I can't tuk it any more!
We had a lovely couple of days exploring Phnom Penh before spending quite a 
harrowing day visiting 'The Killing Fields', scene of some of the atrocities committed by crackpot despot Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge forces, an experience made all the more harrowing by doing it on the hottest day we have yet experienced. It was the sort of heat I imagine you'd experience on Venus. We left Phnom Penh the next day, using a local bus for local people. The bus was due to leave at 8.45am, but this being Cambodia, that meant it didn't start its journey until after 9.30am and then seemed to make stops at every street corner on the way out of the capital and every random cluster of houses 
thereafter. It meant that our journey was far longer and more torturous than it in any way needed to be. At one stop we were boarded by a marauding gang of shouty women selling
eggs, bread and imaginatively carved pineapple pieces. Also, Cambodians have a weird penchant for wearing surgical masks when they travel, so occasionally I'd look around the bus and it felt like I was in some sort of surreal mobile operating theatre.
About six hours later, we arrived in Pursat and alighted into the usual melée of tuk tuk drivers, all vying to take us wherever we wanted to go for a randomly extortionate fee. Of course you haggle as much as you feel you can but when you're in a strange town, in a strange country, it's not always that easy. Which is
how we ended up paying one shameless trickster to be taken to our hotel 
100 yards down the road! We then couldn't shake this guy. So we got him to drive us to Kompong Luong, a floating village about 35-40km away - depending on how high the water levels are in the lake! The floating village is exactly as described - a whole community lives, sleeps and works on a flotilla of rafts, pontoons
and houseboats. There's a floating police station, floating petrol station, floating school - even floating mobile phone shops. And an 
ever-present smell of fish. The lake in which the village floats provides the water that they bathe in, launder their clothes in, cook with, use at the floating ice-making facility... and it also directly receives the contents of their toilets. Ice in your drink anyone?
The next day, another local bus (scheduled to leave at 11am, so therefore left at 11.45am) took us from Pursat to Battambang. The luggage allowance on these buses is seemingly unlimited and we saw one local man ambitiously waiting to board with the rear wheel of a tractor. When we arrived in Battambang (pronounced, amusingly, as "Bottom-bong") we were met by the ubiquitous hoard of tuk tuk drivers - only this was on a whole new level. I had to physically push my way through the throng just to step off the bus. And they were jostling and shoving so much to get to us (one was squealing "I saw him first!") that I had to literally pick a couple of them up and lift them out of the way so Claire could grab our bags from the luggage hold. I'd been worried about the mosquitoes in Cambodia but what we really need is some sort of repellent for these annoying little pests that wait to ambush you at every street corner. Instead of sucking your blood, they want to drain your wallet. They quoted $20 to take us around the area's main attractions - so we hired a scooter for $5, got a map and found them ourselves. Plus it meant we didn't get taken to their cousin's restaurant on the way!
First stop was the 'Bamboo Railway' which we found down a badly-signposted, dusty, little lane. At the end of this lane was a rusty old railway line and on this railway line were what appeared to be wooden bedsteads, with bamboo slats, balanced on little wheels. We got on one of these bamboo beds and a local bloke started to push us slowly down the track. Just as I was thinking "Blimey, this'll take ages to get anywhere" he stopped, lashed a lawnmower engine to the back, 
connected it to the back wheels with a big rubber band, and off we shot. The track is warped and kinked, and the not-quite-aligned joints between rails delivered a disc-slipping jolt every time we hit one. It made for a very uncomfortable ride - especially as we were travelling a little bit faster than I think a bed should travel, quite frankly. The resulting effect was like being on a rickety old rollercoaster but without even a cursory nod toward safety. We rattled down the track, for about 20 minutes longer than was enjoyable, until we reached our scheduled stop. At this 
stop were, predictably, lots of little dusty stalls run by little dusty women trying to sell us food, drinks and souvenirs. We managed to convince our driver that we weren't interested in purchasing a can of Tango or a sarong and that we needed to go - so he asked us to help him turn the train around. We literally picked up the bamboo bed, turned it around, swapped the wheels over and rebuilt our train home. I thought this was brilliant! On the way back we met another bamboo train coming the 
other way. So we had to hop off, dismantle ours again to let them pass and then rebuild it to continue. By this time the novelty had worn off. Claire and I were debating whether or not our man deserved a tip when, suddenly, one of 
Claire's flip flops decided to jump off the speeding bed, into a hedge. We screeched to a halt and the driver and I ran back up the track to look for it. This caused a four-bed tailback and, in all the excitement of trying to spring into action, I'd managed to put my foot right through his bamboo slats. We gave him a couple of dollars and skulked away apologetically.
Next we went to Phnom Sampeau, a rocky outcrop that is home to some Buddhist pagodas,
some very smiley monks in orange robes and 'The Killing Caves' which, as the name suggests, are a bit like 'The Killing Fields' but cave-based. There were lots of annoyingly eager young local lads begging us to let them show us to the caves - in exchange for money of course. We'd read that, just as they do at 'The Killing Fields', they display the skulls and bones of the victims of the atrocities in glass cases in remembrance the suffering. We didn't see any of these. We soon realised that some young chancer with a torch had just shown us 'a cave'. By now it was getting dark so we left. On the way back to town, for the second time this month, we had a puncture and ground to a bumpy, wobbly halt. Luckily, the roads of Cambodia are lined with hundreds of little scooter shacks, selling petrol in Coke bottles and able to fix punctures quicker than it takes to explain to the garage man what the
problem is (even though you are pointing at the flat tyre... on the scooter... that is stood right in front of him... with a puncture). Cambodia has many faults and, as you can probably sense, an enormous capacity to annoy me, but I began warming to it a little bit more when this briliant young mechanic presented me with a bill for just 2000 riel - that's approximately 30p! Stick that in your exhaust pipe, Kwik Fit.
harrowing day visiting 'The Killing Fields', scene of some of the atrocities committed by crackpot despot Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge forces, an experience made all the more harrowing by doing it on the hottest day we have yet experienced. It was the sort of heat I imagine you'd experience on Venus. We left Phnom Penh the next day, using a local bus for local people. The bus was due to leave at 8.45am, but this being Cambodia, that meant it didn't start its journey until after 9.30am and then seemed to make stops at every street corner on the way out of the capital and every random cluster of houses 
thereafter. It meant that our journey was far longer and more torturous than it in any way needed to be. At one stop we were boarded by a marauding gang of shouty women selling
eggs, bread and imaginatively carved pineapple pieces. Also, Cambodians have a weird penchant for wearing surgical masks when they travel, so occasionally I'd look around the bus and it felt like I was in some sort of surreal mobile operating theatre. About six hours later, we arrived in Pursat and alighted into the usual melée of tuk tuk drivers, all vying to take us wherever we wanted to go for a randomly extortionate fee. Of course you haggle as much as you feel you can but when you're in a strange town, in a strange country, it's not always that easy. Which is
how we ended up paying one shameless trickster to be taken to our hotel 
100 yards down the road! We then couldn't shake this guy. So we got him to drive us to Kompong Luong, a floating village about 35-40km away - depending on how high the water levels are in the lake! The floating village is exactly as described - a whole community lives, sleeps and works on a flotilla of rafts, pontoons
and houseboats. There's a floating police station, floating petrol station, floating school - even floating mobile phone shops. And an 
ever-present smell of fish. The lake in which the village floats provides the water that they bathe in, launder their clothes in, cook with, use at the floating ice-making facility... and it also directly receives the contents of their toilets. Ice in your drink anyone?The next day, another local bus (scheduled to leave at 11am, so therefore left at 11.45am) took us from Pursat to Battambang. The luggage allowance on these buses is seemingly unlimited and we saw one local man ambitiously waiting to board with the rear wheel of a tractor. When we arrived in Battambang (pronounced, amusingly, as "Bottom-bong") we were met by the ubiquitous hoard of tuk tuk drivers - only this was on a whole new level. I had to physically push my way through the throng just to step off the bus. And they were jostling and shoving so much to get to us (one was squealing "I saw him first!") that I had to literally pick a couple of them up and lift them out of the way so Claire could grab our bags from the luggage hold. I'd been worried about the mosquitoes in Cambodia but what we really need is some sort of repellent for these annoying little pests that wait to ambush you at every street corner. Instead of sucking your blood, they want to drain your wallet. They quoted $20 to take us around the area's main attractions - so we hired a scooter for $5, got a map and found them ourselves. Plus it meant we didn't get taken to their cousin's restaurant on the way!
First stop was the 'Bamboo Railway' which we found down a badly-signposted, dusty, little lane. At the end of this lane was a rusty old railway line and on this railway line were what appeared to be wooden bedsteads, with bamboo slats, balanced on little wheels. We got on one of these bamboo beds and a local bloke started to push us slowly down the track. Just as I was thinking "Blimey, this'll take ages to get anywhere" he stopped, lashed a lawnmower engine to the back, 
connected it to the back wheels with a big rubber band, and off we shot. The track is warped and kinked, and the not-quite-aligned joints between rails delivered a disc-slipping jolt every time we hit one. It made for a very uncomfortable ride - especially as we were travelling a little bit faster than I think a bed should travel, quite frankly. The resulting effect was like being on a rickety old rollercoaster but without even a cursory nod toward safety. We rattled down the track, for about 20 minutes longer than was enjoyable, until we reached our scheduled stop. At this 
stop were, predictably, lots of little dusty stalls run by little dusty women trying to sell us food, drinks and souvenirs. We managed to convince our driver that we weren't interested in purchasing a can of Tango or a sarong and that we needed to go - so he asked us to help him turn the train around. We literally picked up the bamboo bed, turned it around, swapped the wheels over and rebuilt our train home. I thought this was brilliant! On the way back we met another bamboo train coming the 
other way. So we had to hop off, dismantle ours again to let them pass and then rebuild it to continue. By this time the novelty had worn off. Claire and I were debating whether or not our man deserved a tip when, suddenly, one of 
Claire's flip flops decided to jump off the speeding bed, into a hedge. We screeched to a halt and the driver and I ran back up the track to look for it. This caused a four-bed tailback and, in all the excitement of trying to spring into action, I'd managed to put my foot right through his bamboo slats. We gave him a couple of dollars and skulked away apologetically.Next we went to Phnom Sampeau, a rocky outcrop that is home to some Buddhist pagodas,
some very smiley monks in orange robes and 'The Killing Caves' which, as the name suggests, are a bit like 'The Killing Fields' but cave-based. There were lots of annoyingly eager young local lads begging us to let them show us to the caves - in exchange for money of course. We'd read that, just as they do at 'The Killing Fields', they display the skulls and bones of the victims of the atrocities in glass cases in remembrance the suffering. We didn't see any of these. We soon realised that some young chancer with a torch had just shown us 'a cave'. By now it was getting dark so we left. On the way back to town, for the second time this month, we had a puncture and ground to a bumpy, wobbly halt. Luckily, the roads of Cambodia are lined with hundreds of little scooter shacks, selling petrol in Coke bottles and able to fix punctures quicker than it takes to explain to the garage man what the
problem is (even though you are pointing at the flat tyre... on the scooter... that is stood right in front of him... with a puncture). Cambodia has many faults and, as you can probably sense, an enormous capacity to annoy me, but I began warming to it a little bit more when this briliant young mechanic presented me with a bill for just 2000 riel - that's approximately 30p! Stick that in your exhaust pipe, Kwik Fit.
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