SABADEE.........that means hello in laos, a happy sounding word for happy people, i dont know why they were happy than in thailand maybe because tourism hasnt been around for as long or maybe because over 85% of their country is forest but either way i think the people enjoyed our company and learning our customs as we did their's and they always smile no matter how many times chris asked to drive thier tuk tuks. I am genuanlly sad to have left a country that i'd never really heard of and didn't intend to visit.

Our last stop in laos was the 4000 islands where you have 4 hours of electricity a day and the main activities were swinging in a hammock or cycling durring the day and drinking round a fire on the beach with 70 odd people at night (thats roughly 70 people not 70 freaks). Chris has already written about how we had to share a big bed at the back of the bus with a laos guy and 2 brits, well this actually worked out quite well as we ended up travelling with the brits for a while on the islands and then down to cambodia.

the trip to phnom penn (the capital of cambodia) was just more of the usual really the first minibus to the border ran out of normal seats so they grabed a garden chair and wedged it into the bus, but this wasn't even a good quality garden chair, one leg had snapped off and so it was tied back on with plastic cabel. But again you dont mind because they do it all with a smile.

at the border there was huge confusion as it was a sunday so we had to keep paying a random dollar here and there for 'over-time'. To pay for the cambodian visa chris helped me out as all i had was travellers checks (no atms of the islands or most of laos) which i was told i'd be able to change at the border but no. So the moral of this story, travellers cheques are rubbish, you have to pay to change them you cant use them anywhere and apparantly you cant use them on a sunday acording to one cambodian money changer, sorry rant over.

phnom pen was awsome it just involved more hammocks with some cool clubs and really good sites during the day. In one busy day we started at a shooting range where you can shoot anthing for a price and i dont just mean the weapons for i think $300 you can shoot a cow with a rocket launcher or for slightly less a grenade or a rambo style gun at a duck. I personally went for the shotgun and just a paper target, chris went for the pistol and the other brit went for the uzi......good times. Quite depressingly we spent the next day learning about pol pot, the khemer rouge and the cambodian genocide. First we went to the killing fields where there was just remenents of bones still in the ground and clothes and mass graves, in the middle there was a stupa (buddhist tower type thing) with nearly 9 thousand skulls in it on levels, a humbling sight. Next we went to S-21, a school turned into a prison/torture camp now turned into a museum, for both of these we had a guide who explained parts of the actual sites but we could also ask them questions and they gave us stories of their expieriences under the regime.

Cambodians are perhaps not as bubbly as in laos but they're just as friendly and for a country that has experienced such horrors until only recently it has a really good atmosphere.

the wierdest thing is the maturity of the children, from the age of six upwards they will be walking round the streets with either books, fruit or bracelets to sell, and when they get bored they just come and chillout with the travellers and watch films etc, they all speak great english.

we're in siem reap now and will tomorrow start our exploration of the worlds largest religous monument........Angkor wat.