Today we travelled in the bus with the first stop being the Don Deak Local Market. Not another local market you say; well, this one was a bit different in that it was the first one we had visited to have Prahok fish paste commonly known as Cambodian Blue Cheese. It is fish which has been crushed and salted and then fermented. Gagging material, this is used in a quite a bit of Cambodian cooking and no doubt we had it in some of the dishes we had eaten. You definitely know when you are approaching it. Wish we could take a photo with the smell attached but then they probably wouldn't allow it on the internet (a bit like Durian not being allowed in the hotels).

Having just survived the market we were off to the Boeng Mealea Temple. This temple was apparently a prototype for Angkor Wat and was probably one of our favourite ones. With the help of the trees it seems to have collapsed in an orderly manner if this is possible. We imagine that if they wanted to put it together again all the blocks would be there. I don’t think we have mentioned that all of these temples are blocks that have been put together without any mortar of any description. They just sit on top of one another and it is then that the carvings are done. They are very heavy and had holes made in them whereby the holes would be filled with water and wooden sticks inserted. The wood they used would swell up and the elephants could then drag the blocks from the quarry to the temple construction site.

Back to the temple. Much of this was in very good condition and we could walk through some of the fully covered passageways as well as go up the wooden walkways to view the temple from above. It was that interesting that we probably took longer here than the guides anticipated.

Next stop, which was not far away, was the Bantea Srei temple. This is apparently the favourite temple of the Cambodian people and is known as the Pink Temple and sometimes as the Lady Temple. This is a 10th century temple dedicated to the Hindu God Shiva. It is built of red sandstone, the only one we saw of this colour. It was a small temple and in pretty good condition.

We had lunch at a local temple restaurant and then headed back to Siem Reap. On the way we stopped at a Landmine Museum followed by a Palm Sugar village where we saw how the syrup was harvested and cooked up to make the sugar. Quite interesting. The landmine museum told a similar story to the one we visited in Laos and was mainly about the continuing injuries the unexploded bombs dropped on the Ho Chi Minh trail that went through Cambodia. It also likened the Pol Pot genocide to that of WW2 and Rwanda.

As today was the last full day of the tour group some of us gathered ourselves at the hotel and headed into town for some last minute shopping at the Central Market and then across the road to the bar/restaurant ton continue our very inexpensive margarita tasting! After too many of these we headed off to the restaurant to meet up with the rest of the tour group for our farewell dinner which of course included a few more drinks. Just as well most of us did not have to get up too early in the morning to get to the airport.

We managed to see many of the group the next morning before they left. We are staying on for another 2 days for some R&R, not something we often do, before heading for Kuala Lumpu (Bruce) and Bangkok/London (Anne). If there are any further entries we will let you know. Hope you have enjoyed this. If you have not been to Laos and Cambodia then you should consider it before it gets spoiled with too many tourists. This time of the year is a good time to go. We are here in a low peak season just before the monsoons. We had 2 x half days of rain that did not interrupt our activities at all.