Before we lost out Lonely Planet guide in Vietnam, we saw that the number two thing to do in South East Asia is to watch the sun rise over Angkor Wat. It came above the Gibbon Experience on the LP awesomeness scale, so naturally it had to be done.

The temples at Angkor, just outside Siem Reap in Cambodia are many and varied. It's recommended that you take three days to do them all and we did just that. The first two days we spent cycling between the biggest temples on clanky old Mary Poppins bikes. This was a bit of a shock to my cycling muscles which haven't been properly used in a long time, but it was good excercise. We pottered from thousand year old temple to thousand year old temple, admiring everything from lintels to lingams to ridiculously steep staircases.

We saw 17 temples/monuments in our three days and we were only just templed out by the end. If you ever find yourself there, then you might like to know that our top four were Angkor Wat (great condition and really extraordinarily huge), Bayon (for crazy layout and columns with faces on), Phnom Bakheng (for the breeze and the view and the fact that it's the oldest) and Ta Phrom (for the awesome creeping trees and Tomb Raider atmosphere).

Though the cycling was great, we actually did Ankhor Wat on the third day by tuk tuk. That's because we did as the LP had suggested and saw it at sunrise. I wouldn't go as far as saying that it's better than the Gibbon Experience (which is still my all time favourite adventure), but it was definitely lovely - a magical way to start the morning. We arrived at 5am, just as the sky was beginning to turn pale blue and walked over the causeway to the temple, looking at the huge moat in the misty morning light. Once into the temple enclosure, I picked a spot to sit and watch the stars melt away and the sun peek through the clouds and Si went on a photography spree. Exploring the temple that morning was a lot of fun too and being ever so slightly hysterical because of lack of sleep probably made it better!

The LP wasn't wrong - the temples are fabulous.

We were staying in Siem Reap, which is the major town around 10 km away from the temples. It's a really nice place, smaller than Phnom Penh and friendlier than Vietnam. In the town we went to a traditional Apsara dancing do where you were entertained over dinner and we also did another cooking course. I think it's one of the benefits of travelling with a foody like Si that you get to eat all these huge and tasty meals that you happen to have cooked yourself. True to form, we made some really delicious food on the course and I can now modestly confirm that I am the queen of fried vegetable spring rolls.

From Siem Reap we also had a day trip to a "floating village". This is not as exciting as it sounds - it's actually a village on stilts - but it's still fairly exciting. The stilts are huge, the people who live there are incredibly friendly and our skipper was, at the absolute maximum, 14 years old. After motoring through the village on his rickety boat (which Si had to help him fix at one point) we took a canoe trip through some of the gorgeous mangrove forest and then powered out to see lake Tonle Sap, which lies at the heart of Cambodia and swells to four times it's size in the wet season (hence the need for stilts). Very pretty!

Back in town, and being low on adrenaline-pumping activities recently, we decided to go quadbiking. We were booked onto the company's sunset tour, where you drive out through the countryside to watch the sun dip down over distant paddy fields. Unfortunately, the rainy season being what it is, we didn't actually see the sun once and we got absolutely drenched by a thundercloud - even through our complimentary plastic ponchos. Great fun though! As you drove along the dirt track between villages you would see little kids from houses up the path run out to the road and jump about with excitement. They would then smile, wave and shout "hello!" as you drove past. I nearly crashed a couple of times because I was a bit more focused on my smiling and waving than on watching where I was going.

And that was it for Cambodia. Way too short for our liking, but apparently we have to go home and - according to Si - I do eventually have to find a "job" whatever one of those is! So we pushed on for Bangkok...