The move to Saigon was pretty easy going, back down the mountains and we were there. On the first day we arrived we struggled to find a decent guesthouse open at 6am- they were all really expensive or real DIVES! We found a basic room, got a few hours of extra sleep and then got up to look for somewhere a bit better. Luckily we were just around the corner from a street full of cheap back-packer friendly hotels with all the basics (including hot bloody water!!). We spent that afternoon looking at the local market, and stocked up on supplies we knew would be more difficult to find elsewhere (e.g colgate toothpaste!).

We then visited the War Remnants Museum. I had just finished reading 'The Girl In the Picture' about the famous photograph of a young girl running away from her village bombed with Napalm by the U.S army. It is a really powerful book about the political and social oppression suffered by the Vietnamese people before, during and after the war. They showed the live footage of her filmed by a reporter from America and it made me cry. The museum showed a lot of photographs and remnants from the war-mostly one sided because Viet Nam is still a communist country!

That evening I treated myself to a massage at the Vietnamese Institute of Traditional medicine where all of the masseurs are blind. They are trained at the institute and then have a job and somewhere to live so I felt it was a worthy cause. The massage itself was a very strange experience. When massaging my feet she chatted to the other girls in the booths next to us and they came in and felt my feet, and then my hands and giggled at how small I was. The masseur told me I had a head smaller than a coconut! She then massaged my face and when she felt my eylashes she shouted her friends in again and all six of them pawed at my face and stroked my eyelashes. It definatly wasn't a relaxing experience but a memorable one all the same.

The next day I began to feel unwell with terrible back pain and nausea, by evening this had developed into a high fever with sickness. I followed the ususal drill in case of emergencies......called mum and dad!! The day after i felt much worse and went to the internatioinal hospital where they ran full tests on me to see if they could find out what was wrong. At this point I was in excrutiating pain and was prescribed some broad spectrum antibiotics that didn't seem to work. The doctor told me I had to wait 3 days for my results but the next day I was even worse-the pain in my stomach was so unbearable I went straight back to the doctor. He was great and rushed through my test results-he wouldn't let me leave until he knew what was wrong. He finally diagnosed me with amoebic dysentary (which is as nice as it sounds!!!). Its a parasite living in my intestines and causing a lot of trouble! It can be killed with a strict regime of different antibiotics for 20 days! It was a relief to find out what was wrong and get the right treatment but looking at the chart of 19 tablets I have to take each day didn't fill me with joy! Steven and Kaye took turns in watching over me and got me everything I needed, they were brilliant!! When I started to feel better I got permission from the doctor to leave for Cambodia. I regret that my memories of Saigon consist mainly of staring at the bottom of the toilet bowl!

The bus to Pnomh Penh, Cambodia was a quick six hours and went without much of a hitch (except for being expected to walk three miles over the border to find our bus!). Pnomh Penh is a strange city with contradictions throughout. Huge high rise buildings with modern western shops next to wooden shacks on a dirty river front.

On our first day we visited the killing fields where thousands of Cambodians were murdered after Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. It was earie and soul squeezing to walk past the mass graves where bodies still lay and clothes still poked out of the surface of the earth. The photographs we took of the skulls are the bodies that were dug up in 1988 after the government decided to build a memorial to the victims. The skulls are in a tall transparent building as a memorial to those who died and a reminder to those who lived, not that the people of cambodia need reminding. There are land mine victims everwhere who have lost limbs or the use of their eyes who beg on the streets because they can't get jobs. The beggars and street sellers in cambodia are very different from those in Vietnam. Thay are much poorer and you can see hunger in their eyes.

We left Pnomh Penhh after two days and travelled by bus to Siem Reap- home to the Angkor Wat temples. One of the natural wonders of the world.The bus ride to Siem Reap was beautiful. We drove through rural cambodia, past tiny farming villages and thousands of rice fields. We tried to sleep but found the view out of the window too interesting and exciting to ignore!

Siem reap is a lovely town, we arranged to see the temples the next morning and hired a tuk tuk driver to be our guide (its too far to walk in between each temple). We spent the first day at the temples exploring the biggest ones in the Angkar Thom village. They are so huge and so beautiful even though many are in ruins due to the effects of war. The weather was gorgeous and we spent all day exploring and climbing up the highest temples, the views from the top were breathtaking. We're so proud to say we have seen them! On the second day we got up at 5 am to go and watch the sunrise at the most famous temple - Angkor Wat temple. The sunrise was a disappointment due to an overcast sky but we were there early enough to see the wild monkeys that live inside the temples when the crowds have gone. We spent the rest of the day exploring the lesser seen smaller temples.

We left Siem Reap the next day and travelled by bus to a coastal town called Sihanoukville. It has seven beaches to choose from and the atmosphere here is so laid back we plan to stay here for about 4 nights before moving over the border into Thailand.

We were convinced by other travellers' stories that cambodia was a scary and dangerous place where poverty is rife and the pople are hardened. We had prepared ourselves for this but found that our experience of Cambodia so far is that it is a beautiful country with beautiful people...