The latest garages in the world have fancy clean handles, a smattering of special offer advertisments for things like wind-up torches and you can even put your card straight into the pump to pay now. In Vietnam you can fill up at one of these.
Believe it or not this type of petrol pump has been quite a commom sight in both Vietnam and Cambodia and equally common are old, large glass Pepsi or Fanta bottles filled with fuel to take away! I'm not sure it's the safest way to store highly flammable liquids but it seems to do the job in South East Asia.
Cambodia may have had some of the craziest driving of the trip so far but Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam certainly has the busiest roads.
The amount of mopeds in this city is incredible. I have heard a tour guide say that there are around 4,500,000 of them, there are only around 6,500,000 people! They are everywhere!
Ask most people what they know about transport in Asia and, generally, they will say that it's famous for being a little crazy. So far on this trip, Cambodia is staking a claim to be the craziest of the lot!
After a number of trips about the country I have to say that it's not exactly clear which side of the road people drive on. Obviously, there is an actual side but vehicles spend so much time overtaking one another that each journey is littered with vehicles driving head on towards one another resulting in braking or swerving by one or both drivers!
Then there are the horns, I just don't get the horns. To begin with I thought they were used as warnings but they get beeped when there is nothing to beep at and at other times I thought it might be a bit of road rage, but there are so many horns literally every few seconds on a busy road that they have no effect anyway, they just become background noise.
Ahh, road travel in Cambodia. I won't forget you.
Today I travelled by bus from Bangkok in Thailand to Siem Reap in Cambodia, the 10th country of the trip. It was a bit weird crossing the border on a coach trip as everyone has to get off and go through one passport place to leave the country you started in and then wander a short distance to go through another passport place to enter the next country before getting back on the bus again!
My first impressions of Cambodia are that it's really flat! Fields strech as far as the eye can see and I haven't seen anything close to a hill yet. There are also loads of bicycles and motorbikes and not many cars on the roads.
Just like Chile, the money could give me brain ache here. There are roughly 6000 Cambodian Reils to just £1 and to make it even more confusing most places take US dollars but give you your change as a mix of dollars and reils. Ouch to the maths!
In the photo: You can see our rucksacks on a tuktuk ride to the guesthouse we're staying in. The first tuktuk ride of the trip so far.
Forget those boring paper train tickets you normally get, why not have plastic counters instead? These are what you're given when you pay your fare in the machines near our hostel in Bangkok (We got blue ones back in Kuala Lumpur too).
