Sorry, no time to write anything much about Phnom Penh or Siem Reap/Angkor, except to say how wonderful the whole Angkor experience was and that we "survived" Phnom Penh quite happily (the days of 1975 and the Khmer rouge are well and truly over, although the international tribunal investigating their crimes is far from finished). The Royal Palace (home to the only Czech-speaking monarch in the world - King Norodom Sihamoni attended school in Prague and became a dancer later both there and in Paris!) and the French "promenades" beside the river in Ph. P. were attractions that appealed despite the fact that the Dept. of the Environment has not yet got around to inducing the locals to clean up the plastic bags in delicate shades of pink and blue that litter every street and visible part of the murky river bank. Mopeds and bikes shatter the false security of the pavements for pedestrians and weave their way round them on the streets - crossing a road generally means taking one's life in one's hands.

It wasn't long after re-reading "The Killing Fields" and sensing the atmosphere in Phnom Penh in April 1975, as the brutish Khmer rouge forcibly emptied the city of its entire population, that we got the sad news (on 30.3.08 - in Vientiane) that Sydney Schanberg from the NYT's stringer at that time, Cambodian Dith Pran, had just died in USA. See www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3688459.ece for war reporter Jon Swain's moving tribute to Pran. The road to Angkor from Siem Reap was, by the way, built under the supervision of Pran's father, an engineer.

In Siem Reap we were lucky enough to get an excellent guide - Mr. Kim San - who experienced the Khmer rouge personally in more than one way. Not only was his father - a teacher - murdered by them, but he himself was the victim of an exchange of shots between a Khmer rouge and a Vietnamese soldier while cycling to school around 1985. Luckily, he survived without any major consequences, and after being educated and taken in by monks at various monasteries (his mother had 5 children to bring up on her own), he finally graduated from the university in Phnom Penh and returned to Siem Reap to become a guide at Angkor (his websites: www.deng.nu/kimsan/ and www.angkor-guides.com/siemreap He is also on Facebook). His knowledgeable guiding made our visit to Angkor over a 3-day period an utter delight. We can also highly recommend the new Angkor Museum with its Guggenheim-like design, films and explanations in various languages, and numerous Khmer statues, many of which had been "picked up" from Angkor and later returned. Andre Malraux, the French Minister for Culture under de Gaulle, was one of the many culprits in this "Help yourself" business. He was convicted in Cambodia in 1923 but allowed to return to France without punishment.

Another place we'd like to recommend highly is the hotel we stayed at: SHINTA MANI in Siem Reap: www.shintamani.com It doubles as a school of hospitality for endangered, intelligent young Cambodians and is a sheer delight to spend a few nights in.

Addition (9.8.2014): our guide while in Siem Reap, Kim San, opened his own boutique hotel a couple of years ago - the Kiri Boutique Hotel:

http://www.kiriboutiquehotel.com/index.php

We'd also like to mention briefly the entertaining, cello-playing Swiss paediatrician, Dr Beat Richner, or "Beatocello", who has saved the lives of thousands of Cambodian children from dengue fever, malaria, TB, etc. through the free state-of-the-art medical services he and his Cambodian staff offer at four hospitals in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. They need enormous amounts of money to keep going and provide Cambodian children with the same kind of quality medicine that parents in the western world take for granted. His website:

www.beat-richner.ch

It's comforting to know (addition on 14.4.08) that Dr. R. has just refused a donation from the sales of nude photos of French M. Sarkozy's attractive young wife.....

Today, in Pakse in the southern province of Champasak, we went out into the country in a van with a driver who fought with the Pathet Lao when he was young. Then we did some brief elephant-trekking and got completely showered by the creature - umpteen times! After crossing the Mekong on a ferry of sorts with all the locals, we ended up at a very beautiful old Khmer wat from the 10th century (Wat Phou). Buffalo in the middle of the main road en route home, uniformed kids on bikes coming home from school, frangipanni (the national flower and one that we had in our garden in Sydney when I was young) everywhere and also gum trees. People in general much more restrained than the enthusiastic, self-confident Cambodians, often know virtually no English and sometimes just look away, embarrassed, when you try to speak to them. Tomorrow we're off to the Bolaven plateau smeared with mosquito repellent as there's often dengue there. Being chauffeured around in an air-conditioned van is not exactly environmentally friendly, so we can hardly critize the Laotians for spoiling their country (in a similar way to Cambodia) by littering it with pink and blue plastic bags. Pakse Hotel www.visit-mekong.com/pakse-hotel/ is a bit olde worlde but more than adequate. Its roof terrace restaurant is a pleasure in the evenings and the food delicious and very cheap. Lao beer also extremely drinkable (especially at these temperatures). The managers are a delightful husband-wife team - he French but multilingual (incl. Lao) and she Lao, but grew up in France. They take their time to talk to their guests and every wish is fulfilled. The bridge across the Mekong towards Thailand is visible in the distance and from our room on the 6th floor, we have the whole of this quiet, provincial capital at our feet. Payment for services in Laos ranges from the local currency (US$ 1 = about 8000 Kip) to dollars and credit cards. ATMs are now everywhere but of course in the villages Kip are preferred in Cambodia it was different, as everyone preferred American dollars to the local riels).

Now it's Tuesday 25.3.08 and we saw quite a bit of the Bolaven Plateau near Pakse in the course of the day, chauffeured by a virtually non-English-speaking former Pathet Lao fighter who fought in Vietnam at the age of 20 and pointed out bomb craters among the creepers and exotic flowers at the waterfall sites. Other Sydneysiders who love the Blue Mountains and their many waterfalls would have enjoyed today too. Children were swimming in some of the pools near the falls and the only mossie sighted was in the car. The falls were quite idyllic and all had guest houses and restaurants attached. Very few tourists around but a trio of Swedish girls who were planning to spend a day working on a coffee plantation sang us a Swedish song, accompanied by the guitar at house where we stopped to see the simple coffee roasting process. Prior to that, we'd inspected a Singaporean joint coffee venture involving the most gigantic factory and storage facilities I have ever seen anywhere. The dimensions were virtually incomprehensible considering the state of the Lao economy! Later we found out that the factory belongs to the wealthiest woman in Pakse (so please guess why she built it so big!). We drove through numerous villages, with the houses almost all on stilts and the odd pig, goat, cow or buffalo wandering around in the yard (or in the middle of the mostly tarred roads). Small banana, coffee and tea plantations and currently unused rice paddies dotted the landscape, while lorries transported teak logs to Vietnam (legally? Who knows? We hear that the Vietnamese build roads in Laos and are permitted to help themselves to the teak. Vast areas are apparently denuded of trees, so there's another guess what's really going on question for you) and bananas to Thailand. Our two travelling companions were from Stuttgart and Bavaria - as usual outside the western world, one picks up all sorts of interesting travellers en route. Quite different from driving one's car around Europe.