Sorry I haven't written for a while but I've been sick. Bad times, but I will tell this tale a little later.

So we arrived in Sihanookville after a horrendous journey from Siem Reap, worst bumpy road ever.. and don't say 8 hours if you mean 12. Several people were sick on the bus and I came very close. It doesn't help that Cambodians eat boiled eggs as snacks on buses, vom. Sihanookville turned out to be worth it tho, lovely long white sandy beaches, enough tourism so that you have stuff to do but still undeveloped enough that your still a novelty and random Cambodian families still throw their children at you and take pictures while they scream.

We did act like complete tourists on the first day tho, we made the school boy error of having a laugh with one of the sellers which immediately caused about ten to surround our sunbeds. Literally no space to move there was that many. I ended up having my legs "threaded" (a painful process of having each individual hair plucked out by a piece of thread) and had to go through the trauma of "look how much hair you have compared to us" .. bare in mind this is on the middle of the beach! At the same time all the other sellers saw their opening and jostled for Matt's attention the whole time. There selling technique goes "Hello lady, you buy fruit" No thanks. "Ok later yeah" Maybe "pinky promise, you buy fruit from me no-one else yeah".. literally every single one says exactly the same thing. This also resulted in the purchase of about 40 doughnuts that we didn't want. The seafood is Sihanookville was awesome and pretty cheap too really. Matt's never been that bothered about fish but he's loving it now. Barracuda and tuna, can't go wrong. We also discovered these little banana leaf parcels that contain rice gloup with coconut inside. Delish. One of our favourite things in Sihanookville was called Topcat Cinema. This American dude has set up a projector and filled his cinema with comfy sofas and you can hire out private little rooms aswell. We absolutely loved it but on reflection it was just a big living room with a t.v, but as we haven't had that for so long it felt like luxury. I miss having a sofa!

Cambodian people are really lovely, the friendliest type of asian that i've met so far anyway! All the women talk to me and smile a lot which is unusual and Matt gets offered to drink with groups of men all the time. It's really nice and refreshing. Although he's also abit of a hit with the Cambodian ladies, they're always telling me that he's "very nice" and one of the sellers even gave him a free bracelet that she made for him. They don't give anyone anything for free!!

So after a few days in Sihanookville we left to go back to Phnom Penh to get our Lao visas and then DISASTER struck... or I got a cold and a stomach bug at the same time. It was a pretty bad cold but I lived through it. The only downside was that we got stuck in Phnom Penh until I got better so we were there 4 days instead of 2. I basically lay in an aircon room for three days napping for most of it. Matthew didn't seem to mind too much tho, we were staying opposite an Indian restaurant and randomly he now loves Indian food which he didn't before. So he was happy enough.

After this little setback we decided to go to a place North East called Ratnakiri, but as I was still a bit under the weather we split it up into two journeys and stopped half way in a place called Kratie. Kratie was nice enough but we didn't do much as we were only there a day. Ratnakiri tho! LOVE IT. So glad we decided to come because we were umming and arhhing about whether to go for ages as its a bit of a mish. We had to take a 4 hour minibus from Kratie to Ratnakiri along dirt roads mainly. This sounds ok... but now picture a minibus with 14 seats but with 22 people plus 2 children in it. This is how Cambodians travel. There was one man on the bus that spoke English (sort of) and he chatted to us the whole way there, which was amusing because when he ran out of stuff to say he would just say random English words that he knew that had no relevance to anything with a big grin on his face.

Our hotel in Ratnakiri is AWESOME, I think it used to be some sort of stately home or something because its really grand and everything is wood paneled including the ceiling and its got massive wooden furnishings everywhere. It's also got a ping pong table. Say no more. We've spent two days here cruising around on a moped down dirt tracks to crater lakes and three different waterfalls. The lake was crystal clear water and really green. Very beautiful. There was no-one there at all at any of the waterfalls we visited. Waterfalls to ourselves, couldnt really ask for more.