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It was the realisation of all my backpacker dreams. I leant across the bar at the small Cambodian hostel and asked, conspiratorially, in hastily translated Khmer: “Do you have a map of the Mekong Discovery Trail?”

Shrouded in mystery and muttered about on cycle touring forums, the Mekong Discovery Trail was a once-popular bike trail along the banks of the Mekong river between Phnom Penh in Cambodia and Laos, through quiet villages and unspoilt islands. Launched in 2006 as a joint venture between the United Nations World Tourism Organisation and a Dutch aid agency with the aim of drawing tourists away from Siem Reap and towards Cambodia’s quiet northeast, it fell into disrepair when funding dried up. Maps — detailing friendly homestays and the best route to take to avoid areas prone to flooding — went out of print, and even the trail’s ramshackle website disappeared.

But it lived on in myth: a barely bikeable trail through remote jungle, past houseboat villages, markets that did a booming trade in fried tarantulas and crumbling, creeper-reclaimed temples. I was halfway through a round-the-world bike ride and undeterred by warnings of impassable roads and long stretches without food or water. I’d heard it was just possible, with persistence, local wisdom and trial and error, to pick out a riverside route from the Cambodian capital to the 4,000 Islands in Laos, a backpacker’s paradise of lush, jungle islands that straddled the border. So I was a little deflated when the barman pointed over my shoulder to an enormous wall map of the supposedly secret trail, complete with telephone numbers, hostel reviews and restaurant picks.

My adventure did not get off to an illustrious start. Sunset on the first day found me checking into a brothel that I had mistaken for a hotel, overlooking the fork in the road where I would finally turn away from the Phnom Penh highway and start following the Mekong. Nevertheless, it was a mere $5 a night, and the following morning I bumped off on unsurfaced tracks into the jungle, following criss-crossing ochre trails that occasionally offered a tantalising glimpse of the Mekong, wide and stately.

People must have lived deeper in the jungle because snatches of folk music — and once, weirdly, Drake — reached me through the trees. The dirt road improved outside Kampong Cham, which turned out to be a sedate French colonial town, its leafy promenade overlooked by balconied hotels. I checked into the Moon River Guesthouse and ate creamy amok curry in its restaurant that night, watching cruise boats drift slowly along the Mekong.

It was a different story in StungTrang, the sleepy town where I stopped the following night, after a short day spent riding the riverside trails that joined pretty temples perched on hillsides in the mist. Beyond Stung Trang the road on the west side apparently became impassable but a ferry ran locals across the river to the more developed east bank. My room in the guesthouse beside its terminal offered a bucket that doubled as a toilet and shower and a battalion of cockroaches, so I went out to find dinner on the riverfront, where stalls sold bowls of steaming noodles and wedges of mystery meat. I crossed the Mekong the following morning and rode to Chulong, past tumbledown huts and cool, airy mosques: this short stretch of the river was home to Cambodia’s small Muslim community.

That night the family that ran Penh Chet Guesthouse begged me to use their wifi to call my parents, then sent me down the road for dinner to a hut that sold huge bowls of noodle soup.

The next morning an iced coffee in a hut on stilts in the Mekong sped me to Kratié, a busy town on the tourist trail. Backpackers from Phnom Penh tumbled sleepily out of coaches. “Are you here to see the dolphins?” the owner of the Star Backpackers Hostel asked. I wondered if something had gone wrong with my Khmer because I’d only asked if there was somewhere to park my bicycle, but he really had said dolphins: pods of rare freshwater ones live in the river between Kratié and Laos, and they are the region’s major tourist draw.

They hadn’t come out to play when I left the next day to cycle the long stretch to Stung Treng, the last Mekong-side town in Cambodia. I limped in just before sunset, in time to nose around its covered market and eat more noodles. It was another remote stretch through marshland the next day to Laos, and a confusing series of border-crossing bribes put me in a bad mood that only lifted as the 4,000 Islands came into view, clusters of small forests rising out of the Mekong.

The narrowboat I took from Nakasang picked its way through tanned tourists lazing in inflatable tubes and the flame-red sunset picked out the silhouettes of temple spires reflected in the river. Laos’s Don Det island has long been a fixture on the banana pancake trail, and a mishmash of old-school backpacker cafés, veggie restaurants and temples spilled off onto stilted platforms. It was a world away from the Mekong but after a week of tropical heat and the spine-rattling roads that make up Cambodia’s lost trail, I’d earned hammock time.

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For information on the Mekong Discovery Trail, see travellingtwo.com/resources/cambodia/phnompenh-laos