Hello! I love you! Bye bye! How do you do! Imagine a 55km bike ride (or thereabouts) punctuated every ten seconds or so for the duration by comments from the sidelines such as those above. This is the reality when taking a leaf out of a recently published Mekong Discovery Trail book and bumping around rural Kratie province on a "bike trail" which I would be surprised if many people had actually done. Ok, now we're talking bout the real Cambodia. My in...

Altogether Now: Ra! Na! Ra! Na! Yes I am giving huge props to Don (an American gent, ex military intelligence!!) and Kim(his Cambodian wife), their two children Ra and Na, and all the peeps about 10kms out of Kampong Cham where I just spent a brilliant two days @ a homestay called - u guessed it - Rana! I had heard a lot about Rana whilst I was doing a bit of background study prior to coming here. Google searches related to blogs and homestays would bring them ...

Temples, Temples, Temples.....Time Out! Everybody knows that the very good reason that most people come to Siem Reap is to see that famed of all temples Angkor Wat. Who the hell knew there were so many other temples spread far and wide throughout the area? So much so that the options for a pass to see the temples includes a three day pass and a weekly pass. God knows what sort of temple-phile could be induced to spend a week exploring these magnificent structure...

Living in the ceiling, no more room downstairs...(with apologies to Blancmange) Clearly I have a memory like a sieve, or else I would have rememberd Soraya telling me to stay at the Siem Reap Hostel when I arrived here. But things being what they are - the usual thickness of my head combined with the cold thickness I was now encumbered by, and add a 7 plus hour cramped boat ride that seriously played jip with my right hip (oh, I am getting old....) and the cons...

The Last Good Day Before The Sickness A man with a love of the melodramatic that's me! As I said, woke with sore throat but wanted to have the sort of day Bunnak had described - chilling in the beginning and then a bit of spirited action to finish off - so forgot about all my potential troubles and headed downstairs to find Bunnak waiting. We headed to the riverside "restaurant", a lot of bamboo huts, reaching out over the river, connected by walkway...