Tuk Tuk Tour

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We hired a guide, Nicky, again for a couple of hours, as we are leaving after lunch to head North East to Siem Reap and the temples of Angkor Wat. The tuk tuk is a great mode of transport as its slow, shaded and the open sides means that you have a cooling wind, can smell and hear things that would be lost in a car and you can also interact more with the locals as you go along.
First we visited an old train known as the 'bamboo train'. We all had imagined it was a train where the carriages were made of bamboo. Instead it was pairs of train wheels, a metal base, woven bamboo co wrong and a patterned throw. It was built by the French when this area was Indo China and was used to move cargo and people. It then became the means for locals to visit other villages and today it is a tourist attraction. The sun was getting hot and, given that we were travelling for a few hours in the afternoon, we have it a miss.
Our guide took us through various villages by a river. The mess and chaos is quite amazing with rubbish everywhere as there is no money for formal collections. I suppose this is how midden heaps must have looked in the UK in pre-Victorian times.
We had a brief look around Battambang and bought some more of those delicious spring rolls were ate yesterday.
The kids spent some quality time in the pool as the temperature was in the mid 30's. That said, the water was as warm as a bath!
After lunch we took a taxi to Siem Reap where we will base ourselves for the next three nights. The metalled road disappeared at one point and became an orange dirt track. I turned to the kids and said 'imagine that were on the M6 and its just turned to dirt, that's the equivalent as this was the main road north east.
We arrived at hotel Lotus Blanc around 3.45pm. Cas had booked interconnecting rooms and the first rooms they showed us didn't have this. They were very good about it and put us in a large suite and brought two single beds in which was a great solution. There were two sinks in our part of the suite and Cas was very fast to lay claim to one and spread out all her toiletries.
The kids are in the hotel and then we took a tuk tuk to the sister restaurant of Friends, the orphan charity restaurant that we visited in Phnom Penh. The food was equally delicious and one of the tapas dishes I ordered was beef with red wood ants, when in Rome...

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