... On a variety of toilets

The squits, the runs, the trots, Delhi belly, Bombay bum or, in this neck of the woods, the Ho Chi Minh two-step.
Whatever you call it and wherever you are, having the wildies is never fun.
So after five days of dashing, cheeks-clenched, to the loo after every meal, I found myself under a Phnom Penh doctor.
Dr Scott was the sort of straight-talking, old-fashioned English gent I thought only existed in novels about colonial India.
While I was waiting to be seen, he came to the phone to loudly disclose the results of an HIV test (negative) and tell a man he should be screened for colon cancer "because once they find symptoms, you're dead".
I didn't expect a sympathetic hearing.
However, aside from when he palpated my abdomen and I feared soiling his examination table, it was a relatively painless experience.
I left with some antibiotics which should clear things up in a day or two. The culprit, he reckons, was some sort of shellfish.
I'm just glad he didn't ask me for a detailed run-down of my recent diet.

Yesterday, I snacked on rat.
We spotted dozens of them being cooked on a huge barbecue at the side of the road during a tour of the villages around Battambang and they looked and smelled delicious.
These aren't your sewer-dwelling city types but the bumpkins of the rodent world, feeding all day on country-grown rice. Or at least that's what they told us. They even left the long teeth in place by way of proof.
Either way, it tasted as good as it looked, smoky from the charcoal and with a wildfowl-type flavour.
If that's making you feel queasy, it wasn't the most outlandish meal to have entered my system in the last few days - only to exit all too rapidly.
Feeling peckish after a few beers one night, I took a fancy to some hard-boiled eggs for sale on a street stall.
"These are baby eggs," the vendor warned.
I had heard about the Cambodian delicacy of fertilised duck egg but never before seen them for sale.
Emboldened by drink, I cracked one open. Inside was something not dissimilar to a duckling - and a pretty ugly, grey, embryonic one at that.
Nevertheless, I dipped in my spoon. The taste was like any other hard-boiled egg but the look and texture still haunts me as I write.
I'm sure I crunched through a few downy feathers on my way to the yolk sac at the bottom.
The One With The Common Sense was not going near this one - though she was happy to gnaw on a rat's hind leg.

More squeamish readers will be glad to know a far more conventional meal was on the menu when we took a Khmer cooking lesson in Battambang.
Cook Madame Nary took us to the packed local market to buy the ingredients. There, innumerable types of herbs and veg were laid out alongside fresh fish flipping about in bowls of water on the floor.
Despite speaking little English, she talked us through making the national dish of Amoc - fish with various herbs and a dried red pepper sauce.
It is steamed in a folded banana leaf along with coconut milk that The One With The Common Sense made by kneading dessicated coconut in a muslin bag in hot water.
We also made spring rolls and another Khmer favourite, lok-lak - a kind of beef stir fry in a pepper and lime sauce, served with fried egg and salad.
We departed with a recipe book, so our visitors can expect recreations in future.
The best part - apart from eating the fruits of our labour - was quietly working in the kitchen while the family carried out their chores around us and chatting to Madame Nary's nephews.
It was nice to see a slice of life we'd otherwise miss.

Being a bit of a public transport saddo, The One With The Common Sense chose the perfect birthday gift for me in a trip on Battambang's "Bamboo train".
It got its name because in earlier times a simple flatbed was pushed along the track by men using bamboo poles.
Nowadays they are still simple flatbeds, about two metres long, but powered by 6HP engines. Their wheels were salvaged from old Soviet tanks from past conflicts.
Sitting at the front on a mat on the wooden slats, it rattled over the gaps in rails, sending judders up my spine. The sensation - and the noise - reminded me of the slow train from Manchester to Liverpool that's always full of drunks from Patricroft after gigs.
Mind, this was probably less prone to delay and there was no chance of it being stopped by cabling problems.
Indeed, the most likely obstacle was another bamboo train travelling in the opposite direction along the single track.
Thanks to its ingenious construction, this is easily solved by passengers from whichever is least full "carriage" disembarking as the two drivers lift off the flatbed and move the wheels around the fuller one to reassemble the vehicle on the other side.
It was great fun, made even more so by some of the characters you meet on the line. On one train, a bald Dutchmen - wearing orange, obviously - sat in the middle of two saffron-clad monks, looking quite at home.
The One With The Common Sense suggested he might have found a new calling in life, sending one of the elderly monks into hysterics.