Good morning from Cambodia.

Well it's 2 days till Christmas and here we are in the Kingdom of Cambodia. Our journey yesterday started early (6am) for our 1st leg to Aranyaprathet on the Thai/Cambodia border. Here we had the usual scam of "we get your visa for you" they wanted us to have lunch as well but we stood firm and they took us to the crossing and then the 4 of us were on our own. Crossing into Cambodia was fairly straight forward but a little slow and we were already 2 hours late for our taxi connection!!!

With a bit of luck (or so we thought) he found us and took us to our taxi, it turned out he was not the driver and smiled at us saying "I make you smile you make me smile give me some money please!!!

At 1.30 pm we rolled out of Poipet with our driver who could hardly see over the steering wheel and drove with no shoes on!!!

What followed was 3 1/2 hours on the bumpiest road we have ever travelled on in our lives and we narrowly missed several goats, cows and people on bikes as we bumped our way along in an old Toyota Camry with bits flying off it!!!!

Along the road all the vegetation was covered in thick red dust from the road and there were people fishing in the streams at the roadside. We eventually rolled into Siem Reap at 5pm with all our bones shaken about and the car just about in 1 piece with a flat tyre!!!

It was at this point that the driver became animated and spoke good English to ask for a tip and we disembarked from the car quickly. Spent the night in the restaurant as our food took 90 minutes to arrive and we were all hungry. Today we plan on looking around the city and sorting out our Angkor Wat permits.

Lots of Love

M & M

xx