OK we've been lazy but we are travelling for 12 months!!! We have flown to Siem Reap from Pakse. Pakse is a tiny airport and David was delighted at their manual daily arrivals and departures board (see photos). It was quite amusing - the plane was supposed to leave at 8.25am so they called us through to the departures lounge at 8am where it was pretty obvious that there was no plane in sight. At approx 8.15 a plane landed pulled up outside the window, everyone got off, 1/2 of them came and joined the back of our queue and we all got on the plane. One hour later we were in Cambodia and arriving at the most plush bijou airport I've ever seen - it is like a 5 star boutique airport!

Siem Reap is a lovely city and like many of the towns in Laos has strong french architectural influences. In fact every second tourist both here and in Laos appear to be French (oh and Chinese there are a lot of them too!).

Siem Reap has 2 crowd pullers - Angkor Wat and it's bars and restaurants. It is a very sociable place and even has a street called pub street!

We visited Angkor Wat over the course of 2 days. On day 1 we went from Sunrise to about 3.30pm and on Day 2 we went from 11am until sunset. Arriving at Angkor Wat in darkness on Day 1 was quite eery but wasn't really worth the effort as it was a cloudy morning so the spectacular sunrise we'd been promised didn't materialise. I'm not going to bore you with the details of each temple we visited at Angkor Wat but they are worth seeing once in your life. The temple we visited for the sunset was a hilltop temple called Phnom Backeng but it turned into a bit of a circus really. It has really steep steps and is quite small and yet as many as 1,000 tourists clamber up it each evening to see the sunset. We got up there fairly early and it wasn't too bad but the nearer it got to sunset the more ridiculous it became. There were so many people up there we decided to leave before sunset but even then people were getting agitated and pushing. The guy in front of me who was carrying a baby slipped, one guy pushed me which set David off into a rage. I was so relieved when we got to the bottom and was really glad we did it before the post sunset surge!

Siem Reap is a really beautiful town and it is quite clean with lots of expensive hotels and cosmopolitan bars. Scattered around the edge of the Siem Reap river are signs about litter and the need to keep the town clean - all good stuff. You then walk say 1/2 mile up river and you hit the point where the tourist area meets the residential area - take a look at the photos for the difference in the quality of the river - it is a shocker! The residents clearly have no problem with throwing their litter wherever, including into the river, which means a net is required to stop it flowing into the main town area.

The other thing that stands out about Siem Reap is the use of children to get money from tourists - from the age of about 5 they appear to be put out on the streets at all hours trying to sell books, postcards, jewellrey, small trinkets in fact anything. I have succumbed and purchased some postcards and some bracelets. The postcard boy spoke fabulous english and we struck up a conversation about what he does on a weekend etc. I'd just started quizzing him about where his parents were but then a bolshy teenage girl intervened and he was pulled away (after she'd tried to sell me some books of course!). The girl who sold me the bangles came out with a long list of facts about the UK - I think she did pause for breath at one point but I can't be sure. I know that this is a marketing tool adopted by all the children (on their parents instructions) but she did a good job nevertheless. We spoke to one traveller who now says she is from Luxembourg as she has discovered that they know nothing about it - cruel I know but after you've heard the same thing 40 times in one day it can get a bit waring and boy are they adamant. I popped to the supermarket yesterday and had 2 little girls follow me all the way home - I just couldn't shake them off despite saying no a million times to everything they tried to sell me.