Experience Travel is really pleased to sponsor Anthony Douglas as he will be cycling through Cambodia and Vietnam to raise money for MAG International (Mines Advisory Group); who deliver landmine clearance programmes in former war-affected countries. MAG aims to make land blighted by war safe again for farming, light industry and for making towns and villages habitable again.’
It’s a great cause and Anthony has promised us daily updates! Over to you Anthony:
“Postage stamps from Siam were the centrepiece of my boyhood collection. They conjured up the Orient, silk and long arduous trade routes, like the bike ride to come. ‘Allen Ginsberg’s poem on Angkor Wat in the late sixties updated the sense of very far away mystery. Sihanoukville, Saigon, Indochina – you could smell and taste the exotic names. The late sixties and seventies also stained a sense of potential paradise with bombs and genocide. As with Afghanistan, how could centuries of richness be humbled, brought to their knees and destroyed. Culture of course has survived, and found new outlets. As I train for this bike ride as best as I can when working eighty hour weeks, I wonder what mysteries Vietnam and Cambodia will bring. Everyone who has been there recently tells me they are magical, and the go-to destinations. Everything I read tells me the same. I can’t wait. Oh, there is the small matter of the cycle challenge. But what a place to do it…..”
Anthony will be cycling through Cambodia and Vietnam from the 29th January to the 6th February and we’ll publish daily updates here if you want to follow Anthony’s progress. If you want to follow his route but without the hard cycling part (or even with if you really want!) please do speak to us at Experience Travel and we’d be delighted to put a suggestion together for you.’
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