We have arrived!

The 25 hour door to door trip was actually quite painless. Kingfisher air was actually rather comfortable, against everyone elses assumptions. We had mini widescreen tvs and proper indian food for dinner and lunch. The breakfast could have been better with a s***ty little croissant (not the fresh fruit as promised). The airhostesses were all very friendly...."handpicked" by the owner of Kingfisher (which was made obvious as all of them were pretty fit.)

Once we arrived in Bangkok we found our Convenient Grand Hotel bus driver to take us to our oh so convenient hotel. Racing down the motorway at god knows what kilometers per hour (it was dark tho so we couldnt see much). We had planned out some time by the pool, maybe a massage...but in the end just ordered room service, a litre of beer each (accidental) and ended up passing out to Juno by 10.30pm.

Jess and Emily woke up to some knocking and instead of being cautious Jessica immediately rolled out of bed and opened the door. She had obviously forgotten we are in Asia...The guy had tried to come into our room when he was really meant to be going into the room next door.

At around 2.30 we all woke up thanks to the jet lag but didnt take us long to fall asleep again. We had expected to wake up naturally and have time for a nice breakfast and maybe a swim. We ended up waking up at 11.40 and had to pack our bags and munch on a cereal bar (thank you emily) before waiting around for our taxi back to the airport for our flight to Phnom Penh.

At the airport we grabbed some lunch and then got onto our, again, pretty cumfy air asia flight. We arrived in Phnom Penh where the visa process was ridiculously fast, grabbed our bags and walked out to find some taxi men shoving flyers in our face. As one man offered a $9 taxi we settled for the $7 one........note that the men are standing right next to each other.

We climbed into the back of a tuk tuk with our massive backpacks and the guy drove us into town. Quite the experience! Millions of scooters around us weaving in and out of traffic, squeezing in between massive cars and other scooters - its a surprise all the cars arent covered in scratches. The most interesting sights were seeing 5 people on the back of one scooter, and people driving in the middle of the road, the wrong way! Clearly the lines are just for guidance. Many people gave us funny looks including a mother point us out to her little baby. Can only imagine that she was saying "look! white people!"

As if this experience wasnt special enough, a monsoon hit....ridiculously large rain drops, people stopping on the side of the road to throw on ponchos (birhgtly coloured ones at that....we wont look so stupid in our bright orange ponchos afterall mum!). The journey took a good 45 minutes or so and after stopping at some questionable guesthouses we found one that seemed pretty tourist friendly. I looked at one of the rooms and finally we were set for a reasonable price.

We want to go walk around the town but another monsoon has hit Phnom Penh so waiting around a bit for it to stop - not likely to happen any time soon.

Tomorrow we will do as much as we can in the one day we have here. Then on Sunday we will be leaving nice and early for Siem Reap!

Another update will come sometime soon............

Emma

ps. "monsoon" is how i choose to describe this weather......its more or less torrential rain with lots of lightning and thunder...