Leaving Bangkok

Early start this morning to catch the train to Aranyaprathet, it was a six hour journey along the rickety train line with lots of people from all walks of life, travellers, locals, families, market sellers with all sorts of bags of fruits and veg (one even brought their own cockroach aboard haha) once we arrived at Aranyaprathet we then caught a 100baht tuktuk to the border, seemed a lot easier than we first thought, pretty well signposted too. We flew through passport control as we already had our Cambodian visas so went straight through to the gate. The organisation to help tourists was great to prevent the hoards of people bothering tourists.

Straight after we were through the border we walked along the gates where transport police asked us to sit and wait until the next free shuttle service left, this was only ten minutes to the Poipet bus terminal. This is where is started to go wrong and a lesson learnt, having turned up in Cambodia without US Dollars or local currency Cambodian Riel to pay for the next leg of our journey, mistakenly assuming we could use MasterCard, we had to take a taxi so that he could take us to an ATM Machine. The taxi was twice the price of a bus that we were planning on catching, but in all fairness got us there in half the time and was air conditioned and very comfortable, but still an expensive mistake to make. Every cloud has a silver lining though I guess.

As the ATM gave us large numeracy notes we had to give the driver a larger amount than we would have liked haha but his face was priceless and will stay with us forever. Christmas had come early for this one! He now couldn't do enough for us including driving down streets where locals were giving him grief, still not quite sure why and a bit unsettling, randomly pulling up to ask where our hotel was in the middle of the road, and turning around going down the street the wrong way just in order to take us right to the door! Good man.

Hotel was pretty snazzy which was much needed after feeling like we hadn't stopped for days! We showered, rested and then headed out on hunt for some food, much to our dismay this ended in a very disappointing meal, including a first....Andrew Bood not wanting to eat something and genuinely disgusted by the item. I'd heard of it before the Cambodians call it Balut, a developing chicken embryo boiled in its shell and eaten, in the words of Andrew, "errr it f***ing stinks, all i can see is slimy wet feathers and feet" we headed back to the hotel for a nice long 12 hour sleep!

Battambang

"Bamboo train?" "No thanks!" "Oh my gawd!" were the words greeted to us by the first person we saw the next morning..

Woke up feeling amazing, had a pretty lazy morning and then headed out for brunch. After a shameful western eat (bacon sandwich and a nice cup of tea, much needed home comforts) we walked along the river to check where the Boat port was for tomorrow, discovering on route that the river was very low, to which we have now found out if the river is too low and not enough tourists the boat doesn't run, so we'll be getting the bus to Siem Reap instead. Midday was way too hot for Katie Ann, so she returned back to the hotel whilst Andrew went and got some shopping done, he returned with a sausage and egg face on a giant white bread bun and two chocolate donuts, or the essentials has he described them!! We arranged for a TukTuk to take us up to the bat cave at 4:30pm (Andrew actually expecting to see The Batman), was a pretty fun journey, Cambodians seem so friendly. Before the bats we had time to climb up to one of the statues in the side of the cliff with a spectacular view from the top. The bat cave was out of this world, a truly natural phenomenon, the pictures genuinely do not do it justice, the tuk tuk driver drove is back to the hotel, we went straight for dinner to Nary Restaurant, a small place that also does cooking classes and very cheap Khmer food, definitely recommend, one of the best meals we've had so far! but then that's not saying much really.