When we were in Phnom Penh 12 years ago, it was a surprisingly low-key place with a certain undiscovered charm. It was strange to be in a national capital city with dirt roads in the center of town.

But today those dirt roads are gone, and some of the charm seems to have gone with them. Now it feels more sprawling, more trafficky, more chaotic. I guess those are the growing pains for a country that is thankfully seeing more prosperity. It’s still a fun, somewhat quirky place to hang out. And it still has a couple of incredibly moving sites — the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum set in the high school turned prison at the center of Pol Pot’s brutality.

We’ve also found some fun pockets of nightlife here, including a classic old colonial-style hotel bar and a surprisingly vibrant gay scene. And yes, we’ve enjoyed a fair amount of escape time by our hotel’s peaceful little salt water pool.

After three days here we are heading southwest today to a river lodge near Koh Kong, where we will be quite cut off from the world for at least three days. Yup, no Internet at all.

Today was a great biking day. I scheduled a 75-kilometer ride to Beng Mealea, another old Buddhist temple, with Grasshopper Adventures, the same company Mark & I rode with two days ago out to Angkor Wat. They run tours throughout Asia and based on these experiences I may be looking for them a lot over the coming months.

It turns out not many tourists want to schedule 75-kilometer rides, and I was the only one on the tour – just me and the guide, so we could go at whatever pace I wanted. We traveled on everything from paved roads to gravel roads to muddy paths, through rice fields and rural villages. Just beautiful. Meanwhile someone else was driving a tuk-tuk to the 25-kilometer spot, and then the 50-kilometer spot, with fresh fruit, cold water, and chilled cloths for wiping down. Then, after we’d ridden to the temple he strapped the bikes onto the tuk-tuk so after lunch we were driven back into town. I don’t experience that when biking on my own!

This was the longest ride I’ve done in years, though I observed from the start that a long ride for me used to be 75 miles, not 75 kilometers. Apparently the secret to growing old is to just convert to metric.

Tomorrow we’re taking a bus to Phnom Penh for a few days, before (probably) heading south to the Cambodian beaches. We had been planning to fly up to Hanoi, where my brother had a business meeting scheduled. But when the meeting got canceled, we dropped Vietnam and now will spend probably a full month in Cambodia before crossing overland into Laos for maybe another month. So far this Southeast Asia stuff is pretty good!

At any rate, here are some of my favorite new pictures.