Kratchie

After a panic in Ban Lung, where we couldn't take out any money with Káe's Cirrus card, we wired $400 over with Western Transfer, at just under a 10% charge. With this we took the bus to Kratchie, and cycled with a Leed's gap year guy called Will and a Liverpudlian who hates football called Ed to find the rare irrawaddy dolphin, a freshwater dolphin with stumpy heads found in the Mekong.
There are meant to be only about 75 left in the river, and we must have seen all of them. We spent about 45 minutes in a hired boat and they kept bobbing up to breath all around us! Endangered my arse.

The cycle to and fro was great, and the Cambodians were proving to be just as friendly as the Laoatians, with a more savvy attitude and extremely good English from the earliest age.

One of the most talkative characters I've met runs a book shop in Kratchie, and among recommending an itinerary for Angkor Wat, he told us a little about the effects of the recent war with the Khmer Rouge. He had some friendly, equally overtly camp staff sitting watching telly across the shop and he pointed to one saying "his parents did very well out of the war, and were Khmer Rouge," he pointed to the guy sat next to him and said, "his parents suffered terribly at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, but noone talks about any of it, even though everyone over 40 has some memory of it."

Even with all the political undercurrents, the disturbing amounts of one legged landmine victims, more begging than I have ever seen by the old, the crippled and children, and more children working and selling things than I'm comfortable with, and so far really bad food, we were both starting to enjoy travelling through Cambodia.