Good afternoon from Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh. We arrived back here yesterday after a comfortable 5 hour bus journey from Sihanoukville. The driver barely used his horn at all and they even had a TV playing entertaining Cambodian music videos for us. Most of the songs were Asian covers of western pop songs, but there was also some original local music as well. The videos really highlighted the cultural differences between the two socieities. One ended w...

I've worked out that I've stayed in around 55 different places over the last 4.5 months, and of those 55 one of them has to be the worst. That honour goes to where I am now - Sihanoukville, Cambodia's premier seaside resort. Constructed in the late 1950s after the French withdrew from Indochina, Sihanoukville is Cambodia's largest port and one of its key tourism centres. Being relatively modern it lacks the French architecture you see in other parts of Cambodia, ...

The drive from Kampong Cham to Cambodia's capital city Phnom Penh, where we changed busses, took about 3 hours including a rather pointless rest stop. The distance we covered was not that great, but the roads were even narrower and busier than the previous day and our bus driver was struggling to overtake. Its amazing how different the road hierarchy works in the third world. Busses are often the fastest thing on the roads, bullying smaller cars and motorbikes ou...

I am now in the grotty seaside town of Sihanoukville, but have two blogs to catch up with and a lot to tell about the last couple of days. Immediately after updating my last blog from Siem Reap, we set out on our afternoon excursion to the floating villages on Tonle Sap lake. We boarded one of the many tourist boats at a village built on stilts (many villages in Cambodia are so as to avoid flooding in the wet season). It was a pretty horrendous boat which through...

Hello from the poorest country I'm visiting all trip - Cambodia. If this blog has uploaded it will be a minor miracle as the Internet here is unsurprisingly appalling. Today is the third day of my Intrepid tour of South East Asia and I already feel like I've settled in quite well with the 15 other people on tour. The group is unsurprisingly dominated by Australians (especially Sydneysiders). Most are university students travelling during their long summer holiday...