about it, what costs your enemy more, burying a body or caring for a paraplegic? And over here you’ve got your toe-poppers…” It’s mid-morning at the Cambodian Landmine Museum, a warehouse of awful relics which works as a grassroots conduit for education and funding for this scarred country’s colossal clearance efforts. It’s a sharp contrast to the resplendent jungles and endless flood-plains we’ve already seen on the first leg of our 150-mile charity cycle to benefit kids with cancer, kids who can benefit from music therapy, and kids who need a lifeline. With that in mind, no hill or heat seems too great. We’ve a long way to go, but already it feels like a different world. After a short hop from Singapore over the endless floodplains of the Mekong Delta the first thing you’re hit with is the blasting jungle heat and countless tourist-shops full of little hand-carved Bhuddas and Hindu gods nestled alongside books like, ‘First They Killed My Father’ and, ‘Stay Alive, My Son.’ It’s that juxtaposition of histories – of Cambodia’s grand origins and its devastating recent years – that’s echoed time and time again here. On the one hand, you have the ancient the legacy of the Khmer empire, an ancient political dynasty that’s...
