It took almost six hours for our bus to reach Sihanoukville from Phnom Penh. We'd booked a hotel in advance and felt a bit out of place when we turned up, with our sweaty faces and our backpacks, as it looks like a 4 star kind of place even though it wasn't expensive. Felt a bit better when we realised that there is a building site next door, no plugs in the bathtub and that the drawerhandles fall off when you open them too energetically - perhaps we are the usua...

According to our lonely planet, a 2008 TI corruption perceptions index ranked Cambodia as 166th out of 180 countries, i.e. very corrupt. We experienced our first taste of this before we even made it across the border when, despite the tourist visa being just $20, we were made to pay $25 to the official. Since then we have spoken to locals who have told us that Cambodians have to bribe staff at the supposedly 'free' hospitals to treat them or they won't be seen to...

About 4 minutes after we got into Mui Ne we realised we'd left a bag of our clothes on the bus. The reception staff at our hotel rang up the bus company and they told us they'd drop it round at 1pm, then 5pm, then the next morning. Needless to say, we didn't get it back. Moral of the story: never let anything out of your sight in S.E.Asia! Luckily our hotel was rather swanky (chandeliers in the reception oo-er) which helped us get over it. For the second time in ...

So the sleeper bus from Hoi An to Nha Trang: a double decker bus with the middle floor taken out and three lines of bunk beds where you can almost - but not quite - stretch your legs flat out and almost - but not quite - recline your seat all the way back. We were fairly impressed, until the driver started torturing our ears with such gems as 'My heart will go on' and Mariah Carey's 'How do I live without you'. This went on for the entire night. Every half hour o...

We have fallen head over heels in love with Hoi An. Our room was great, with a comfy mattress, a balcony and *drumroll* the Bath, but the place itself is lovely too. Cars and motorbikes are banned from the old town so the usual fear of being splatted or spliced mid-crossing evaporates. Lanterns are hung between buildings, across roads and in trees, and all the buildings look so old and quaint and like they are just crying out for you to go in and drink copious am...