Day 82 - 84: The Grand Temple Circuit and the Orphanage School

New Year’s Day was predictably a write-off. We used the opportunity to recover in Blue Pumpkin, an amazing cafe-bakery which had some fantastic cakes, even better than Cargo in Hoi An (in my opinion). We lounged on huge white sofas eating banana chocolate mousse cake and marble chocolate cheesecake whilst our hangovers thought about leaving. Just to make sure they did, we opted for some western grub in the evening at the superb Cafe Central, where a divine cheeseburger soon made me feel a little more human.

The next day we were feeling more ready to tackle some temples, and we certainly crammed a lot of them into one day. Sam took us up to Preah Khan to begin our tour, a sprawling palace temple which incorporated a lot of imagery we’d end up seeing in other temples in the coming days. Highlights included huge guardian statues, a tree growing out of one of the temple walls, and a reproduction of the “churning of the sea of milk” crossing a bridge. This last legend told the story of gods and asuras (demons) who worked together by using a huge naga (snake) wrapped around a mountain to churn the cosmic sea in order to create an elixir of immortality, before fighting amongst themselves once it was actually made. It basically looks like a tug of war using a huge snake.

From here we made a short stop at Neak Pean, an island temple with a large walkway on approach, but not much we could actually get up close to due to a barrier.

At Neak Pean we decided to buy a guidebook for the temples. I didn’t think we were getting as much out of the visits as we could be, and a lot of the depictions in the carvings and bas-reliefs were nice to look at but with no frame of reference, they were basically just that – nice pictures on a wall. You’ll find guidebooks being sold everywhere at the temples, mostly by young kids, although we opted to get one from an older teenager due to the amount of child exploitation going on in the area. You will get hassled at every single temple from 4 – 10 year olds selling bracelets, books, scarves, coconuts and other fruit, water and cold drinks, paintings, toys and postcards. On top of that, you’ll get shouted at and pleaded with by a variety of stalls manned by older women selling pretty much the same stuff. On a side-note, one of the scams in Siem Reap (and possibly elsewhere in Cambodia) is a woman who approaches you in a tearful state, clutching a young baby and begging for milk. You’ll go to a shop with her to buy milk for the helpless child (about $10-15), and be on your way feeling better about yourself as the kid won’t be going hungry. What you don’t realise is that the woman then takes the milk back to the shop and sells it back to them for the cash. Mr. Why Not told us that they can pull in a relative fortune each day with what is a pretty sick scam. One of the girls at our hostel got stung with this one.

Guidebook in hand, we moved on to Ta Som, a small temple of little note other than a strangler fig embracing one of the external buildings, and a huge smiling face carved into the side of one of the towers, which we’d see better and more numerous examples of at Bayon later on.

East Mebon followed. This is an “island” temple (the baray or artificial reservoir surrounding it long since dried up), and it’s built in a sort of pyramid style with various levels to explore, mostly out in the open. There are plenty of stone elephants dotted around too.

Next up was the impressive Pre Rup, another large complex with 5 central towers, built in a pyramid style again. Pre Rup means “turning the body” which is a cremation rite, and there is a cistern in the temple grounds which is apparently where the name originated from.

Banteay Kdei was the next destination, an interesting complex with face towers at the entrances and an easy route through to explore. The stone colours were more interesting too, with red and green breaking up the greys, browns and whites we’d experienced so far:

The landing stage of Srah Srang was outside; not a temple, but quite a peaceful baray.

We were flagging at this point somewhat, so grabbed some lunch from one the many temple restaurants dotted around. Well-nourished, we visited the last three temples on the circuit in the afternoon: Ta Prohm, Ta Keo and Prasat Kravan.

Ta Keo was first: a temple mountain which was lioke a smaller version of Pre Rup. This one is unusual as it wasn’t finished, so looks fairly stark and forboding without the decoration afforded many of the other temples. The views were excellent, but it otherwise compared poorly to some of the other places we’d seen.

I was looking forward to Ta Prohm most of all during the day. It is the “jungle” temple monastery which featured in a couple of scenes in Tomb Raider, where the trees out-acted Angelina Jolie. Even with this infamy, the temple itself is superb. Trees have ravaged it from the inside and it has basically been left in a natural state aside from some walkways and barricades in more dangerous areas. A combination of strangler figs and silk cotton trees have pushed their roots through walls, floors and ceilings, and in some cases completely enveloped parts of the temple. Tourists aside, the place is very atmospheric and has a definite Rick Dangerous feel about it.

Our final stop of the day was Prasat Kravan, a 5-building sanctuary which doesn’t look particularly exciting from the outside, but in the central building contains excellent brick bas-reliefs which are the only known examples of their type in Khmer art.

We were exhausted by the end of the day and I had got through two camera batteries, so we were looking forward to a shower and a decent meal. The pizza craving hit us, and we visited Kholene for two excellent (and huge) pizzas, and a couple of good cocktails.

Thus ended the second day of our three-day temple ticket; we’d decided to space out the days with a break in between each tour, for fear of being “templed out”, and I think this was a wise decision. It also allowed us to spend more time in Siem Reap, which I was very happy about – it’s an excellent little city.

The following day, short of things to do, we asked Mr. Why Not what he could suggest. He said that we could take a tuk-tuk to some rice fields, help harvest rice and visit a village and school. This sounded like a great idea. However, it turned out that all of the rice fields had already been cropped, so the trip didn’t actually happen. Certainly something to remember if we come back here at a different time of year. Instead, we bummed around the town, catching up on our emails and blogs. We met a great group of people in the hostel including Ed from Shropshire (no matter where I go in the world, my fellow Salopians will find me), Josh from Perth/Darwin/Melbourne (he moves around a lot), Michael from Yorkshire and finally Papa Tom, a retired English gent who has been volunteering in an orphanage school nearby. Mean Mach, one of the hostel’s tuk-tuk drivers took us to the Cambodian version of Pub Street in the evening, where we enjoyed beers from huge kegs at very cheap prices. In the mood for more of a party, Mr. Why Not then picked us all up and took us to the western Pub Street, where we stayed in “Angkor What?”, enjoying cocktails, writing on the graffiti wall, and doing bad dancing until almost 2am.

We had, unfortunately, booked a tuk-tuk for 5am to head to Angkor Wat the following morning to see the sunrise. We decided to knock that on the head, as three hours sleep followed by 13 hours of temples would not have made us particularly happy the next day.

Instead, we slept in and after some great Khmer food at Traditional Khmer Food Restaurant which had the nicest amok and curry we’d eaten so far, we jumped in a tuk-tuk in the afternoon with Tom and a couple of other teachers to visit the orphanage school where the hideously underpaid teachers ($100 per month) battled valiantly to give kids of a wide range of ages and backgrounds lessons in English and computing. Only a few of the kids were orphans, but all of them came from very poor backgrounds and none of them had the money in their family to go to public school. Some of them wore pyjamas as their day clothes, most of them had holes in their clothes, yet all of them were happy and smiling. We helped out in class with English lessons, and doing my best teacher impression I wrote exercises for the class on the whiteboard. The teacher was 27 years old, and had only been at the school for 3 months. Her English wasn’t bad, but needed a lot of work; her determination to give kids a decent education, however, was admirable. This is in spite of the fact that the textbooks were all American, so you had things like Independence Day, Thanksgiving, “fall” instead of autumn, and so on, which would add to the confusion during teaching. None of the textbooks were in dual-languages, purely English. That’s one hell of a learning curve for kids to overcome. Added to this was the fact that one of the laptops had been stolen a couple of weeks ago, possibly by another teacher who was attempting to set up a rival school. 

The school is helped by volunteers like Tom and operates solely on donations. Staff salaries, books, stationery, even food for the children and their families – all is covered by the school. The afternoon was an eye-opening glimpse into the daily lives of the under-privileged in Cambodia, and we came away with our wallets lighter and feeling more than a little humbled.

We resolved to get an early night and make Angkor Wat for sunrise the next morning, for the beginning of our final temple tour day.

Day 79 - 81: Siem Reap, Kbal Spean, Banteay Srei and New Year's Eve

The bus ride was comfortable and uneventful, and we arrived at around 7pm in Siem Reap. After a tuk-tuk ride to a road with a load of guesthouses on, where the tuk-tuk driver was very keen for us to stay at his brother's hostel, we ended up choosing Golden Takeo for the night. Aside from the overpowering smell of air freshener, the room was clean, cool and comfortable. We soon found out that the internet speeds in Cambodia are nowhere near as good as in Vietnam, and coupled with a wireless connection far from the router, we only managed to get about 10 photos uploaded overnight.

The next morning we had breakfast on the terrace, and enjoyed a free "fish massage". For some reason, fish massages are all the rage in Cambodia. For the uninitiated, a fish massage involves you putting  your feet in a tank of hungry fish, who proceed to nibble away the dead skin on your feet. That's the idea, anyway. In reality, it's a bit of an odd sensation which doesn't appear to pedicure your feet in any way. It hasn't stopped the bandwagon from rolling on though - there are literally dozens of places in the centre offering fish massages, some chuck in a beer to enjoy with it.

We moved down the road to Prohm Roth Inn, after circling the block of other guesthouses, most of which were full or only had fan rooms. The temperature in Cambodia is significantly hotter than Vietnam, and air-con is pretty much essential after a day in the baking heat. The guesthouse was run by brothers, and they couldn't do enough for us.

I'll be honest: I wasn't looking forward to Cambodia that much. Out of everywhere we'd planned to travel on our trip, Cambodia appealed the least. It was probably my western ignorance thinking that it was a dangerous, under-developed hole with a few tourist spots to strip foreigners of their cash (and sometimes belongings). I was pleasantly surprised then, to find Cambodia is actually a really beautiful country and the people are amongst the friendliest and most genuine of any country we've visited on our trip. It's good to have preconceptions smashed to smiling bits every so often.

We took a 15 minute stroll into town, and changed our remaining Vietnamese dong into US dollars. Cambodia appears to work primarily with the buck, and only uses its native riel for loose change (anything under a dollar) which is based on the US conversion rate at the time. All of the prices in supermarkets, restaurants and guesthouses are in dollars. For the most part, this means that a lot of things (such as water) are relatively more expensive in Cambodia than other SE Asian countries, but food can still be found as cheaply or as expensively as you're happy to pay.

Our first taste of Khmer food came courtesy of Khmer Kitchen, recommended to us by Tom and Holly. The national dish is called amoc or amok and is a type of fish (or chicken) dry curry mixed with a kind of paste made from onions, cabbage, beansprouts and egg, then served in a banana leaf. It's really rather good. The other dish they do (which Gilly went for) is a traditional Khmer curry, which is similar to a Thai curry but much less spicy and just as tasty.

Siem Reap is Cambodia's fastest growing city, thanks mostly to the attraction of the Angkor heritage park which hosts dozens of temples of various shapes and sizes. The most famous of these, only 6km away, is Angkor Wat, with adjacent Angkor Thom dwarfing that. However, there is a well-established route around the "main" (read: most interesting) sites which you can take in a tuk-tuk. Angkor passes come in 1-day ($20), 3-day ($40 - 3 visits within a week) and 7-day ($60 - 7 visits within a month) flavours, and allow you to pick and choose the days you go.

The town itself has a main hub of activity circling "Pub Street" which, as the name implies, hosts more bars than you can shake a beer glass at, along with a plethora of decent places to eat. Alongside "The Alley" which runs parallel, you will have no problems finding nightlife, food, or fish massages. Supermarkets abound, as does street food and markets, both day and night (I counted at least 5). Unfortunately, the shadow of poverty is all too apparent, as is the impact of the Khmer Rouge. Street children prowl the tourist areas, selling postcards, books and general tat - you are strongly advised not to buy from them, as they are usually controlled by unscrupulous adults who have removed them from school, and see practically none of the profit - as do landmine victims who have been maimed and are missing legs, arms, eyes or all three. Selling copied books and art seems to be all they can do to survive, and they will come into restaurants to ask you to buy from them.

We'd decided not do too much on the first day, as we wanted to laze around and enjoy the sun and the (relative) lack of pollution after Ho Chi Minh City. On the second morning after a great breakfast at Prohm Roth, we moved to our pre-booked accommodation - Angkor Wonder. This is run by a legendary owner named Mr. Why Not, so called because that is his de facto response to most questions. In fact, he was one of the most accommodating hosts we'd met on our travels. We took the afternoon to look around the relatively expensive Angkor Museum, which looked to be recently developed and was very well laid-out in a lovely modern building. We spent a few hours there, but the audioguide is recommended, otherwise you'd zip through it a lot quicker.

We decided to get a 3-day pass for Angkor, which also allows you to get in to watch the sunset for free on the night that you purchase it. Unfortunately, this was a complete bust. The ticket booth opens at 4:45pm and the entry to climb either one of two temples to actually get a view closes at 5:30pm. The queues of tourists are so long that we didn't even get near the entrance before we had to turn back. It seems a little ill-conceived, and a bit pointless to let people into the park on the same day since they'll have trudged half an hour for no reason. Feeling a little dejected, we got a tuk-tuk back to central market and found Father's Restaurant, where we had some more great Khmer food before calling it a night.

New Year's Eve arrived, and we decided to visit some of the more remote attractions included in the Angkor pass: Kbal Spean, and Banteay Srai. We took a tuk-tuk with one of Why Not's drivers, Sam, who had taken us to the sunset debacle the previous evening. He's a quietly spoken man, whose father was killed during the Khmer Rouge atrocities, yet he has a quiet dignity about him which is indicative of a lot of Cambodians we've seen.

Kbal Spean is a carved riverbed, apparently unique in the world, which has a number of religious images etched into the rocks around the river and in the river itself. It leads onto a waterfall which is unfortunately not big enough to swim in, but is good if you fancy a cool shower. We didn't. It already takes 10 minutes to cover ourselves in suncream, and we really didn't want to go through that process again! The fact that the riverbed remained fairly undamaged despite the constant flow of water is testament to the design of the images:

Banteay Srei was our first proper temple and was small, but ornately carved. It was built in the 10th century, and roughly translates to "citadel of the women" due to the detail in the carvings.  It's hard to show the intricacy of the carvings in the temple in a few photos, but I will give it a go:

Looking back, I think this is the most detailed temple we visited on the circuit.

In the afternoon we fancied a change, so we visited the Landmine museum. This is run by a former Khmer Rouge child soldier called Aki Ra who planted hundreds of mines when fighting for them, only to defect and spend his life up to now undoing what he did and de-mining the country. He has also turned the grounds of the museum into a home for 20+ children who have been affected by landmines either directly or indirectly.

Afterwards, we went to the Angkor Butterfly Centre, an interesting diversion from anything we've done so far. I remember visiting a butterfly farm when I was in school (I believe it was called Countryworld in Shropshire, but I may have made that up) and loved it, so this was a real nostalgia trip for me. We got to see quite a few different species, as well as being taken around by a very enthusiastic guide who showed us the various eggs, chrysalises, caterpillars and species dotted around the place. It made for a very enjoyable hour and we got some excellent photos.

We got back to Angkor Wonder for about 5pm and found that Mr. Why Not had put on a party for all of the guests. There was food and drink all round, including more amok, fried chicken and mushrooms, rice, and most importantly: beer. The national beverage is Angkor Draft (on tap) or Anchor (in bottles or cans). Both are fairly decent. Even Gilly is getting into beer now, words I never thought I'd write. There was one extra food item we got to try - fried spider. It tasted a bit like crispy chilli beef, but a little chewier.

Apparently I had something stuck in my teeth:

Oh, it must have been the huge spider.

The Angkor Wonder guests and staff:

Mr. Why Not - what a guy!

Just after 2012 was rung in:

Pub Street:

After a few hours of merriment, it was past 11pm so we decided to head to Pub Street. The road was chock-full of people, Cambodians and tourists alike. Water and beer was sprayed everywhere and everyone was in a fantastic mood, as well as being universally inebriated. The sound system in the street counted down to 2012 and everyone went berserk. If we weren't drenched beforehand, we soon were! There were no fireworks as such, but a few people had some interesting little sticks (for want of a better word) which fired out a series of sparks. I felt so happy we'd decided to come to Siem Reap rather than Phnom Penh to celebrate.

Moving on from the street, we headed over to Red Piano for some new year cocktails and 80s and 90s tunes to dance to, much to the amusement of the locals. I don't really remember what we did there, but the next time I looked at my watch it was 3am. We went back to the hotel via a supermarket (Pringles were essential to fend off hunger, and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to buy a cigar in a tube) and then crashed out.

Happy new year 2012!

Acer Aspire One D257 - Freezing issue resolved

Our Acer Aspire One D257 netbook had an odd issue where it would simply freeze when any sort of load was put on the wireless network (for instance, when downloading files). There is a dearth of information about the issue online; some people blamed the wireless drivers, some thought it was overheating.

One bright spark managed to track down the problem - a bad BIOS. Flashing it to a later version (in my case from v1.08 to v1.15) fixed the problem immediately, so I'm posting this resolution here in case anyone else has a similar problem.

The BIOS update file is on Acer's site:

http://global-download.acer.com/GDFiles/BIOS/BIOS/BIOS_Acer_1.15_A_A.zip?acerid=634583037092226871&Step1=Netbook&Step2=Aspire%20One&Step3=AOD257&OS=722&LC=en&BC=Acer&SC=EMEA_16

Just in case it gets removed, there's a copy available here.

Hopefully this will be of some use to someone!

Day 74 - 78: Christmas in Ho Chi Minh City

After crawling off the worst sleeping bus we'd yet experienced (I think the beds are designed for children or adults under 5 feet tall, given the amount of leg room you get), and making our way to the Duc Vuong Hotel which we'd splashed out on for Christmas, we found we couldn't check in until 12 without paying for another day's accommodation. We decided to make use of the free bananas, tea and wi-fi in the lobby to check out Amazon, and it turns out that Amazon have an incredible returns policy: if your Kindle gets damaged within 12 months of buying it, you can send it back to them and they will send out a replacement free of charge. Obviously this poses a problem when you're not in any given place for too long, so I opted to have it sent to Australia where we'll be headed in April and staying with friends. They were fine with this, and also said that they would pay the cost of posting my broken Kindle back to them. Unbelievable customer service.

Whilst I'm handing out plaudits, I would be remiss if I didn't mention another amazing website: Natureshop. I bought my Keen sandals from this company, and unfortunately after only 2.5 months of wear, the glue attaching the sole to the upper has started to dissolve, and the material is coming away. I emailed them and asked what they could do, if anything, and they replied back saying that my size was out of stock but as soon as it was back in they would send a replacement pair of the same sandals out to Australia for me free of charge. Fantastic. Companies that stand by their products and treat their customers like normal people instead of assuming they are all chancers deserve our patronage; I'll definitely be using them again.

Since we had 5 hours to kill, we ditched our bags and decided to head down the road to the Fine Arts Gallery. Two floors of the gallery were under renovation and closed to the public which was a shame, but turned out to be a boon as we were so utterly knackered that, after walking around the only open floor and adjacent art shops, we were ready to sleep. We got back to the hotel at 11am where they mercifully let us check in earlier, and we had enough time to get showered and changed before going to meet Scott and Hannah at La Marq restaurant for lunch. We ate some excellent Hue food, and almost made us forget we'd had three hours' sleep.

After grabbing another three hours' kip in the hotel we were feeling a little better. The hotel put on a Christmas Eve party for all of its guests; the Vietnamese appear to celebrate Christmas Eve as the main holiday rather than Christmas Day - at least, that's the impression we got. Regardless, the party involved food, Dalat wine, beer, plenty of funny hats, some very bad dancing, and some even worse karaoke. It turns out that everyone in Vietnam is obsessed with Lionel Richie, specifically "Hello". Now, I don't know "Hello", other than the chorus. That didn't stop microphones being shoved in our faces with expectant looks once the karoke selection was made. I think we delivered an improv-version of the song worthy of "Who's Line Is It Anyway?". That's how it plays out in my head, anyway.

The department stores in HCMC go a bit crazy for Christmas and there seems to be an odd custom of locals all swarming around outside them just to see the displays they put on. Everyone loves Christmas over here.

We found out that Scott and Hannah had never been to Swensen's so decided to rectify this horrific problem immediately after dinner, and they are now convert thanks to the Chocolate Ring-a-Ding. We saw in Christmas on the rooftop terrace of the hotel, playing some cards and teaching the Aussies how to play cribbage. Seven floors up, the smog and noise seemed to be much reduced, and the terrace was decked out in fairy lights and tinsel. It was a subdued, lovely way to welcome Christmas Day, and unlike any I've experienced before.

This made up for Christmas day, which was a bit of a bust. Somehow, I had managed to pick up a stomach bug: the first illness I'd had since travelling. Of course, it had to happen on Christmas day. It wasn't so bad in the morning. We'd set off for the War Remnants Museum to get some perspective (Vietnamese, naturally) on the impact the US had on the country during the war. I'd heard that it was graphic, but even that didn't fully prepare me for the photos and stories on display. Mutilations, corpses, burned out villages, deformities caused by Agent Orange (the dioxin spread over the jungle to kill it off and expose the Viet Cong); the atrocities committed by the US were so horrific that at one stage I just had to walk away from one of the galleries. It was a relentless, brutal onslaught of inhumanity on show, a sobering and harrowing journey from one act of cruelty to the next. Yet if we choose to ignore what we do to each other as a race, how will we ever learn? Happy Christmas, indeed.

Feeling a little queasy (and not just from the museum), I soldiered on with Gilly to the Reunification Palace where we had a fairly interesting guided tour around the various conference rooms and the underground bunker used during the war. At this stage, amidst a pretty large crowd of tourists being shepherded to each room, I started to feel a lot worse and by the time the tour was over I was in agony with my stomach. We stopped at Napoly cafe for some overpriced peppermint tea, before heading back to the hotel. I zonked out for a couple of hours and was feeling slightly more human after some sleep. So much so, that I was definitely feeling up for a Christmas curry courtesy of Mumtaz. We took a bottle of decent wine along with us (which in SE Asia takes some tracking down), which the staff were happy to let us drink with our meal, and even a piece of plastic in the curry couldn't spoil the evening. Unfortunately, that was about all I could manage as I was again feeling completely drained, so went back to the hotel whilst Gilly went out with Scott and Hannah for some Christmas evening drinks.

The next day I was feeling much, much better so we decided to carry out our original plan which we'd postponed from the day before, and go to Dam Sen Water Park. We took a bus with the locals (it's weird how few tourists want to do this: it's far cheaper, and lets you see parts of the city you'd otherwise miss) and stayed there from 10am to 4:30pm, having a cracking time on water slides, wave machines, lazy rivers and other water park staples. Foreigners have their own tiny changing area, segregated from the masses for some bizarre reason. The park itself was heaving with local kids who insisted on queue jumping, but a few well-placed glares soon sorted that out. I'm British, damn it: we live to queue in an orderly manner. Thankfully from lunchtime onwards, pretty much all of the kids buggered off in their respective school groups and we pretty much had the run of the park, so we rode each slide until we couldn't take any more then headed home. We went back to La Vanq for the evening meal, but it wasn't as good second time around. We also moved hotels to Ha Vy on Scott and Hannah's recommendation since Duc Vuong were going to bump up the prices way beyond our budget.

On the 27th we visited the Cu Chi Tunnels, to see how the Viet Cong lived during the war. Guided by a Mr. Tung, a 64 year old ex-Viet Cong soldier who had been strafed by a helicopter machine gun which wounded him in the arm and foot, he gave us (and the other 40 tourists in our group) a whirlwind tour of the area, showing us some of the rather nasty traps that the VC used, the holes that they would dig and hide in, and finally a crawl - literally - through one of the tunnels. I have no idea how they could have lived in those conditions; I only crawled for about 5 minutes from beginning to end and that was more than enough. To say the tunnels were small would be an understatement. I was on my hands and knees for the most part. Carrying a backpack would be near impossible, and we had to push ours in front of us from beginning to end. After that ordeal, we got to the firing range, where I got to try my hand at using an M-100 machine gun, with live rounds. Now, I'm not condoning guns, but shooting a sand hill was pretty therapeutic. Mind you, the only reason I was shooting the hill was because my aim was appalling, and I missed pretty much every target laid out for us.

Heading back to town in the afternoon, we spent half an hour or so in the post office returning the Kindle. Vietnamese post offices are fantastic. You just take whatever you want posting, fill out a form, give everything to them, and they sort out the packaging, wrapping, and postage. It's all dirt cheap, and saves you loads of hassle. The UK could learn a lot from their efficiency. Near the post office was Notre Dame cathedral, a poor facsimile of the Paris original which we saw in January for my 30th birthday. 5 minutes in and out was plenty...it's just another church. For our final activity of the day, we headed over to the botanical gardens and zoo, which had some fairly rare animals including a white tiger and a rhino. I'm not a fan of zoos, but there is a fairly decent argument made for them in The Life of Pi which I'm currently reading, so I can appreciate both sides.

For our final meal in HCMC, Gilly suggested we take a punt on one of the roadside restaurants on our street selling seafood. I'm glad we did, as it was some of the tastiest food we'd had for days. Scallops, crab claws and some sort of fried fish meat rice cake - all excellent. I'm glad we ended Vietnam on a high note for food.

I'm not sure we gave HCMC a fair chance, but I really didn't like it that much. It was noisy, crowded, dirty and smelly. It had plenty of things to do, but didn't have the charm of Hanoi which offset the bad aspects. If you disliked the bikes in Hanoi, you won't get on well in this city; there are about 6 million bikes on the road in a population of 7 million people and the road system is utter chaos. On the plus side, I can probably cross any road in the world safely now, since I can judge vehicle distances with millimetre precision.

Sihanoukville was off the table for New Year's Eve. We'd contacted a good 10-12 guesthouses and all were full; even the more expensive hotels were booked out. There was a Sea Festival taking place which would see a good 50,000 people descend on the town, and we simply couldn't get there unless we just turned up and hoped for a room somewhere. Instead, Gilly suggested we go directly to Siem Reap which was another great idea, as it meant we wouldn't be in the rather depressing Phnom Penh for New Year's Eve, and could work our way down to the coast.

So, on the 28th we found ourselves on a bus heading for the fourth country on our trip: Cambodia.