The next day was spent mainly sleeping. When I eventually got up, Stevie and Lucie had already been to the temples. while I was catching up on some much needed beauty sleep it had been decided that myself, mona, Matt, Steve, Lucie and Kai would travel down to Phnom Penh together, strength in numbers and all that. We had decided to get a nice comfortable air conditioned limo bus for $11 each. Fair enough I thought. We played around in the pool for a couple of hours, we invented a good little game with heading a football, obviously i was the champ, naturally. After that we sat around in the bar lounge area and were just idly chatting, when Ron told us about this train that ran to Phnom Penh from Battanbang and how he wished that he had time to catch it. a light bulb came on inside my head, THE TRAIN! I'd read about this train about a month ago and i promised myself that if I had the chance then I would catch it. Now the plan was to leave on the saturday and get the bus that took 6 hours to Phnom penh, and what I was suggesting was to leave early saturday morning, get the boat to Battanbang (anything between 3 and 7 hours), spend the night in Battanbang and then get the train to Phnom Penh at 6.40 Sunday morning (it only ran once a week and was supposed to arrive at 1900 in phnom penh). I showed everyone the youtube clips of it, Stevie was hooked, Lucie was pursuadable, Matt was happy to go along with whatever, Kai wasn't feeling too well so he was going to get the bus, Mona wasn't sure about it at all.
A little note about the train: It's the only train running in Cambodia, it travels at about 20km/h, you can easily out run it (which we all did at one point), the seats were nothing more than wooden benches nailed to the floor, and best of all, you can ride on the roof.
We sat around discussing the various merits of both methods of transport, yes the bus would work out quicker, cheaper and more comfortable, but as I pointed out we could get a bus anywhere in the world, and we all came to cambodia for exactly these kinds of experiences. Lucie was in, which meant so was Stevie. After a little bit of badgering, so was mona. even Kai decided to join in. it was set, we were going top catch the one and only train in Cambodia.
That night we all went out for a Cambodian BBQ, I had a selection of Chicken, Beef, Snake, Squid and Crocodile. Croc was by far the best. we had to cook it all ourselves on the stupidest BBQ invention I'd ever seen. It was basically an upturned cylinder surrounded by water, so your food would slip down into the water and boil if you weren't careful, which i wasn't. The snake was still too chewy though.
After that we went to a restaurant called 'dead Fish' that Steve, Lucie, Kai and Ron the night before. It's called 'Dead Fish' because you can buy a plate of dead fish for 50c to feed to the crocodiles. As we'd all just eaten crocodile I thought this was a good way of giving something back. Looking over the pit, there were 2 or 3 crocs, about 3 or 4 feet in length, I'm not sure if i'd ever seen a croc before but they were quite impressive. I threw in a couple of fish and out from underneath the decking came 2 monsters! they must have been 8 feet long, strewth I thought, she's a beauty!
We all went out for drink after that, me and Ron decided to stay out and watch the Germany Portugal game, we met a nice german bloke called Christian who used to box in Bethnal Green, we all bonded over our joint hatred of Portugal. I noticed 2 english blokes st close to us cheer when portugal scored, and when I was telling Christain about how i thought spain would win it, and how Torres was the best striker in the world I heard one of them mutter “didn't win you the league though did it”. Mancs, like cockroaches, get everywhere it seems. I ignored him and didn't rise to it, anyway I was pally with an amateur boxer fighting out of east london, I thought I was pretty safe. Portugal were soundly beaten and the mancs slipped away into the night, I wonder if they knew what Ronaldo was going to do immediately after that game would they still have been supporting them?
Me and Ron stayed for a celebratory drink with Christian and went home at about 4am (the game over here didn't start until 1.45am. We woke Kai up to tell him the good news, then off to bed.
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