The bus stop is eight minutes from the riverside. I was packed, checked out, and sitting on the riverbank with twenty minutes to spare. The light was doing something extraordinary to the water — turning it from brown to bronze to something almost gold. I thought: I'll get the next one. There is no next one. There's a minivan at 6AM tomorrow. I went back to the guesthouse and booked another night.
Most people give Kampong Thom an afternoon. They stop on the highway between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, see Sambor Prei Kuk, and move on by dark. I had planned to do exactly that. Then I stayed for the sunset, and the sunset rearranged my plans.
The second day was the one that mattered. Without a schedule I wandered the morning market, drank iced coffee by the river, took a motorbike out to the rice fields, and ended up invited to a wedding I had no business attending. None of it was on any itinerary. All of it was the trip.
The places that change you are rarely the ones you scheduled.
This is the whole argument behind the province's “Stay One More Night” idea, and it is not marketing. Give Kampong Thom a second day and it stops being a rest stop and starts being a place.
