My first few days in Bangkok were pretty lazy. I was exhausted after my mammoth train journey and determined to do very little. In this, i succeeded! I walked around a wee bit, basically just walking between my hostel and the infamous Kho San Road to buy Pad Thai from the street vendors (50p for a decent meal!) whenever i was hungry. This caught up on me after a day or so though as i got Bangkok belly and spent a day in bed.I also managed to watch a lot of football in those first days and the guy who runs my hostel became convinced i was a lucky charm when his team, Liverpool, beat Portsmouth in the last few minutes.

I had been expecting Bangkok to be a dirty, smelly, unpleasant place and over-touristy. I guess that's a fair description of the Kho San Rd-which actually is quite fun-but i was pleasantly surprised by the place. The temples are amazing and the people are really friendly.

I spent 3 nights in Bangkok then set off for Siem Reap in Cambodia. This is an infamous backpacking route and the terrible legends of the journey came true. I had a 6hr bus journey to the border, well, nearly to the border. I then bumped into two american girls, Sara and Leslie, and shared a tuk-tuk with them to the border. Or so we thought.....The driver actually took us to a dodgy backstreet place where we were pressured into buying our Cambodian visa. This is exactly what you are warned not to do and we werent too happy about it but figured it was better not to argue. We were overcharged but the visas, surprisingly, were valid. We got through Thai emigration and had to walk the no mans land to the Cambodian immigration. Its no exaggeration to say that this place looked like how war-torn Vietnam is portrayed in movies. Run-down buildings-casinos mostly, burned out cars and poverty stricken kids pulling on your clothes. It was...disconcerting. After that we got a government bus to the transit cantre and after some haggling got a taxi to Siem Reap. The taxi was well dodgy and had a massively cracked windscreen. Not helping matters were the Cambodian roads and way of driving. It was mental but we arrived safely.

The next day we hired a tuk-tuk for the day and saw the main Angor ruins. We saw sunrise over Angor Wat and all the other main ruins. I couldnmt help but think of King Louies palace from the Jungle Book and spent most of the day humming "I wanna be like you" One of the highlights was climbing up the very, very steep stairs at one of the temples and standing opn the edge of the temple about 100ft up. Great fun!

The next day was awful. The 8hr bus journey back to Bangjkok took 13. I'm still scarred and dont want to talk about it. I'll tell you when i see you.

Next up was Chang mai................