We’ve successfully negotiated our last international overland border crossing of the trip: the obscure O’Smach/Chong Jom border crossing that connects Cambodia and Thailand.

Most people travelling overland to Thailand will leave via Poipet and make a beeline for Bangkok, but as we’re visiting areas slightly north of there we thought we’d leave Siem Reap by one of the less frequented routes and head to the town of Surin in Thailand.

Our friendly tuk-tuk driver in Siem Reap, Sukhin, told us his friend could take us to O’Smach for $55. “But the road is not so good,” he said, making undulating gestures with his hands. Most of the roads in Cambodia are not sealed and are thus in a state of constant disrepair… the rains do nothing to improve matters. A few days ago, the red dirt road we had to take from Battambang to Siem Reap had deteriorated rapidly when we got to the junction at Sisophon. Later that day, Sukhin told us that his friend had wanted to use his new car to take us the 150km or so to O’Smach, but he was afraid it might get wrecked so he was borrowing someone else’s instead.

At 6.30 we left the relative comfort of Siem Reap’s roads and headed west on to the ‘highway’. Those going to Poipet will share this initial part of the trip. After the rains, there were an incredible amount of potholes in the rocky, red dirt road and our driver began to do the pothole ‘dance’ which involved swerving rapidly at the last second to avoid them. Invariably you’re then confronted with another car in the opposite direction doing the same thing. If any astronaut plans on going to Mars, try practising driving your buggy on a Cambodian road! At times the driver reached 80 km/h but much of the time he was going at 40 km/h, so it took us about 4.5 hours to get to O’Smach.

It’s not all whiplash and juddering jaws though… the countryside really does change dramatically. It gets more mountainous and even more sparse, although crops are still prevalent and there seem to be more cows on the road. About 85 per cent of Cambodians live in rural areas and you’ll see many children herding, or running around naked playing in puddles or on dilapidated statues. The small wooden shacks people live in are filled with people, and there are many roadside stalls selling fruit, drinks and homemade food. The road got slightly less potholey once we headed north as not as many vehicles pass through, but it was still spongey and bumpy.

Along the way there also seemed to be a visible amount of foreign-funded schools and information signs about registering your child once it’s born or looking out for landmines. As we headed up towards O’Smach we saw people looking for land mines (this is pretty much the region of Khmer Rouge’s last stand), and another five-on-a-motorcycle sighting, this time with three monks on it!

We passed a car with some Westerners and as we approached O’Smach, we saw the big casino in the distance that attracts daytripping Thais (gambling’s illegal in Thailand). The border crossing was uneventful and straightforward enough — we made it to Thailand and immediately, we noticed how the road was sealed and even had paint on it! The problem now was getting to Surin without any baht.

Luckily the three young Americans in the car behind us were also going to Surin (about 90 mins away), but they were hard bargainers. Only one driver offered to take us to Surin in his private bus and wanted 1,000 baht for the privilege (about $30). No one could tell us when a public bus would arrive. The Americans were initially only keen on paying 50 baht per person ($1.50). Eventually, after almost an hour of discussion and negotiation, we all agreed on paying 100 baht per person “but you share with some Thai people”.

Finally we got to Surin after occasional checks by the bus police (some Thais had to get out of the vehicle - don’t really know why…) and despite a few people dropping in and out at various stops it was pretty straightforward. Our hotel was even next door to the bus terminal!!

Surin is a provincial town but compared to what we’ve seen it’s pretty big. It’s famous for its ‘elephant round-up’ which is some kind of fair involving elephants participating in contests of skill, beauty and showmanship (I think). Apart from that, there’s nothing too exciting apart from huge DIY stores, keycutters and so on but the people are laid back and friendly! And we did see one elephant in the bus car park…

Wow! This was our first reaction upon seeing the jawdroppingly stunning Angkor Wat, near Siem Reap in Cambodia. To see the temples, and there are actually dozens of them, you need to decide in advance if you want to visit for one, two, three, or seven days. We chose the three day ticket ($40) which was just enough time to see all but a few of the smallest temples. It allowed us to tag rest days before and after the temple days for some well deserved R&R.

The temples and buildings date from around 800AD until around 1200AD. Almost all fell into disrepair or obscurity before 1400AD, not until the mid 1800s did a French explorer unearth the sites and realise he had discovered structures that rivalled the pyramids or great wall for their importance, architecture, and purpose.

As far as accommodation goes, the only real option is to base yourself in Siem Reap, just 3km away from the temples and in the throes of escalating tourism. Sadly but not unexpectedly the town itself offers almost nothing in the way of showing what real Cambodia is like. It has a ‘Pub Street’, a ‘Grub Street’, and not much else. However, this matters very little as visiting the temples is literally a dawn until dusk affair as thousands congregate to watch the sun rise or set over the magnificent spires and time spent in Siem Reap is minimal.

While Angkor Wat is the most famous of the complexes and the site in best condition, there are half a dozen other major sites that can be explored for many hours. Angkor Thom is a walled city several times the size of Angkor Wat, and it houses the mysterious Bayon temple, famous for the many staring Buddha faces carved into rock. And Ta Prohm is an almost alien experience. Here, the jungle is taking back the temple and huge trees wrap themselves around whole buildings. You might have seen this in the Tomb Raider film. (I’ll have to watch it myself one day …)

Unless you are travelling in a tour group, nearly everyone hires a tuk tuk driver for the extent of their stay. You can see what the Cambodians call a tuktuk below, which is different form a Thai tuktuk. The first haggling question a tuktuk driver will ask you is “Where are you staying?” in order to surreptitiously gauge your ability to pay. For anyone else headed this way, we managed $12 a day, but I’m sure you could haggle a few dollars lower, and we found out going directly through our hotel would have set us back $46 a day, though this included a guide. Your driver takes you between the sites, which are each a few kilometres apart. and justs waits from you to return at your leisure. During this time you form something of a friendship or loyalty with the driver. One the first day, you learn his name. On the second, about his family. On the third, where he lives and how he slept last night. Good thing we didn’t get a seven day ticket.

Don’t imagine that seeing the temples is all about chaffeur driven luxury, though. While you can get a basic experience walking up to the front entrances, there is a huge amount of walking involved if you want to get full value. The is also a good quotient of climbing to do as well, and at times it appears quite dangerous. Even in Angkor Wat, the central citadel can only be reached by climbing up very very steep slippery rocks without handrails. One slip here and you’d end up in hospital at best. That is nothing compared with the skills you need to avoid the touts. Literally hundreds of times a day you will be asked to buy a book, water, Tshirt, or postcards. Usually by gaggles of cute 10 year old kids. Kim has some funny videos of the touting (”Mister long hair, you buy shirt! Lady Pink [shirt], you have look?”).

The only down side to our trip was that it was our first steady rain for more than two months and it rained everyday. It wasn’t such a problem especially in the covered temples like Ta Prohm but it was not always good for photography. I seem to have collated several dozen pictures of Kim standing next to humongous trees!? And at times, you’d find a tour group of fifty South Koreans descend just as you had found a peacful place to explore.

We’ve caught many different forms of transport of the last few months, and seen many varieties of train, but the bamboo train of Battambang in Cambodia must rate as the most unusual.

Called a Norry or Lorry by locals, the “train” is a small wooden platform that sits atop hand machined axles running over an old damaged railway line. The contraption is powered by a motorcycle engine that spins a rubber wheel against the line. The railway line is the country’s main train route but it is in far too bad condition to be used for regular trains. There is one ‘”real” train each week, but it moves only at walking speed as anything faster is deemed dangerous.

A short video Kim filmed can be seen here and below.

Finding the railway is easy as it follows a direct line between cities. Joining up with it about 25km from Battambang, we rode on the train for about 10km. It’s not cheap for foreigners who turn up, we paid $4 each which is a lot of money in these parts. Amazingly, it runs at up to 50km/hour. The ride is noisy and bumpy but highly exhilarating and not altogether uncomfortable. Our moto driver came along with us, complete with his motorcycle, and told us that it can carry up to two tonnes of freight.

As there is only one line, the obvious question is what happens when you meet an oncoming train? The answer is just as obvious - one train must be disassembled to allow the other to pass. We came upon a train travelling in the opposite direction that was full of freshly harvested rice and a staring match lasted two or three minutes before it was determined that they had to pull off the track to allow us to pass.

The scenery along the way is stunning. Apart from the rice paddies, banana trees, and water buffalo, you pass many locals using it as a footpath between villages. Eventually we arrived at what can only be described as a bamboo train station, complete with refreshments and an open air waiting room.

We had a fantastic time on the bamboo railway. If only London had a few of these!

Wherever we’ve gone in Asia we’ve been surrounded by food. Eating is (quite rightly!) a huge part of people’s lives, and street food in particular. In Vietnam most people eat pho (beef noodle soup) or perhaps treat themselves to some virility-boosting snake wine; a deep-fried slice of tofu or a chicken foot is the order of the day in China; fish stew in Cambodia (amok) is a national dish or perhaps yak potato stew in Mongolia might take your fancy. We’ve been sticking to the fruit and vegetables which has been far easier than we imagined, especially in Vietnam where there’s a com chay in even the smallest towns (see my vegetarian travel page).

That lady above is in Saigon’s Chinatown, peddling her feet (ha, ha).

In the Mekong Delta we’ve seen the piggies get taken to market in their little bamboo cages, or perched on their backs on a $400 Honda motorcycle. We bought an amazing postcard that shows 14 piglets kind of sitting quietly on the back of one of these small vehicles. This pic is just of a few piglets at the back of a rice noodle making factory we visited.

Rob’s holding a fresh bunch of hairy rambutan from the floating markets near Can Tho (rambut means hair in Indonesian).

In Cambodia, we’ve been confronted with so much produce. Trees bursting with fresh bananas, skinny cows, and lots of rice in the Battambang region. There are quite a few ice-cream shops where teenagers will sit and have a sundae or a bubble tea (sweet, tapioca pearls situated at the bottom of a usually milky or fruity drink and consumed with a large straw) while listening to 24/7 Cambodian karaoke channels.

Local food markets are everywhere, and you won’t see a Tesco or a Coles in sight, let alone bananas in shrink wrap. Salad in a bag washed in chlorine would be postively alien to these people and it’s simple to see why. Their food is farm fresh and cheap. Although the smell in Phomn Penh’s Russian Market was pungent and fishy, we walked past there and ended up in the ‘tools and paint’ section which didn’t smell as bad! The worst sight was in Saigon, where we passed sacks of spices sitting in an alley but each one was covered in a swarm of flies — it seemed that the sellers didn’t want to cover up their produce even though you could barely see what was in the sacks for all the flies buzzing around. For the most part it’s been great!
In Vietnam, ladies selling fruit expertly balance a piece of bamboo on their shoulders; two sacks of produce hanging over each end like scales. They’ll tap you on the arm and still manage not to drop what they’re holding.

Our guide book says the Vietnamese think that sandy, yellow dogs make the most tender meat so whenever we see one of them we think, ‘must be tasty’.

In China, everything goes, as we’ve already mentioned…

We spent a hot couple of days in Battambang, Cambodia (pronounced Battam-bom). Although it’s the country’s second largest city, you wouldn’t know it from the size. It’s just a few sleepy streets with sleepy restaurants, sleepy dogs, and sleepy tuk-tuk drivers. Oh, and oodles of linen-clad French tourists, now that August is upon us. After the epic travel of recent days, we decided to splurge on a private car and driver for the four hour drive ($4 and it was worth every cent. We liked the town immediately, for it’s riverside charm, it’s laidback atmosphere, and the fact that it was super cheap. (We stayed in the best hotel in town, newly built with all the mod-cons, for a princely sum of $13/night!).

Battambang is also a town not without quirks. There are many ice cream sundae cafes, as if the local teenage girls are reliving 1950s America. And all over town are incredibly badly painted advertising signs. Many have bad likenesses of English football stars, we presumed the signs entice you into cafes to have a drink while watching the bootleg satellite coverage of European football. (Kim has photos of these, but we are now seeing such a rush of sights and sounds that it’s not always possible to keep up as you can see from the poor pics today). Eventually we came upon the store making all these signs, where we spotted a kid and his dad with some plywood, stencils, and spraycans. Add all this to the three by three grid of streets and at times it looked like the set from an old western. Finally, the house next to our hotel had a shiny sign “MJP - Maddox Jolie Pitt”which seemed a little odd at the time, but we’ve since discovered this is the humanitarian project Ms Tomb Raider set up.

On the second day we hired a motorbike driver to show us the sights around and outside town (5 hours, $8). I wouldn’t have thought it, but the three of us on a small bike travelling over bumpy red dirt roads was excellent fun. Kim has some fun videos that she might get a chance to upload. We drove around the orchards outside Battambang, stopping at family farms to check out weird and wonderful fruits, at a monk’s compound to look at zillions of bats, by the side of random roads to marvel at “baby snakefish”(??), and after 25km at Wat Banan, a 9th century temple atop a huge hill. (stairs pictured below). But the highlight was undoubtedly the Norry, or Bamboo Train, that I’ll write a separate post about.

Like most people in Cambodia, our moto rider Dara had led an interesting life. Now aged 45 years, he had fled the Khmer Rouge in 1982 for Thailand and didn’t return for 11 years. He threw us nuggets of information about his time in “The Hard War”. For example, he showed us how he used to forage on the ground for food after watching what cows did and didn’t eat.

We left Battambang for Siem Reap also by private car. But halfway, at Sisophon, the road wet diabolically bad. Two or more hours of some of the worst road conditions in the world. It didn’t help that before we left the driver stopped and picked up 400 cans of beer. Thankfully he was delivering them to Siem Reap, not drinking them en route. We’re now in Siem Reap for a few days to visit the temples of Angkor.

In Phnom Penh, Cambodia. We visited S-21, a Cambodian school that was turned into a Khmer prison, torture, and interrogation facility between 1975 and 1978 that held 17,000 prisoners over that period. There were places like this all over Cambodia. The tiled floors remain bloodstained, the shackles in place, the gallows intact, death is everywhere. It’s a gut wrenching place to visit. Cambodia’s Auschwitz. The Khmer rouge took meticulous records. Everyone was photographed on the way in, and many were photographed on their way out with a toe tag. You can look at all the photos on site, its hard to turn away from them.

Only 7 people survived. The vast bulk were taken 13km away to be killed and dumped in the so called Killing Fields at Choung Ek. At first, prisoners were shot. Later, ammuniation supplies began to run thin so they were killed with a hunk of wood. Children and babies were battered to death against a tree that still stands. Today, a memorial is at the site, a vast tower of human skulls unearthed after the Khmer Rouge was ousted. A buddhist shrine in the fields is covered in teeth and bone fragments that visitors even today find scattered amongst the grass.

The true horror is hard to imagine, and its no wonder that the guestbook is full of recent comments and graffiti is everywhere. Someone has scrawled “DEVASTATION” with their finger on a dusty desktop. One piece of graffiti cites Guantanamo. I’m not sure how accurate that is, but its true that we don’t learn lessons. Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Darfur. On one floor of S-21 are the stories of the young men and women who joined the Khmer Rouge and killed their own and in a strange way these tales are just as tragic as those of the innocents.

It was a deeply depressing afternoon seeing all this but you have to see this in order to begin understanding the Cambodia of today. It is amazing that the last remnants of the Khmer Rouge were swept away just ten years ago. To see the sites in Phnom Penh simply hire a tuk tuk driver for about $6.

Soon before leaving for Cambodia last week, we took a daybreak tour from Can Tho (ready at 5.30am!) of the Mekong Delta and caught two floating markets in full swing — Cai Rang and Phuong Dien.

Our simple boat was powered by a small propellor. The lady taking us and who appeared to be her pubescent son accompanied us along the river, first stopping for petrol that they sell in reused plastic bottles.

Hundreds of people live along the muddy river and they use it every day for washing clothes (it appeared to be washing day when we visited), bathing and even brushing their teeth which made us cringe a little, as their other waste gets pumped straight into the river. Unfortunately, locals have little place to dump rubbish either, and we saw much of it being thrown directly into some of the meandering canals we went through.

The vast majority of the people selling the fruit and veg we encountered were hard working women. All types of food from the banal to the exotic were on sale to traders who might be using it for their restaurant or local roadside stall: dragonfruit, rambutan, carrot, longan, pumpkin, pineapple and much more. At Phuong Dien a few boats had slabs of meat lying in them and even people selling blocks of ice, but for the most part it was fruit and vegetables.

What I also liked about the markets was the fact that the traders wore clothes that matched what they were selling. The fiery dragonfruit perfectly complements the green and pink ensemble worn by this lady:

Phuong Dien seemed even busier as we got caught in a kind of ‘boat jam’!

Many of the people living along the river are poor, and some of the shacks were made up of precariously-patched corrugated iron that looked like they could blow away at any moment.

As we passed through some of the smaller canals, the surroundings took on a jungle-like effect. The lady taking our boat stopped to cut mystery fruit from trees and to point out plants such as water coconut.

In this area, our boat’s propellor got caught in floating plastic no less than five times. The lady’s son had to cut it free with a small knife every time (of course, the errant plastic simply got dumped back in the river). There was a lot of non-biodegradable rubbish in this area which was a shame but the locals probably don’t have anywhere else to put it or perhaps they assume it will be magically picked up somewhere down the line.

We also saw a rice noodle factory and stopped at a restaurant along the way for a bite to eat and a swing on the hammocks. We also had people come up to us and give us a surprise massage which cost about $3 - six times cheaper than the Walk In Backrub in London!

We also stopped by to take a walk along one of the nicer-looking villages, where the adolescent boy tried to show off his macho-ness by stabbing his small knife into the coconut trees and trying to rip off leaves as he led us past the beaten track.

I recommend doing a tour like ours - we were on our very own boat, unlike the really fast tourist boats that barely stop for air when they go past the markets. There’s a tour office on the main promenade in Can Tho which should be able to point you in the right direction. We paid $24 for an eight hour tour but I think you could probably do better.

At the end of a relaxing morning we had lunch (again) at the vegetarian restaurant across the road from our hotel, where the little old lady who ran the joint had forced Rob to eat the last few grains of his rice with a spoon otherwise it would go to waste. Who could say no to a little old lady? The meal the day before cost us $1 in total including drinks and soup — the cheapest meal yet. In fact, most of the meals we’ve eaten have cost less than the Malarone anti-malarial tablets we’ve been taking (a month so far, with no side effects) which are about $6 a pop.

Hopefully others wanting to do the same route will stumble upon my ramblings and commit to memory: 1) The slow boat is nice, 2) Never use Delta Adventure Tours.

We left the Vietnamese town of Chau Doc headed toward Phnom Penh, Cambodia, just 165km away. It took 10 hours by two boats and a bus. There is a 4-hour ‘express boat’ ($1 that was sold out, except our hotel landlady somehow had two tickets left for $40 each. Not wanting to fatten her coffers we found a cyclo driver that knew of a different speedboat. A few minutes later he had dropped us at - you guessed it - Delta Adventure Tours. Argh! An hour later we’d determined there was no speedboat, so we had to sign up with Delta Adventures for a slow boat ($8), the group we’d had all sorts of annoyances with.

Next day up and ready for the 7.30 AM cyclos that the Delta lady said she would send for us in order to make the 8.00 departure. 7.40 and no Cyclo so we hired a motodop driver to take us to the Delta office and sort out the problem, as we didn’t know exactly where the slow boat would depart from. A short ride later we were on the boat. It has room for 35 people, and there were 35 pieces of luggage, but there were no people and no staff spoke English. Shortly before 9.00 it putt-putted off with only us aboard, past the shanties that surround Chau Doc, then moored again. Finally at 9.30 AM the Delta tour group shuffled on board (we were the only independent travellers) and the boat departed, 90 minutes late. The journey is along the chocolate coloured Mekong river, Bassac river, and their tributaries. It’s almost all very beautiful. The guide hops off halfway with the collection of passports to speed the process and three hours later you arrive and hop ashore for a few minutes at the border.

Another comedy ensued here. We couldn’t see the guide anywhere and the other 30 Delta passengers stood in a clump as they tend to do. Kim and I went searching other areas for her and soon enough the other 30 followed us. In the middle of nothingness stands an X-ray machine in a glass booth, operated by an old Vietnamese guy. One passenger felt the urge to put his stuff through and 15 minutes later all 30 lemmings had followed suit, casting suspicious eyes at Kim and I who had not. “Who told you to come here! Who told you to do this!” said the guide as she came running over. The Delta passengers were basically trying to re-enter Vietnam.

On to a second, smaller boat, but one that lets you sit on the roof. All the Delta people had their luggage through into a giant haystack at the back of the boat, which we managed to avoid after some Dont Mess With Me wrestling with the boatman. This three hour trip is the best of the journey. Cambodia looks immediately different. Far less infrastructure, more rural, no lights, no vehicles, more barnyard animals. But for three hours children line the shore 100m away yelling “Hello!”, smiling their beaming white smiles, and waving frantically. It’s not an exaggeration to say there are kids every few hundred metres. Soon everyone on the boat was also waving, smiling, and shouting hello back. Great fun!

The second boat pulls up at Neak Leung, some 60km from Phnom Penh, for passengers to catch an onward bus. The Delta ticket lady has sworn there was no bus involved but we expected this to happen. ‘Bus’ is an exaggeration as it is a small minibus and large minibus outside someones crumbling home. We jumped in the comfier looking small bus along with a German family of six, the father of whom looked like Chevy Chase and his son like Rusty from National Lampoons. This minivan took us for 90 minutes along the worst road I’ve ever experienced in my life and hopefully ever will. Continuous 10″ deep potholes and corrugations. The handholds in the van had all been ripped out long ago, and the seats were now bolted to 4×2 pieces of wood as they’d come loose over the potholes. Even the window wouldn’t close due to the constant shuddering it had endured. At least there were only 10 of us in the van.

As it usual with such outfits when you arrive at your destination Delta drops you in the middle of nowhere at a dodgy hotel (strangely named Kings Hotel) with people grabbing at you and your bags so that they score your money for a nights rest. Don’t do it. Hotels are crazy cheap in Phnom Penh so head into town on the first non-affiliated tuk-tuk.

Despite all this we had an excellent day adventuring. From Chau Doc you have little choice but to take one of these boats as there are no cars or flights as alternative. Just make sure you never use Delta Adventure Tours!

Throughout our travels in Asia we’ve been on the look out for the four-leafed clover of motorbike seating - five people on one small bike. This was the second spotted of three so far, and the only one I’ve been able to catch on camera. They were laughing as I tried to take the photograph. With a bit of effort, I think they could have made it six. This from a bouncing bus as we left Saigon en route to the Mekong Delta.

- Rob

As you may have noticed, sometimes our entries are out of order, I hope it is not too confusing. We are now in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, waiting for the afternoon monsoon rains to subside. Here are some photographs taken a few days ago in the Chinatown (Cho Lon) area of Saigon showing people going about their business. We didn’t see any tourists or westerners during our walk around. The Chinatown area is vast, a sizeable portion of Saigon itself, but there are few hotels or westernised restaurants around here. Instead it is never ending streets of markets and foodstalls.

- Rob