After talking to a few people I was a little worried about Battambang, one guy called it the whore house of Cambodia and judging by the initial drive through the city and the hotel we stayed in it looked like they might have been right.

Turns out they were wrong, we had another moped tour organised similar to the one we had done in Hue. The tour visited small out of town family run operations that make rice paper, grind rice, catch and cook water snake (we all tried a bit, tastes like fishy chicken) and a fish market. It was a really nice getting out of the city and seeing some real Cambodian life and I loved all the kids who jumped up and down waving and shouting “hello”.

Finally we visited a temple that was used by the Khmer Rouge as a torture and detention centre, the gardens where also used as mass graves similar to S21 and the killing fields in Phnom Penh. There’s now a monument filled with the skulls and bones of those that were found in the graves. My moped driver told me how he was recruited to the Khmer rouge when he was 9 years old, but fled to Thailand (which took 3 weeks of walking) soon after and joined the army. He told me that he had lost half his family to Pol Pot’s regime.

We only had one night in Battambang and we were up bright and early the following day for an 8 hour drive to Bangkok. I’ve got a week here before Pam arrives and don’t really want to stay in the city so I’ve booked a flight down to Ko Sumui to meet up with some of the guys I met on the tour, should be a laugh.

We took an overnight train down to Hué, we had 4 berth cabins which felt a little like a prison cell, although quite comfortable I could have done without the 7am wakeup song that was blasted over the PA system.

The main part of Hué is within a citadel which was home to all the Emperors from 1802. We visited the inner imperial part of the citadel on the first day. It is quite an impressive complex of buildings with temples and statues all over place. Unfortunately I was quite tired and didn’t really take it all in.

Our second day in Hué was a lot more interesting, we all hired mopeds (with drivers, I don’t think anybody would be brave enough to chance the roads alone) and had a tour round the city starting off in at a local market there was a museum nearby showing how the locals live as well as a covered bridge with a sweet old lady who read the palms of some of the American girls.

We had lunch at what I think was a monastery and then headed over to the tomb of one of the kings. It reminded me a lot of tomb raider as the area hadn’t had any restoration done to it at all. By then it had started raining which I think had brought us down a bit because we went on a little cruise up the perfume river to a pagoda but nobody seemed to be very interested. One thing I did notice at the pagoda was an old American car that I actually recognised from the cover of a Rage Against the Machine album cover. It was actually the car used by a monk called Thích Quảng Đức who drove it down to a busy junction in Saigon and burned himself to death in protest of the treatment of monks by the government.

It took a little while to get my confidence up on the moped and ease by vice like grip of the handle on the back, especially at the fist junction we past, but it was great fun in the end, even managed a few Paparazzi type shots from the back.

Crossing a road in Hanoi

• Wait until the road you are going to cross is mostly mopeds and fewer cars.
• Take a deep breath and step off the curb (avoiding the river of god knows what in the gutter)
• Keep a constant pace, don’t speed up or slow down no matter what happens, just let the traffic deal with you.
• Arrive at the other side and change your underwear.

I arrived in Hanoi from a very brief overnight stay in Singapore. I ‘d love to write all about Singapore, but I was feeling really rough and all I really saw was the inside of the 20 bed prison like dorm I was staying in. I was up at 5am (again for the second day running) to catch my flight to Hanoi.

Still feeling quite bad I missed out on the Singapore airlines plane food (which actually looked quite tasty) and arrived in Hanoi some time in mid afternoon. I was bundled into a tiny minibus which for US$4 will take you the hours drive from the airport to anywhere in the city. The drive from the airport was terrifying, I don’t have enough fingers to count the number of times a moped nearly ended up under our wheels, you also soon get used to the sound of horns. Once at the hostel I went back to bed for a few hours then decided I should make an effort and go for a walk, but roads at night made me think again and I only ended up walking around the block.

The next day I was determined to see more of the city so I followed other people until I got the hang of the road crossing thing. I got ripped of buying a photocopied lonely planet guide book (that smells of fish), I thought I was paying £1 for it when I actually paid £10. Got a much better grasp of the exchange rate now (around 25,000 dong to the pound).

All the streets in old town Hanoi have a different theme: silk street, toy street comb street, clam worm street etc. each selling exactly what it say on the tin. This didn’t make it any easier to find my way around, I managed to get lost for about 2 hours after I popped out to the supermarket for shower gel.

I spent the rest of the day at the Hoan Kiem Lake getting hassled by the street touts who try and sell you anything they can and once they get up close and out of earshot of anyone else they offer a whole different range of products (I’m sure you can guess).

I also watched the water puppet show which turned out to be really funny. Seven puppeteers stand waist deep in a very smelly green pool and operate puppets from behind a screen whilst a live band plays along, I don’t think there was much of a plot to the storey, but it was really enjoyable.

I’ve met up with the guys I’ll be spending the next few weeks with on the first of my tours. They all seem nice enough, there’s 2 young Australian couples, an Australian mother and daughter, an American mother and Daughter and a family of Americans. We all went out for quite a posh Vietnamese dinner which came to all of £4

Next stop is Hanlong Bay which looks amazing from the photo’s I’ve seen. Hopefully I’ll get a couple of good HDR’s.