After a restless night of not much sleep (again), at 6am I turned to Nico. He took one look at my face and suggested we go find a doctor. I went to the bathroom, took one look at my face and agreed. We were at the doctors for 7:30 when it opened. He took one look at my face and diagnosed conjunctivitis. I’ve never had conjunctivitis before, so this would have been quite exciting, except I was exhausted and in Laos. Never mind, at least now I had eye drops.
We walked to the cafe where we had been going to take a cooking class. On taking off my sunglasses and seeing me for the red-eyed monster I was, the woman excused us without charge. The sympathy vote. We went and had an overpriced breakfast in a French-style cafe, where the owner (who had spent 20 years living in Paris), asked us to write down “conjunctivitis” in French for him and explained that an epidemic was sweeping Savannakhet (!).
I spent the morning asleep. We went for lunch in the same restaurant we had visited the first day, it was still cheap and good and we discussed plans for the next stage of our trip. We were both feeling weak and exhausted, and neither of us had any desire to get back on the bikes and face the intense heat again yet.
“And if we just went to Phnom Penh straight from here and asked your parents if they wanted to meet us this weekend?” The sentence hung between us for a while. My parents had already offered to meet us this coming weekend, but we had told them that we would be somewhere in Laos and probably unreachable. But we were tired, ill and lacking the motivation to explore uncharted territory. I phoned my mum.
Whilst waiting for her response, we decided it might be a good idea to find out if it was actually possible to get to Cambodia’s capital in 2 days. We arrived at the information office just before it closed, and found out that we would need to take 2 buses totalling 17 hours. Easy! It was good to have made a spontaneous decision. It was on.
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