The bus journey from the Thailand/Cambodia border at Poipet to the city of Siem Reap was on such a bumpy road - it felt rather like being on a rollercoaster for four hours (at 30+oC!). The surroundings along the way were fascinating though - the landscape was flat rice fields as far as the eye could see scattered with palm trees. Many of the houses are built on stilts and there are cows wandering round. It's all very rural, even in the small towns. The roads are lined by people travelling on scooters and motorbikes - including the typical family of four on a scooter or twenty people piled into the back and/or top of pick-up trucks. We passed one scooter carrying a stack of mattresses and a couple of scooters with big crates full of live piglets on the back! There are signs, flags and posters for the various political parties absolutely everywhere (there's a general election at the end of this month but apparently they're there all the time anyway).

On our first night in Siem Reap we tried some local food at the Khmer Kitchen restaurant ('Khmer' means Cambodian) - Khmer curry (very nice!), and Amok chicken (it's traditionally Amok fish but we went for chicken, it was okay, a bit bland).

After dinner we visited the Night Market, which had some pretty handicrafts and oil paintings of the Angkor Wat temples.

We spent the next day visiting several of the temples at Angkor - Hindu temples built between the 9th and 12th centuries. These immense buildings were so impressive, it's hard to do them justice with words! They have tall towers, corridors lined with columns, windows, doorways and staircases - all decorated with beautiful intricate carvings in the stone. Some temples had heads about six feet tall carved in stone, while others had stories depicted in a long series of small carvings.

First we visited a temple in which scenes from the movie Tombraider were filmed. The buildings were crumbling and almost merging into the surrounding jungle but when I looked closely I could see the wonderful details of the carvings. There were huge trees growing up through the buildings there, with roots several metres tall!

The largest, best-kept and most remarkable temple is Angkor Wat - it is staggeringly beautiful. It has a long walkway up to the main entrance which runs across a river - the temple is reflected in the river and it looks extraordinary. As we explored inside, I found my jaw dropped every time we turned a corner and I was saying "waow" almost continuously - it seemed to become increasingly impressive the more we saw. It is incredible to think that these amazing buildings and stone carvings were created 9,000 years ago!

We finished the day at a temple on top of a mountain, from where we had a great view of the sunset and all around the forests and rice fields - it was very pretty.

Back in town in the evening, we went to the famous Dead Fish restaurant which has the advertising slogan 'Don't serve dog, cat, rat or worm' - how reassuring! It is very cool with a quirky layout of tables on different levels. It has a pool of live crocodiles that guests can feed (these big creatures seemed to be crammed into a very small space though). They also had traditional Khmer dance performances.

After dinner we wandered down Pub Street to the Angkor What? Bar - a great place, which was packed with people. It served interesting cocktails and every inch of the walls and tables had been plastered with the scribbling of previous visitors. Rosy bought one of their t-shirts that proudly proclaimed 'Promoting irresponsible drinking since 1998'!

The following day we visited the nearby Tonle Sap lake and saw a 'floating village', in which the buildings were literally floating on top of the lake (we even saw one house being moved, dragged along by a boat). There were floating shops and churches; everyone got around on little boats. There was a little boy with a huge pet snake that he brought out to show us.

That evening we went for a 'Cambodian barbeque' dinner, in which a hot plate is put in the middle of the table with liquid in a ring around the edge for cooking noodles and vegetables and a 'mountain' in the middle for cooking meat - we could add as much as we wanted of whatever ingredients we liked. It was a bit chaotic but good fun and tasty.

Later, I was walking around with a few of the girls and we found a nice cafe in a very swanky hotel - it served coffee, ice-cream, cakes and pastries. We sneaked in to have a nosy around the hotel too and got a bit over-excited about the luxuriousness of it all (a far cry from where we were staying!).

I'm loving Cambodia so far - the Khmer people are so friendly, welcoming and helpful. Khmer is a funny language to listen to - it almost sounds like chickens clucking! I was surprised how widely English is spoken and used - even for things that are not for tourist consumption like schools and political party posters.