Our 4 hour bus to Battambang cost us a very pricey $5 which included pick up from our hotel and AC. I'm pleased to say the bus journey was entirely uneventful which makes a change! When we were arriving to the stop in Battambang a load of people, upon noticing the bus, suddenly jumped up, grabbed their placards and started chasing after the bus. Of course they were Tuk Tuk drivers all competing to take us to their commissioned hotel. Coincidentally we found someone with a placard to the hotel we wanted to go to anyway and he drove us there for free. Of course nothing is completely free because he managed to get our custom for a tour the next day.

We arrived late afternoon and hadn't eaten since breakfast so we decided to get a late lunch. We stopped at a cafe called "Smokin Pot" which I thought was just a play on words. After looking at the menu it turns out there are some meals which include marijuana in them! We decided just to order a weedless curry and soup before wandering around the rest of town. There are some nice parks and temples around the river but apart from that there isn't an awful lot to see in Battambang. Even less so in the evenings. We walked out around 8.30 in the evening to get a snack and the whole place was dead, not even a corner shop open to buy a packet of crisps!

The real reason we were in Battambang was to ride the bamboo train so we went with our tuk tuk driver Coco (or Chanel as he also likes to be known by) to take the bamboo train. This is a bizarre contraption that the locals have devised to make use of the abandoned railway tracks. They consist of flat bamboo platforms placed on wheels and powered by a motorbike engine. I don't think they go faster than 40km/h but when you're sat that close to the tracks with nothing to hold onto it certainly feels pretty speedy! So we whizzed along, feeling every join in the track with a large jolt and the occasional branch whipping us in the face, until we came across another bamboo train going the other way. The general etiquette seems to be whoever has the least amount of passengers loses, unless you have another train behind you which then trumps everything else. In any case, all the passengers get off one train, they quickly disassemble it and then reassemble it after the train has passed! I have got a video of the train but I haven't yet been able to work out how to upload videos to the blog so you can get an idea from the photos hopefully.

We arrived at a little village 20 minutes down the track which was completely geared up for tourists. They tried to usher you to sit down and have a drink or buy some rubbish from their stalls. When we refused, 3 kids popped up to walk us round the village. They chatted to us and made little ornaments from banana leaves for us. Of course, when we reached the end they asked us for $1 for each of them. Their cute smiles quickly vanished when we told them we had no change for them. Even if we did I wouldn't pay to keep them out of school anyway. So we got back on the train quickly before anyone else could try and extorte money from us. At the end of the $10 train journey they even tried to get us to tip the driver who hadn't even smiled at us the whole time let alone spoken to us.

The second part of our tour involved a trip to the killing cave - a cave which the recent Khmer Rouge used to store the bodies of the people they massacred from the village. We were persuaded to pay a kid a dollar on top of our entrance fee to show us the way and tell us the stories behind the cave. It was a very strenuous walk up a steep hill during the hottest part of the day. The alternative was to pay over the odds for a motorbike ride up which I refused to do. At least we can try and get fit for the Inca trek! The cave was a bit of a let down, it was a box with 3 skulls in and that was it. The kid didn't have any stories to tell us either but he did entertain us with Thai pop songs while he was waiting for us to catch up. Again he took us around the obligatory tourist tat stalls before we got to the top of the hill with some nice views around Battambang. At the end he tried to get us to part with more money to apparently pay for his school (state schools are free here) and I was starting to feel the day was one big tourist rip off.

We made sure we went out for dinner earlier that evening to avoid going hungry for a second night. Fortunately we managed to find a restaurant that was open although places did seem to be closing up at 7pm! After a nice meal Bryan decided to pop into a hair dressers on the walk back. The two girls in the salon, along with the two customers, found it really funny that he wanted a hair cut and couldn't stop giggling! Despite the language barrier he managed to convey what he wanted. He got a full cut, wash and blow dry along with a head and shoulder massage for $2! And it doesn't look too bad!

Despite Battambang being Cambodia's second biggest city, 2 nights was enough. We only paid $4 each for the bus to the capital, Phnom Penh, and as we were leaving our hotel (one of the best we've stayed in and only $6 a night) the receptionist gave us a free scarf each! Bonus!