Flying East for Winter

The weather in Sihanoukville prevents us from achieving our aim of sitting on the beach cocktails in hand. So we settle for chilling out with out new British buddies in the wooden terrace of our guesthouse, ordering endless amounts cheese & bean toasties (mmmmmm).

Jo's birthday night kicks off with some Thai whiskey, coke & redbull, on the terrace of our little bungalows out back (poor ventilation - needs work). We end up in a beachside shack nightclub called JJs - notorious in these parts - avoiding having to drink from buckets - which appear to hold about 15litres! We all go home fairly drunk.... Jo a little too drunk, and she spends the next day throwing up - even though the sun is out!

By late afternoon Jo is feeling better - but too late- the skies have opened once again. So we book ourselves in to a session at TOP CAT CINEMA, the most comfiest, indulgent, best hangover activity EVER! Here Sean, the cinema man loads up a film of our choice (Wild Target - good film) and gives us a cozy, cool room full of comfy sofas to watch it on with a giant flat screen tv. He then carries in a fresh hot pizza of our choice to enjoy.

Perfect.

It's clearly not beach weather- and won't be for some time so we decide to leave the next day for Kampot - home of the world's best pepper.

So we got our Dr Fish massage (photos to come) where you dunk your feet in a pool of man-eating fish, ok i exagerrate, dead-skin eating fish.
Bit tickly at first but is quite nice after a while and our feet emerge fresh and clean.

We decided to book a 10 hour night bus for the following evening which left us with 24 hours of time to kill in Siem Reap. Basically spent eating, drinking and wondering around avoiding calls from tuk tuk drivers. Later on we meet our very first traveller friend in Cambodia.... Jonno, an actor from Melbourne, only to leave him an hour later to catch our bus.

And what a bus it was.
I'm not sure if a stranger form of transport exists. Basically a coach full of built in bunk beds....crammed full of people, whole families sharing two side by side beds (yes, that includes crying babies). The air con turned up to the max - me and Jo wrap ourselves up in whatever we can find to keep warm. So we zoom off into the night, not knowing what to expect at the other end, watching lightning light up the sky along the way.

This morning we arrive to an overcast sky and head straight to Banana Republic hostel, full of bored Brits who say that it has been raining everyday and so they cant enjoy the beach! Its Jojo's birthday today - so we have found 12 nice people here to have a knees-up with later, yey!!! The guy who owns the hostel has said he will try and order an OTT asian birthday cake. (shhhhh! dont tell Jo)

Day 1 at Angkor yesterday was amazing yet tiring, we toured 5 or 6 of the smaller temples (still bloody big) taking respite from the heat only once Paul, our tuk tuk driver fired up the moto for the breezy rides inbetween. So day 2 started at 4:45am in order to travel to Angkor Wat, the main temple in time for sunrise - the whiskey bucket last night perhaps not the best idea. Unfortunately the sunrise was somewhat non-existant this morning, and so we were left to explore the temple half-asleep wishing we had slept in. Tiredness meant we managed to look around until about 9am, when we decided to call it a day and head home to sleep.

Tonight we plan to reward our efforts by getting a fish pedicure!

Our next leg of the journey will be a sprint for the coast so that we can reach a beach hut with coconut cocktails and hammocks in time to celebrate Jo's birthday.

Well we decided to get the 200 bhat bus to the Thai/Cambodia border instead of the 48b train ... rumour has it it was a verrrrry sloooow train. And the bus was great! Took us all the way to where we wanted to go in 4.5 hours!

Having read and re-read the advice on crossing the border we knew what to do and how to do it ..... we thought.
We made it out of Thailand and into Cambodia to the ''charming'' town of Poipet - casinos + scam artists!
And we found ourselves on a dirty road surrounded by men trying to make money from us.
So our only way out was to let one of them.

30 American dollars + 2 hours going 100mph on the WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD later we got to Siem Reap..... the home of Angkor Wat, only to be hounded by tuk tuk drivers.

We had one tranquil night in the very nice Earthwalkers guest house but it was too far from town so we have now moved to the "Popular" guesthouse in town.

Today we have been all over the temples at Angkor with the help of our very nice Tuk Tuk driver Paul.

Now we're off to find some street food but probably not of the animal tongue, pig's snout or chicken feet variety that we have seen so far......

Our one and only day in Bangkok. Sitting in our hostel's terrace we first met our airplane friend - Christopher - who we had a few drinks with.
And after a bit of a walk around the Kao San Road (not that cheap ...for Thailand) we returned to our spot on our hostel's terrace only to bump into someone I (India) know from Sheffield! .... that's Tom Marsh for those who know him.

Tom led us to a few places he remembered from his first trip to Bangkok, a lovely restaurant called Hemlock, and the Adhere Blues bar where we sat down to enjoy a good ol-fashioned jamming session of the Banglampoo blues band. We had to call it a night fairly early due to our early start for the Bus to the border... but there was enough time for Tom Marsh to mildly insult a very drunk Swedish guy by asking him if he liked monkeys.