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After a much needed nights sleep we were off to explore Phnom Penh! It turned out to be very noisy and busy (much like most of the big cities we've seen) and we didn't really rate it much, so spent a lot of the day decided what to do next! We skipped the grand palace, which apparently was a mistake because it's beautiful, but it was quite expensive and I wasn't really feeling too touristy that day. So we booked a bus to Battambong for the following morning, and checked into a hotel in a different part of town. Deciding to walk to move our bags between hotels was probably a mistake, but the can of ''Sting' (some kind of super sugary strawberry flavoured pop) made it all worthwhile!
We left early for Battambong, getting up at 5am :( It was much much quieter, and much less touristy, though we did stay in the one hotel that every tourist seems to flock to (mostly due to the free tuktuk ride there...). The quiet afternoon we'd planned, mooching around the small city, turned out to be very different! First we talked to a monk and his friends for a long time whilst visiting a temple, then moved on to helping teach English at a school about 7Km out of town. The school was free, aimed at kids from poorer families. A guy pulled up to us on his moto and asked if we wanted to help for an hour or two and we simply said yes (I'm not sure what makes me feel quite so invinsible out here to just hop onto a guys moto for half an hour out of town, Im hoping Ollie would protect me!!) The first class was younger kids (about 8-14) so only simple conversation and word games, then the second class was older, so full conversations about our lives. It was really interesting, and suprising how amazing their language skills are! To top off a great day, we had ''real' western food for dinner, no curry powder (or meat, in my case) in sight :)
Our second day in Battambong we hired a moto to tour the two temples surrounding the city. It's more common to hire a guide on a moto for a day, who knows the route well, but we (by we, I mean Ollie) really wanted to drive! So after a 2 minute lesson, in which he stalled more times than started and looked nervous enough himself, I hopped on the back and let him take me down the highway! It was easy to drive once he got the hang of it, and I even gave it a go for 10 minutes (on a quiet road, in the middle of nowhere). The temples were some of the better we'd seen and we even got a free guide at the first one, another monk keen to chat and practise his english :) We climbed what felt like a million stairs in the sun, saw the killing cave complete with cabinets of skulls, and full of bats deeper inside, but that bit was a little grusome. Before the second temple we managed to puncture the tyre, and ducked into some locals house (no english here!) where the inner tube had to be replaced! Typical! It was obviously worse for wear though, as there were probably at least 5 previous repairs on the old one already.
We finally did street food properly, ordering (with some good hand gestures!) fruit shakes and noodles and vegetables.... The shake was good, though I think it was papaya rather than pinapple, but the noodles were not! It was more like noodle slop with hidden meat and we were both pretty disappointed! Ollie made a good effort to eat most of it, while I tried hard and failed miserably! Probably won't be trying that again for a while!
On our third day here we headed for the bamboo train! It's a small cart made to sit on top of the disused railway tracks (very overgrown now!) and it went super fast! A little scary actually! It used to be the only way local people living by the tracks could transport goods easily, but now its more of a tourist attraction - shame, as we were expecting something a little more authentic. Really fun all the same, and when someone is coming the other way, one cart has to dismantle and be put back together again afterwards!
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