Friclay

Breakfast at Les Manguiers transplanted me back to relaxing weekends away from Phnom Penh. Lazily eating baguettes and drinking iced coffee is a great way to start any day.

The weather was unseasonably windy and cloudy, and there was rain which I've never before seen in January. Instead of being exposed to the elements up Bokor Mountain, we hired motorbikes to explore Phnom Chhnork, a hillside cavern containing a temple, surrounded by farmland. The day started off poorly when I couldn't master the motorbike controls and careered off. I've only driven one once before up Bokor Mountain in 2012 and must have been more gung-ho in my youth, or better at hand-eye coordination. Niki bravely stepped into the breach.

We successfully visited the temple, ate noodles in a village and watched a group of men playing pétanque, but took a wrong turning on the way back to Kampot. We hit a patch of road where the rain had made the clay simultaneously as sticky and slippery as hell. The tyres on our bikes could not handle it and it was painfully slow going. Whenever we alighted from the bikes to push, our feet became rooted to the sticky mud. We had to resort to negotiating with a random trailer owner to load one of the motorbikes and hitch back to Kampot town.

It all reminded me too much of troubleshooting logistics when doing fieldwork. We were all relieved to reach Les Manguiers and eat some food in one of the ramshackle wooden terraces that jut out over the river.