We left Phnom Penh on the early morning ferry to travel up the Tonle Sap river to our next destination, Siem Reap. The ferry resembled a high speed canal boat which had the added excitement of our seats being, well no seats at all, and not in the cabin for that matter - we were to endure the four hour journey on the roof. No problem!! Temporary excitement (as we taxied out of the harbor) turned into wide-eyed terror as our captain cranked up the speed leaving us hanging on for dear life and freezing cold.

Arriving at the port just outside Siem Reap (complete with a mild dose of hyperthermia) it was the usual chaos of tuk-tuk drivers trying to earn a fare. However with our hostel pre-booked (pre-planning being more and more the preferred approach at this stage of our travels) we had little bother getting settled in ready to plan our trip around the Temples and Wats which have made Siem Reap a UNESCO world heritage site and the most visited location in South East Asia.

With the area being so vast (many people allocate 5 days to visit all the sites) a certain degree of planning was required (i.e. now many days? What sites we want to visit? etc). So without further a do, it was off to the nearest bar for "just the one to help grease the wheels of the decision making process". Seven hours later we fell out of the bar and had achieved little more than commandeering some random tuk-tuk driver to pick us up at 9am and "take us to where you would go". All good.

So a little bleary eyed, we met our tuk-tuk man on time and gave him what amounted to be around 6 quid to be our guide for the day. (In actual fact we opted for a 3 day pass on the advice of the Rough Guide). The first day saw us largely visit the more easily accessible and popular sites. The most famous site being Angkor Wat which was a pretty amazing site of grandeur even though it was dripping with the traveler I love the most, the middle-aged Japanese tourist. Hoards of them complete with their ridiculously sized croupier visors for hats, and looking like Nikon catalogues had puked up all over them, jostled and barged there way into just about every photo I tried to take (there's more of my encounters with the Japs to follow). Nevertheless, a jaw-dropping place that only hade wee Belle complain that she was too hot just once in 2 hours (a record!).

In the evening it was time to get involved in the nightlife of Siem Reap, and it has to be one of the most entertaining and bizarre nights of our trip so far. We once again met up with the Jamie Atherton look-alike (well you really can't get too much of a good thing can you?!) and had something to eat with a few beers before making our way to Siem Reaps premier late bar called The Temple. Things were moving along at a manageable pace until the point at which a big shovel-like hand slapped me on the back (while I was incidentally about to double the red yellow spot nicely into the middle pocket) and a meat-head named John yelled "Hey man, what the hell are these pockets you have over here, they're bullsh*t!!". Welcome everyone to the United States Marine Corps having a night of "R&R". Quality!!

Now there's simply too many incidents for me to document, so I will need to give the full night justice by explaining the antics when we get home, however I can set the scene quite easily; imagine Saigon '68, ten guys on leave and hitting the town on their first leave period since leaving the US of A. You've got it - lots of shouting, an almost tiring amount of high-fives and whooping, and them referring to Cambodia as either a) "Cambod-I-A", or (and my personal favorite that brought tears to my eyes, b) 'The Bode" -we might have been in a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Amazing scenes! After the Marines left lead by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Donovan of the US Marine Corps (this was how he introduced himself to us) at a "strict 0100 hundred hours" the night took a new direction as lady-boys did their rounds and rent-boys ponced around the place looking for their next client. Sleazy as it may sound, it's part of the Cambodian nightlife experience, and after copious amounts of the local brew, provided compelling viewing of how things were done in 'the bode'.

The night ended in the small hours, and so after not enough sleep it was onto our 2nd day touring the Wats. This time we hired bikes and set off on what was around a 40km trip through great scenery visiting sites that included the heavily vegetated temples that inspired scenes in the Jungle Book, and more recently featured in the film Tomb Raider. The Bayon Temple thought it had been straddled, jumped-on, hung from enough by Lara Croft until it came across the Japanese tourist (yes, the scene for my second encounter in which I did nothing whatsoever for Anglo-Sino relations). These lemming like people had touched a raw nerve by trying to get their pictures taken with particular artifacts that every other tourist just wanted a picture of without Kendo Nagasaki's mother giving it a bit of Kate Moss! - So yours truly took it upon himself to get the attention of Nagassaki in the following manner "Oi! Get out of the f***** way!!! using my thumb to point her in the direction I wished her to go, and guess what, she got the picture (and so did I, ha!).

So with me living in fear of some triad retribution, we finished the day by climbing up some mountain that look over the entire sites of the Wats to watch the sun go down. Nice idea, but sadly it was shared by around 3 thousand other people - oh well, lets get to the pub!!

Day 3, and it was a 05:30 get up to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat. We, like the 3 thousand other tourists from the night before, lined up on the lawn in front of the Wat to get the perfect picture of the sunrise over the towers only to be slightly disappointed due to a cloudy sky. Never mind though, it was a good last chance to see such an impressive place while Nagassaki and friends enjoyed their Sake's back at the Intercontinental.

So with Cambodia definitely living up to all we expected, next it was back to Bangkok in preparation for some fun in the sun around the islands on the Andaman coast.