Whilst waiting for our bus from the Laos capital, Vientiane, to Pakse in the South we saw some great-looking buses with individual DVD players and all sorts which made them look rather more appealing than the budget one we were expecting. Much to my delight when our bus arrived it was better than we had anticipated! We walked on and were initially a bit shocked to find actual beds where the seats normally are. There was a row of bunk beds down each side of the bus and they looked really comfy until we realised we did not have one each (which you would presume from the width of them!) but we had to share one. Obviously this was fine for us, as a couple, but I have never been more grateful for not having to sit with a stranger - there really wasn't a lot of choice but to "spoon" each other for the entire 15hr journey! I personally thought it was a great improvement on the coach seats we normally spend the night in but Phil disagreed as he is about 2 feet taller than those beds allow and spent the duration trying to find somewhere to put his knees/shins/feet! The whole scene was topped off by the fact that the given bedding included a Winnie the Pooh blanket for me and a 101 Dalmatians one for Phil! It was a great sleep apart from the few occasions waking up to the rapid braking of the coach or a very steep lean as they take the corners at speed - it was most certainly an experience anyway.

We arrived in Pakse and within about 20 minutes had ascertained that it was the worst town in the whole of Asia! There was just nothing to it at all. No charm, no entertainment, few places to eat/drink and our hotel room had builders on the roof directly above our heads from dawn til dusk. Having heard lots of negative things about the border crossing from Laos into Cambodia, we had decided to cross from Pakse into Thailand and then travel to one of the Thai-Cambodia borders to avoid the hassle. Whilst bored in Pakse we looked into this plan more thoroughly and realised that it involved literally over 10 different legs of transport (town - border - border - town - bus - bus - coach - stay overnight - taxi - bus - border - border - bus) as well as as overnight stop in the middle of nowhere and we decided that the time and money for this route would probably outweigh anything we could be bribed for at the Laos-Cambodia border. Unfortunately, by the time we had realised this we had missed the bus out of Pakse to the border so we had to spend another day in the God forsaken place!! Thankfully we had smiffed out an Indian where we had several meals over 2 days...it was amazing food and Phil would have gone for breakfast if it had been open!

We did the border crossing and got to Phnom Penh in Cambodia in a delightful day of 14 hours' travelling but it was still much better than the alternative and the border crossing was nowhere near as bad as we were told - the guards just demanded a couple of dollars for each of the stamps which we needed to leave/enter the countries but this is nothing new. They all try their luck and you see the money going straight into their pockets, or in this particular instance, a briefcase stuffed with loose cash!!

Once in Phnom Penh, we dropped off our passports so that the Vietnamese visa could be sorted out and caught the bus to Siem Reap, 5 hours away.

Hauling ourselves out of bed at 4am whilst it was still dark was no easy task but once we arrived at Angkor Wat for sunrise we had forgotten about it. Angkor Wat is the world's largest religious building and is the pride of every single Cambodian. Built between the 9th and 13th centuries. there are over 100 temples remaining but this is just a small fraction of what was once Cambodia's sprawling holy city, Angkor. It housed over 1 million people when London had just 50,000!

We went to Angkor Wat itself which is a 1 mile squared site with a huge moat around it and a mighty causeway. Before we realised what it was, I pointed out to Phil what a lovely "lake" it was! It was absolutely beautiful with the sun rising behind it but quite surreal as it is a view we have seen so many times on postcards and in pictures and on telly. We walked through the grounds and took in the many towers, monuments and reliefs of scenes and deities which fill the long corridors. One of the reliefs is over 800m long.

After taking in Angkor Wat we headed to Angkor Thom, a fort with several temple sites within it. Bayon was a site with over 200 huge faces shaped out of the towers as well as tere being hundreds of deities embossed into the walls. The Elephant Terrace is a 300m long wall with a hunting scene depicted on it and huge elephant heads bracketing the stairways. It was once topped with big pavillions but they have totally deteriorated. The Terrace of the Leper King was a site of 7 tiers with nymphs/dancing girls carved in to it and a statue looming on top.

We also went to Ta Promh site, where unlike many of the other sites, nature has been left to do its thing. This temple was recently in the Tomb Raider film! Huge trees are sprouting up through the old temples and walls, and lots of it is rather unsafe as a result. It was really impressive to look at though and made it seem like we were in the middle of a jungle and finding it for ourselves!

The last site we visited is called Preah Kahn, meaning "sacred sword". This is a huge site thought to have been the university or equivalent in the ancient city. Inscriptions say that this building required 80,000 members of staff to maintain it!

We spent the whole day doing just these 4 main areas of Angkor Wat and we were totally exhausted. It would take weeks to see all of the different sites but we could take in the awesome scale and grandeur of Angkor in the short time we were there. Truly beautiful and far bigger than either of us had conceived. Lots of the deities around the site were still beheaded from the Khmer Rouge attacks - one of the most offensive things you can do in Buddhist society.

We ended the day by having dinner with a couple we met whilst tubing in Laos and then we had plans to meet up with Elmer, our Dutch friend we met in Australia. He has been working in an orphanage in Siem Reap for the past month and is going to come back in a few weeks instead of continuing around Asia as he has enjoyed it so much.

We headed back to the capital Phnom Penh the next morning and then arranged our day trip for the next day. We went to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek in the morning, home to 129 mass graves (43 of which have never been disinterred) from the Khmer Rouge campaign. The first thing we cam to was a huge stupa (Buddhist monument) containing 8000 of the skulls found at the site.

Between 1975 and 1978, an estimated 17,000 people were killed here under the genocidal regime, which included killing anyone who adopted any "western ways", was considered intelligent (e.g. by wearing glasses or speaking another language) or had moved to the cities to work instead of farming. By the end of the regime bullets were thin on the ground and people were killed with garden hoes, sticks or with plastic bags tied around their heads. They were then kicked into the mass graves, which they had normally dug themselves prior to this, and had strong chemicals poured on them. This served 2 purposes: to stop the smell from arousing suspicions of people living nearby and also to kill any of those who had been buried alive.

The site is basically a small field of grass and as we walked around we noticed lots of bones and clothes poking up underfoot. There are still so many bodies that they have never dug up and they do not bother because there are simply too many.

When we left the site, we were already feeling depressed but our next stop was likely to make it worse. We were heading to Toul Sleung, the high school which was taken over by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to use as a 'security prison' and is commonly known as S-21. Essentially the high school was taken over as a torture centre. Most of the people were tortured within inches of their lives were then send to the killing fields to be brutally finished off but many were tortured to death within the classrooms. The site was discovered by some Vietnamese journalists and each of the classrooms is set out as it was found, with a photo of the scene at the time of discovery. There was a bed and shackles in most of the rooms and the picture shows how the person was found in that room. You can tell it is the exact same bed and room and the massive blood stains were still visible on the floors. The pictures were truly horrific showing people starving to death and then being savagely beaten. There were about 30 rooms like this in all.

In what would have been the playground, were some gallows, which were used for tying up the arms of the "prisoner" behind their backs and dangling them until they passed out with pain. They were then dropped in a bucket of sewage to wake them up and then it started again. This was in order to obtain "confessions", although to anyone but the Khmer Rouge cadres these people had done nothing wrong.

There was an exhibition of photos taken during the time of S-21. Every victim had had their picture taken, presumably knowing they were here to be tortured and killed. Most of them were young men and women but there were lots of children and even mothers holding tiny babies too. It was heartbreaking to see and the whole thing was so recent and so unnecessary. There was lots of information on the atrocities at the site, including a list of all known mass graves/killing fields. The lists covered a whole wall from floor to ceiling and we spotted one which listed 300,000 people found at one site.

We left the place in absoloute disbelief that such a thing happened in relatively recent times and with more understanding for Cambodian people. We picked up some books on the genocide and were horrified to find out that what we had seen before was the tip of the iceberg and that there were atrocities going on everywhere in the country and affecting everyone. In the countryside, people of all ages were worked for 14-18hr days in the fields on nothing but half a spoon of rice per day. Tens of thousands died of famine and diseases such as dysentery .

By culling the types of people that they did, and the numbers of people that they did (over 1.7 million people in approx 3 years) , the country has clearly been set back but the people are innately friendly and positive and we enjoyed our visit immensely, even if it was a bit sad at times!

We are now heading into Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam before working our way up the coast. We have been inland for about 5 weeks now and are very much craving a stint at the beach...the end is all too near and we know that the English weather can not be relied upon!

Hope you are all well.

Lots of love,
Ali and Phil x