Battambang is a riverside city in the west of Cambodia, it is very compact for 250,000 inhabitants. This makes it a bit larger than Luton, or around the same size as Aberdeen. Though some say it has 1 million people – I don’t think it anywhere as big as Newcastle. The river cuts a 10-metre deep track through the city and Battambang’s essential bridges are in dire need of upgrading or repairs. Local boys fish in the muddy brown river by hand, or hunt for molluscs. Others scavenge for waste, hoping to amass a collection to sell at the local “recycling” centre for a dollar or two the next morning.

Battambang has a very much a civilised form of wild west atmosphere about the place – it is due to its informal and relaxed attitude, and governmence is underwhelming here. It is a great base to explore the areas such as Banon Temple, the notorious killing caves and for onward journey to Siem Reap for the insanely vast “see it once before you die” temple of Angkor Wat. There are plenty of guesthouses for all tastes and budgets – Victoria Hotel is looking decidedly posh for a rustic town while opposite is a more modest guesthouse. A new hotel is being built outside my office – five floors and built entirely by hand – no tools whatsoever.

Down the road from this under construction hotel is Romance Beer Garden. It is a very good restaurant, and remarkably un-seedy for a Battambang night venue. Be sure to try out the GRILLED BEE LARVAE! It has the soft mushy texture of marshmallow, looks like a scaly fish on the plate, and has no flavour. If you think this is bad, the alternative is grilled wasps larvae.

It was first settled in the 11th Century, and has changed hands between Thailand and Cambodia many times in the last few centuries, and was a stronghold against the Khmer Rogue for a long time and has probably the best preserved colonial-era buildings in the heart of the city. However, what will take the attention of your eyes when you approach Battambang from Phnom Penh on Highway 5, a journey of 4-6 hours over 180-odd miles, is a large statue of a sitting buddhist greeting you to the city. It is black with striking white eyes and red “clothing”.

The next thing you will notice is the awkward juxtaposition of tiny huts that a family of 4-10 will live in at night and turn their homes into shops by sunrise among the very large modern houses clearly built for people with lots of money. The contrast couldn’t be more stark and wasteful especially as most of these modern houses are second, third, fourth… nth homes for the owners and therefore empty most of the time. It must grate on those who are squashed onto the verge between the boundary walls and the city roads. But they do not show it, they smile day in, day out, getting on with life in the best way they can.

Here’s another rant about an airline – it’s becoming a favourite past time of mine. But, having built up an expanding list of airlines that I flew with, I think I know the difference between a decent one and a crap one.

So, what’s my problem with Die Airways? Despite having a modern fleet (747-400) serving the popular London-Bangkok route, a travelling time of 11 to 14 hours depending on the direction and which way the wind blows.

It proudly boasts that it has been in operation for 48 years. You’d be quite sane in thinking they’d know a thing or two about looking after customers. Unfortunately, it’s not the case at all.

I’m a regular flyer, doing my bit to impose my size-11 carbon footprint on the world, and I’ve never had these problems before:

1) The seats are so backbreaking, I’d sell them to CIA as torture equipment. No sitting position or posture will find you your comfort spot. I find myself folding my arms for 14 hours, and lean to the side slightly. As a result, I’ve a utterly sore backside, which 2 days after the flight, show no sign of abating. Particularly troublesome is my shoulders are aching and preventing me from sleeping well. My elbows are punishing me for folding them for such long periods.

2) The staff, enthusiastic at first, become lazy and hide in their wee kitchens for hours on end. If you want water, you get out of your seat and hunt the lazy sods down. Then, they will grudgingly pour you some water – but not a full glass. Oh no, that would be too much. Half-empty.

3) Movies/videos/screen – using DLP projectors is getting old, and really bad epilepsy-inducing colour-wheel artifacts are prevalent on all of the screens. If that wasn’t enough, the movies kept stopping and restarting. Then, I presume a computer detected something has gone wrong and attempts to rewind/forward to the right position, but by such time, you’ve lost interest or forgotten what had happened as you figgetted so much in the chair to find that sweet comfort spot.

4) Their time management skills leave a lot to be desired – it was over an hour late in departing their home flagship airport in Bangkok, and reasons varied from birds on the runway to people late coming on board to the pilot’s in the toilet. Sure, I’d let this go, but when querying them about arrival time at Heathrow, answers were as varied, if not colourful as the first attempts: We will be on time, we will be early, we will be 15 minutes late. We will be there when we will be there. We landed 1.45hrs late. Fortunately I still managed to catch my connection flight. My colleague who flew with me didn’t.

The only good thing about the airline was the food. But, then again, Thai food is great, so it’s to be expected rather than a surprise.

My British Airways connection was a breeze, even using Terminal 5 – though I didn’t have any hold luggage – and the seats were soooo comfortable – I instantly slept, slept through the take off and landing.

So for now, British Arseways is my friend and have booked an alternative airline for my return to Cambodia – Malaysia Airlines.

Now time to nurse my shoulders.

I’ve just spent six weeks working and living in the city of Battambang, in western Cambodia. The area surrounding Battambang is predominantly rural, and one of the heaviest mined areas in the country, and quite possibly the world.

Landmines and other unexploded ordinance come from the Second World War, the French-Indochina war in the 1950s. After a brief respite in the early1960s, Vietnam placed UXOs to protect its supply routes in Cambodia from 1967, and then the USA responded with aerial drops of cluster bombs and covert operations deploying landmines in the Vietnam war well into 1975. Cambodia then suffered under the Khmer Rouge regime, and brought UXOs to the rest of Cambodia and around its borders to create a wall-less prison. Vietnamese troops withdrew in 1989 and sparked another major UXO deployment as a result of a power vacuum and the Khmer Rouge continued laying mines after the 1993 elections with new tatics of placing UXOs in towns.

The Cambodia Mines Action Comittee (CMAC) reports that mines found in Cambodia have been manufactured in the US, China, Vietnam, the former USSR and East Germany, the former Czechoslovakia, India, Chile, South and North Korea, Thailand, Iran, Iraq, South Africa, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland.

With the regular occurrence of the wet season, UXOs get moved and become buried. Maps were rarely drawn when mines were deployed as it was carried out on an ad-hoc basis with varying tatics by different countries from the Second World War right to the late 1990s.

However, a mine removed is a life saved and CMAC spent the last 15 years clearing away mines and other unexploded ordinance, but there are still a rough estimate of at least 6 million mines, and discounting urban population, that’s nearly one mine for every rural person.

People in rural Cambodia live right next to a road – or rather, access route as it is generally safer, though people can still be dangerously ignorant of the consequences of handling an UXO device. A police station stored a large collection of UXOs, who alerted our crew of the collection. They wait until an organisation come along and take them away for controlled detonation.

The leader of our de-mining team, a Cambodian, was captured and tortured by the Khemer Rogue three times – each time he was thrown into a deep pit naked, was excreted upon, buried, put under water, and other stuff that is unspeakable. You would have not known it if you met him, he is a bright man dedicated to the dangerous job of removing UXOs in Cambodia.

A boy of four years old was playing with an unexploded hand grenade, completely unaware that it is a lethal device that could kill him without warning. He came running towards us, proudly showing off his new “toy”. As we got him to put it on the ground and walk away from it, our de-mining team removed it and found it to be harmless. The explosive materials has leaked out through a rust long ago. The kid was lucky, children and adults are maimed and killed on a regular basis in Cambodia.

Three days before I arrived, three people died when they stepped upon a landmine by a roadside near Battambang. It was an anti-tank mine. The police said there was absolutely nothing left of them.

It is mostly the very poor, as always, who suffer. They are uneducated and need to live off the land to feed themselves, and cannot afford to move to a town. In Cambodia, if you earn more than $40 a month, you are doing very well. Builders working on a building Battambang’s highest building, a 4-storey hotel, earn just under $2 a day. That’s less than a quid a day. Human labour is so cheap, that the builders have no machines or power tools to build the hotel. It is like going back 150 years and watch how they tackle tricky construction methods without any machinery such as lifting, pouring concrete, and ‘drilling’. Waiters earn between $1 and $1.50 a day and they are well dressed and many have taken upon themselves learning English.

The average income is $350 a year, skewed by the very rich few, and those who can be counted. The rural people have no income, live in houses they built from sticks and planks of wood, and often a temporary structure. The clothes they wear look modern, but what they wear is what they have.

Yet, the Cambodian people are a cheerful lot, and they have every reason to be – its the first time a generation has not experienced war and conflict, the first time people can plan the next day, to embark on long term projects and a reason to make money. It has a long way to go, and it won’t be easy, but the people sure are trying!