“You go to Angkor Wat? You want tuktuk?”

“No thank you. I’m going to cycle.”

“You need bike?”

“Yes, I’m going to rent one. $3 a day the man down the road offered me. Is that a good price?”

“No, no madam. We have bike. You take it. No charge.”

The next morning the two men that ran the guesthouse wheeled my stead round to the front gate and stood waiting for me and smiling. “Your bike is ready.” The bike, like the tuktuk, taxi and train I’d taken the day before, was less than ready for the task in hand, but it would do.

I set off to cycle the 6km from my guesthouse to the temples on my borrowed bike. The red dirt track that the guest house was on soon gave way to a gravel path and eventually I hit the smooth wide roads that led north to the temples. Cars, moped and tuktuks beeped as they overtook me. Locals on their way to work piled into the back of a pickup truck stared back at me, waving and smiling. Tourists in air conditioned coaches looked down at me as they drove past on their way to Angkor.

The busy town of Siem Reap gave way to the fields and trees that explorers in the 16^th century had carved their way through in search of the legendary lost city. The occasional roadside stall selling paintings of the temples got less and less frequent until soon there was nothing and nobody around, just me and the trees. And then, clunk. The chain fell off the bike.

Back home in London it might be referred to proudly as a ‘single speed’ bike. There was, after all, just one rusted cog of metal to wrestle the stiff chain back onto. With it fixed I looked at my map – the lack of traffic and souvenir shops should have been a clue that I was going the wrong way. I turned the bike around and pedalled hard towards the turn-off I should have taken two miles back, but the bike had other ideas. Clunk.

Every time I picked up some relative speed, the bike would protest and the chain would come off again. Any time gained by going faster was lost by having to dismount and force the chain back into position. I yielded to the bike’s demands and slowed down.

At the security gate my photograph was taken and printed onto my three-day tourist pass complete with the black smudge of grease under my left eye. An official pointed me in the direction of the toilets so I could wash the signs of my fight with the chain off my hands, arms and face.

The temples awaited and I was eager to get my first glimpse, but mindful not to pedal too fast and upset the bike. Less than a mile down the road I turned a corner and there it was, Angkor Wat. I’d seen it in so many pictures that it felt like cycling into a film set. It was big too – so big that it took another few minutes of cycling alongside it looking to my right to stare at the temple and trying not to collide with a tuktuk before I was at the front entrance.

I parked my bike and bought two cans of coke in return for which the vendor promised to keep an eye on the bike until my return. I threw one can in the bike’s basket and drank the other. It was early but the day was already hot and sticky and without the gentle breeze of cycling along to cool me I began to sweat a lot.

I spent a couple of hours wandering round the temple, sitting in the shade and staring at the carved stone and climbing to the top of it and looking out across the trees to the other temples. There were lots of them out there and my bike would deliver me to them all one by one. I cycled round Angkor Thom, Preah Khan, Chau Say Tevoda, Ta Keo and Ta Phrom. I cycled left and right depending on which road looked less busy and I avoided the crowds. I cycled slowly, I stopped where I wanted and I took the sun going down as my cue to go home – my bike hadn’t come equipped with lights.

On the way back to Siem Reap I got lost. Anxious that it was getting dark I joined some passing Australians who seemed to know where they were going. I cycled hard to try to keep up with them and then, clunk. The bike had been right to make me slow down and take in the sights, but now it needed to listen to me and hurry up.