We passed all manner of transport on our road trip from Phnom Penh - enormous trailers with goods piled high being pulled by tiny mopeds, agricultural engines pulling trailers of passengers after dark without lights, and the usual scooters with the entire family on them. This prepared us well for the transport to come, where we soon found ourselves bouncing around over pot-holed dirt tracks in the pitch black, with our tuk-tuk driver unable to find our accommodation!

A few miles outside this quiet little town by the river is the "bamboo train". After a night's rest, we borrowed a couple of bikes and set out into the countryside to find it. The little bamboo platforms are disassembled at each end of a 5km railway track, which is all that remains of a once used public transport link. As it is single track, they also have to be disassembled and reassembled whenever another one is coming the other way. Of course, this is now just for tourists, but still great fun to be whizzing along, powered by a little engine with sparks flying from the wheels just below.

Watching the surrounding countryside pass by as the atmospheric farmland stretches out to the horizon also provides an opportunity to quietly reflect on what went on here. These were some of the many "killing fields" where the second largest holocaust in history took place, and driven by extreme left-wing politics rather than fascism, it's a story that shouldn't be forgotten. Back at our home stay, after serving us a delicious home-cooked meal, our host Mony gave us her personal account of what life was like as a little girl under the Khmer Rouge. She told us how her father had risked his life to walk back from forced exile in the countryside to attempt to retrieve her red dancing shoes from their house, but the house had been destroyed. As a family of school teachers who speak English, they would have been seen as a threat, so they are more fortunate than most that they eventually managed to return here and start again.

Before leaving Battambang, we had to try some of the fusion dishes at the Jaan Bai restaurant. We had Kampot pepper prawns in chili jam and a banana flower chicken. It was absolutely delicious. A riverside beer before sunset provided the perfect spot to mentally prepare for tomorrow's journey, when we will be relying on yet more of Cambodia's unconventional transport.