After a little two hours walk, I ended up in the Battambang bamboo train station. A policemen (real one?) asked me to wait for another tourist to come to share a bamboo train. I start to make friend with the driver and ten minutes later a nice German lady arrived in a tuk tuk.

The little bamboo tray were actually going “really” fast. You are sitting in the middle on two little pillows and you try to stay still while the engine is going crazy on the damaged straight railways. It is a short way but you have to stand up every time you meet another bamboo train to dismount one of them, let the other passes and build your flying carpet again. Oh, and you have to avoid the gigantic spiders in the middle of their web like a ninja if you don’t want to finish with a new friend on your face. Yep…

It is obviously really touristic and you are forced by a little lady to give a tip to the driver but I guess it makes the local lives and it was in the end a funny little attraction. I was amazed to notice how the kids are good english speakers, even in the smallest village in Cambodia. I was really sad also to see that instead of going to school, they are all helping out their parents by selling to the tourist some bracelets they did. It is more the action of begging that I condemn here and I am still not sure about how to react with a child trained to beg a dollar to go to school. They usually look so happy, playing together and as soon as they see a western tourist, they turned their black eyebrows up and declame the eternal “lady one dollar please.” 

Everything is one dollar in Cambodia. Everything…

However, I felt like the Cambodian government were trying to protect the kids at all time and I’ve seen some advertising to help preventing the children abuse…

I came back to town with my bamboo train partner who rented a tuk tuk for the day and walked in the city for a bit. I had a crush for this little shop: “Jewels in a lotus”, hold by a nice guy from Switzerland. Make sure to do a stop to buy a print or a postcard if you are around.