After a very long and dusty local bus journey, with a few near disasters involving cows and motorbikes we arrived into Siem Reap and the highlight of most people's trip to Cambodia with the Angkor Temples. And we weren't disappointed!

The temples are stretched over such a large area that it took us three days just to cover what we'd picked out as the highlights. Our trusty tuk tuk driver (and stand in guide) Plet got us in motion and kept us entertained throughout. We were slightly surprised to learn that the temples were constructed between the 11th and 14th centuries as we'd imagined them to be more ancient but they're still very impressive.

Angkor Wat is obviously the best known of all of the temples and it is deserving of the praise for its size and intricate carvings (we also got a kick out of seeing monkeys playing right beside the temples). It's one of those places you've heard so much about that it's almost hard to take in that you're really there. But it has to be said that many of the less visited temples were definitely our favourites
because they have so much more atmosphere, many of them still overrun by the jungle with trees growing out of and over towers and walls. Ta Prohm is the famous location of the Tomb Raider tree but better still was less visited and highly atmospheric Ta Som.

Bayon in Angkor Tom is breathtaking with each of the towers showing a four faced figure; the carvings and pink stone of Banteay Srei which is nicknamed the women's temple because they can't imagine any man's hand creating such delicate carvings; and a definite high point was walking 1.5km uphill through forest to reach the carved waterfall temples of Kbai Spean.

Each of the temples is overrun with local children selling everything and anything they can, some of them are incredibly cute and thankfully they do attend school but at present in Cambodia there are so many children to adults (due to Pol Pot killing a vast tract of the adult population just over 20 years ago) schools have to take half of the students in the morning and the other half in the afternoon. We were told that the kids use the money they make selling trinkets at the temples to pay for English school which the government doesn't provide - all we can do is hope it's true.

We also visited the Land Mine museum which is run by a former Khmer Rouge child soldier who was too young to understand what he was doing when he lay the mines but is spending his life demining vast tracts of land throughout Cambodia and providing a home and education for child victims of landmines. An amazing man trying to make a difference in a country still suffering from its bloody past.

On our last night Plet took us out to Tonle Sap lake where we wandered around the local market where they were celebrating a big Buddhist holiday. The lake grows in size with the changing seasons from 3,000 sq km in dry season to a staggering 16,000 sq km in the wet season, flooding villages (all built on stilts quite smartly) and rice fields. We enjoyed a dinner with the locals and a taste of local life in a
restaurant on stilts over what should be paddyfields but was now just more lake! A nice ending to our time in Cambodia.