The Great Dopamine Rush of 2025

Today I woke up at 5am to go meet James the tour guide, to ride motos, climb mountains, and check out cool temples. I’m not gonna write too much today as I have so many awesome photos and I am feeling a little under the weather. So today is gonna be a little different format than usual.

Me and James traveled from Siem Reap, to Kulen mountain today. We stopped at I think about 6 culturally significant sites on the way. The route to Kulen is about 1.5 hours long but because we were touring and James decided we should off road our Shitty motos through sandy farm roads. we Arrived at Kulen mountain 6.5 hour after we left.

When we actually got to the mountain we were greeted by some new Mine fields that weren’t there a year ago as James explained, they just keep finding new ordinance in the area. As this was a Khmer Rouge stronghold during the war.

So the big highlight of the day was Rappelling off of kulen mountain to the base of the sandstone cliffs lining the mountain. After rappelling though, we had to climb back up. Now as a side note here, there is no bolts or routes at all in this area. So when I say we made our own route up, we literally picked a spot and James free solo’d the the first 25 feet. from there we had anchor spots and we traversed across some sand stone ledges to a bat cave that James had found on a previous trip up to this area. It was a super cool experience.

On the way back to Siem Reap from Kulen, I had a very very near miss with a pickup truck with only one headlight. Here in Cambodia bikes and Motos are the most populous thing on the road, so one headlight means its a moto. It was dusk, it is always smoky at dusk here, and I was over taking a semi truck in the oncoming lane. When I realized the situation I was in, I slammed on my breaks. Now when your on a Moto going 90kph and you lock your breaks, the bike wants to slide out from under you. I planted both my feet to right the bike, and smashed on the throttle, still doing about 80 and swung in behind the semi truck. The pickup passed me as I was swerving into safety. It missed me by about 0.1 seconds, the drivers here don’t stop. It is the wild wild east. This is by far the closest I’ve ever come to a life ending crash ever on a bike or in a vehicle. It scared me to my core. Its the only time I’ve ever had my life flash before my eyes. After a brief minute to catch my breath on the side of the road and to check and see if there was indeed any shit in my pants. We continued the drive back to Siem Reap with no further incident.

Now I haven’t spoken too much about the food today or showed pictures as the food we ate today was literally nothing to write home about. I didn’t have a single meal that was notable.

I am actually writing this in the morning of my 21st day as when I got back last night I immediately passed out. 13 hours of hard riding and constant sun will do that too you. Today I leave Cambodia and the shitty Khmer food behind to head to Bali. Who ever told me the food was better here than Thailand was full of shit.

Even After that close call this was one of my favorite days of this trip, Big shout out to James at Kingdom Climbers for showing me around on a private tour of his favorite spots.