Bike tour

A popular social enterprise, Soksabike, is a guided bicycle tour of the area concentrating on local industries. Starting at 8am and returning at 5pm, it was a long day cycling in the intense heat but it was worth it. We were taken to homes to see families make products like they have done every day for years. Rice paper, dried banana sheets, rice bars filled with banana, rice wine, fish paste (the photo shows the fish being cured in salt) and bamboo filled with coconut sticky rice. At each stop we were introduced to the family and told about their history.

We finished with a visit to the bamboo train, the most popular tourist attraction in the area. A single train track which was originally used to transport rice and other goods between villages, the bamboo trains were devised to solve the problem of vehicles going in opposite directions. They're nothing more than a sheet of bamboo placed on top of two sets of wheels and an engine. When two meet, the train with the least cargo (these days that means people) is quickly dismantled and set beside the track so the other can continue. The process of moving it off and back on again only takes a couple of minutes.