The sombre mood of Phnom Penh's genocide museum was followed the next day by a 6 hour white knuckle speedboat ride up the Tonle Sap river to Siem Reap. As with all transport in Cambodia, the boat left at 7:00am. This time there were 2 boats, and they had over-sold both, just in case it wasn't complicated enough.

We were fortunate enough to get a seat, but abandoned it shortly after departure to sit on the roof. Great scenery, but a little hairy and, for some people a few feet further down the boat, very wet.

The Tonle Sap is an interesting lake (as lakes go). In the height of the rainy season the Mekong flows into it, swelling it from 3500 sq km to 7500 sq km. When the rainy season ends and the level of the Mekong falls, the water flows back out again causing the Tonle Sap river to reverse directions and flow back into the mekong. As a result, the view from the boat includes houses, trees and all kinds of things that are on dry land for most of the year. There's also a floating village, which moves around the lake depending on the water level.

We got to Siem Reap with no problems, slightly earlier than expected. Our minibus was full and so I was treated to a moped taxi back to the hotel while annabel was in the bus. I got there first. We decided to get our 1 day ticket for Angkor Wat shortly after, and rented a moto driver to take us both in to see the sunset. This was our first mistake. While we have seen locals carrying up to 5 people on a single moped, we weigh more than the average couple of locals. Our driver's moped was not happy. It made some complaints on the way in, but on the way back it sounded like it would have to be scrapped. To his relief we agreed to get 2 mopeds for the next day.

On first seeing Angkor Wat I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed. Annabel scolded me harshly for this view, but there it was, and it looked a lot smaller than I had imagined it to be. Anyway, we had a look around and it was definitely interesting and, considering when it was built and the troubles the country has endured in the mean time, also an impressive achievement. We saw a good sunset from the top of the central structure, though we gave up on it too quickly and climbed down before the colours had 'developed'.

The next morning we got up very early. 5am i think. We were back at Angkor Wat just before sunrise and were unlucky to see the sky mostly covered in cloud. There were a lot of people there, a few hundred at least, and everyone was taking pictures of the sunrise, or trying to. After sunrise we had breakfast, then followed our guide out to another breakfast place with which we think he had a deal. It was 3 times the price of most other places and we declined to be ripped off. The price of that was waiting for our guide outside while all of the local children tried to sell us things. Things ranged from postcards, to guide books to flutes and other stuff. They all had their standard patter down, and it was quite entertaining in a way:-

where you from?
england
you have queen elizabeth, 62 million people
no, it's 58 million people, we just counted them
you want postcard?
maybe later
no, you buy now
no thanks, maybe later
what's your name?
steve
my name is david beckham
[from another] my name is david beckham too
you want book?
no thanks, maybe later
ok you buy from me later
maybe
no, you promise you buy from me later
ok, maybe
no, you promise
no, maybe

...and on it went. one of them - we were surrounded by about 7 - had even done his hair in a david beckham stylie and was quite funny. He said "what do you want" to which i replied "nothing" to which he replied "nothing, 2 dollars". Annabel later told me she had had the same exchange with another kid.
Then we crossed the road and found, to our surprise, that they didn't follow. The police would apparently fine them if they went on the temple side of the road, each temple has it’s own version of this line. respite at last...

From there we set off on a day of temple exploration. angkor wat is one among a large number of temples in the siem reap area, mostly within an ancient walled city. they're all old, and in various states of repair, between 500 and 1200 years old, some decorated, some not, some big, some small. We had decided to get a guide, which wasn't cheap but did help to make it more interesting. He talked us through the amazing carvings that were on the temple at angkor thom, and gave us a much better understanding of what we were seeing, who had built it and all of that stuff.

Our favourite was probably Tha Phrom, which is overgrown with huge banyan trees because it was abandoned to the jungle when the khmer empire moved its capital to phnom penh. It really was a sight worth seeing, with the added interest that it was, apparently, used in the filming of tomb raider. Even funnier was that it was being used, when we were there, by a French production company for the making of "2 brothers" (coming soon to a cinema near you...). The film crew had bought lots of extra plants and creepers and put them around the temple because, for some reason, it didn't look overgrown enough.

By sunset we had seen 7 temple complexes, i think - i have to admit i had lost track and interest, somewhere along the way - and we were back at angkor wat for sunset. 12 hours of temple seeing was more than i could take, but the sunset was good - again - and this time we waited.

The next day Annabel, who is made of much sterner stuff than i can fathom - decided to go in for a second day to look at one of the temples again and to travel the 26km out to another one which we hadn't seen. I took the opportunity to look around the town, lounge around and do nothing much at all. Siem Reap is not much of a town, though it does boast a couple of hotels with rooms for up to $1000 per night. Out of our budget, for sure. The most shocking thing about the place is the number of limbless people on the streets. I think Annabel enjoyed her second day, but decided to leave it at that. We are still unable to understand some of the people who get 7 day tickets and spend a week there.

We decided not to go directly back to Phnom Penh and went, instead, to Battambang - Cambodia's second largest city. The boat ride there was hairy to say the least. At the hotel we were told that the capacity of the boat was 25. At the boat we were told it was 30, and that looked more than enough. At our second stop to pick up yet more people we were told that the driver was happy with 40. At this point we wished we hadn't heard that a boat had sunk a couple of months before due to over-loading. To me it felt ok, though it clearly had too many people on it. The water was no more than waist deep for most of the way and we were sitting right near the back of the boat, which was open. It wasn't fun, though.

The trip was fast and quickly left the lake to travel up a tributary river. We then understood why the boat was small. And why we didn't want him to go so fast. The river is probably a road in the dry season, and a narrow one at that. We had to pass other boats just as you would another car on a country road. More white knuckles.

We did pass through some villages suspended above the water on stilts, which was interesting. We were even passed by shop boats and a joyful festival involving pelting tourists with water balloons. Actually very funny.

We got to Battambang and decided to leave more or less immediately. It wasn't a great place, and what it did have to offer - temples, countryside, villages - we weren't really in the mood for. So, we decided to get a shared taxi to phnom penh.

It is standard practice in Cambodia to put 6 people and the driver in any taxi, and almost all taxis are toyota camrys, of some vintage. As we are larger than the average Cambodian, by some distance, and do not have the Cambodian tolerance for discomfort, we paid for 2.6666 seats in the back, and shared the back with one other tourist. We left our hotel at 7am, and spent the next 2 hours sitting in the car at the local market while our driver displayed his complete ineptitude in finding other customers - he wasn't going to leave 'til he had 2 more people for the front seat. At 850 we left, having waited for what seemed like forever. The journey was 6 hours long and, relatively, uneventful. Half way to PP he offered to arrange a cab for us to the coast, as we had decided to motor on through rather than spend another night in the city.

When we got to PP we - foolishly - allowed him to arrange our ride and the price. This he did and we got a deal that was fine, but when someone else does these things for you you always wonder what you could have got without the middle man. Anyway, this taxi driver decided to carry a non-standard number of passengers and, in addition to the 3 of us in the back, he put a mother and small child on the front passenger seat and himself AND ANOTHER ADULT MAN on the driver seat. As you may expect this made us a little nervous. We spent the next 45 mins trying to decide whether it was worth bailing out of the cab in the middle of nowhere but eventually we calmed down a little when we could see that he'd done this before and he was actually one of the safer drivers on the road. 3 hours later we got to sihanoukville, cambodia's premier beach resort and were thankful to be there in one piece. Never again.

We spent the next few days on the beach. We hadn't realised how much we had wanted a change of scene but it was pretty obvious from the first 5 minutes by the water on the first day. Besides the change of pace, the best thing about the place was the food - we found a restaurant, called the melting pot, and ate there for 3 nights. The first night we had a roast lunch that was the best thing either of us had had in ages, even if it was $4 per person.

On the 4th night we decided to leave the next day. At 630 the next morning we went to get a taxi and this time afforded ourselves the luxury of a taxi to ourselves. The 3 hour, 130km trip to Kampot cost us $13, but was much easier on the nerves. We found a guest house and arranged a tour to the deserted french hill station and one-time party town of Bokhor. We had expected the guides to show up with dirt bikes - or scramblers, or whatever you'd like to call them - and instead they had mopeds. Not good. The 40km of road from the park entrance to Bokor is in a truly awful state and we spent the most uncomfortable 3 hours of our lives bumping up that road, knowing that we would have to bump all the way back down it again later. In testament to my spreading waistline, my moto had a puncture after about 45 mins and i was told to sit on the other, newer one.

The place itself is ok. It was the last refuge of the khmer rouges and, apparently, the only place the vietnamese had to fight for when they kicked pol pot out in 1979. The town dates back to the 1920s and the colonial era under the french. The buildings include a casino, a hotel, a post office and a church, in addition to other stuff. Unfortunately the view was completely obscured by the weather. We did have a laugh though as we did our wedding foxtrot in the deserted remnants of the hotel's main ballroom. I don't think anyone saw us which is a good thing as we were more than a little rusty. Funny though.

From Kampot we returned to Phnom Penh. We spent the afternoon out at the killing fields, which were absolutely horrific. In similar mode to the museum, it is hard if not impossible to understand how people can stoop so low as they did. When I heard the guide in front of us pointing out the tree against which babies were beaten to death and tossed into the mass graves below, I knew that I had seen enough. The other thing - beside the obvious horrors - that bothered me about the place was that the exhibits there included lots of words damning pol pot and his men as evil, as demons - and undoubtedly they were evil in some incomprhensible way - but at the same time he has not, to the best of our knowledge, ever been brought to trial for what he and his henchmen did, and was instead allowed to die at home in phnom penh a few years ago.

The next morning we set off for Saigon. We left 45 mins late, at 730am, but were supposed to be in Saigon at 3pm. At 930 the bus stopped. At about 1000 we found out why - the mud bridge up ahead had collapsed and they were working to rebuild it. We couldn't understand from the driver whether we'd be leaving in 2 hours, at 12, or at 2pm, but either way we knew we were in for a wait. The air conditioning went off, and the drinks sellers became more insistent. By the time the bus started again at 1210, we were all hot and sweaty, but hopeful of progress. The bus moved 50 yards down the road and stopped again as it became obvious that traffic from the other direction was coming first over the single lane bridge. At 1300, with the traffic still coming and us not having moved an inch for 45 minutes, a guy came running up the road and, much to our dismay, gave the signal to indicate the bridge had collapsed again (when i say bridge, by the way, i mean about 3 feet of mud and earth piled into the water of a rice field to act as a road while a real bridge is being built) and that they were pulling a truck out and would rebuild again. Not good. Our driver spoke no english really, but it looked like another 2 hour wait or a return to phnom penh, and so 7 of us decided to make a break for it.

We grabbed our bags, walked down the traffic, across the mud foot bridge and over to the other side. We found a motorbike with a long wooden trailer on it to take us the 5km to the next town, and off we went, trusting that we would find transport as we went. The locals loved it, and every single person we went past laughed as soon as they saw us. We got off that and found the mekong. No mud bridges here. We soon found a boat to take us across to the other side, and when we got there we found a very pricey minibus to take us to the border. By then it was 245pm and we had 3.25 hours to get to the border, about 130km away. No problem, you would think. Problem - Cambodia's national highway #1 should be renamed national pot-holed dirt track #1. The minibus rattled, bumped and shook its way to the border. Unfortunately for us we arrived 20 mins late and despite my furtive suggestions of an overtime payment to the border guards, they wouldn't let us through. Not good. So we found a hotel and waited 'til morning, when we were first through the border at 7am.

We got to the other side after an ok crossing into vietnam at 750, and then had to wait for an hour for the rest of the people who had been on our original bus but who didn't bother to get themselves out of bed early enough to avoid the queue. When we eventually left we had been on the bus about an hour when the driver stopped, supposedly 'to get information'. This was the shape of things to come - a 15 minute stop in a 2.5 hour journey, when we should have been here yesterday. There's no point in getting angry about it, it's just a racket to make tourists buy refreshments at certain places linked to that company, or that's what we think anyway.

We eventually got to Saigon and we like it. It's hot here, but it seemed - and seems - like quite a good place. The number of people and the number of mopeds here is amazing. Crossing the road is not healthy but does provide an adrenaline rush.

The next day we headed off again to Da Lat. We didn't want to see Saigon until byrne got here, and we did want to do some activities and get some fresh air. The bus to da lat was fine, and the climate there was superb. We got a great hotel and just enjoyed the fresh, cool, clear mountain air - the first time we've had that since the great wall. Monday we spent looking around town, booking ourselves on things to do and catching up with bryan and claire who we had met in laos and had decided to come to da lat to do some mountain biking with us.

Tuesday we had a superb day's mountain biking, just what we needed. Wendesday we did some canyoning, which included abseiling, jumping into waterfalls and falling over a lot (the latter was me). Yesterday - yes, we're almost through here - we went on a 17km hike through the local hills and villages. What a change, we hadn't done anything like that for so long and we really enjoyed getting out there and doing something again. Last night we couldn't move.

Today we've come back to Saigon. Tomorrow we meet our friend - and cupid - byrne, who is currently en route from NYC. Enter the final stage of our Asian extravaganza.