Greetings from sunny Cambodia! Been a while since the last up date - computers are sometimes hard to come by in this part of the world (its a hard life I know!). We've been through Vietnam since our last post and we're now in Sihanoukville on the Cambodian coast. So, highlights from the last few weeks:

After spending a couple of days in Hue in Vietnam we moved to the beautiful town of Hoi An to be beach-bums for a couple of days and do some shopping (finally! First time for both activities in the whole trip!!!). Really great town, we did another cookery course - so now we can make you Thai spring rolls or fresh Vietnamese ones whichever you prefer! We cycled to the nearby beach a couple of times (I know - me on a bike!) and generally relaxed before heading up to the frantic city of Hanoi.

I swear I have never seen so many mopeds in my life as on the streets of Hanoi. They are all going in different directions, all at the same time with no real clue who's right of way it is! Really something to see - makes crossing the road quite interesting too! We went to the Ho Chi Minh museum and musoleum (he wasn't in though - he was away being re-furbed!) and also watched a performance of the Vietnamese Water Puppets - a traditional art form that originated in the rice paddies - really wierd but good fun.

Also had a very entertaining meal out one night in a roof top restaurant, during which we witnessed a rat literally running up the drain pipe next to us, and a live langoustine making a final bid for freedom jumping out of the seafood soup that was being cooked on the table behind us - wriggling around on the floor at our feet! You wouldn't get that in White Horse now would you!

We went out to Halong Bay which is truely beautiful. Sailed out into the bay on a junk, visited some hidden caves, went kayaking around some of the rock formations and spent the night on the boat out in the bay watching the lights twinkle over the water - horrible way to spend an evening.

After that it was down to Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon as the locals still prefer to call it. Another big city but with a different feel to Hanoi - not quite as frantic. Visited the war museum here which was a very sobering experience. Very graphic images, albeit very one sided, of the war - very interesting as long as you have the stomach for it. Worst part I think was the reconstruction of the prison on Phu Quoc island - including a very detailed list of the torture methods used on prisoners - horrific.

We also went out to see the Cu Chi tunnels - an area 60km away from Saigon where rebel North Vietnamese fighters dug tunnels in the forest to escape the bombings, and spy on the Americans. Really interesting day thanks in no small part to our tour guide Thong - or Slim Jim as he preferred to be called - who knew more cockney rhyming slang than any Londoner we've ever met and proceeded to entertain us with it all day! Some of his favourites were telling us we could stop for a rest break to go for a 'jimmy riddle or a betty boo', or that the previous day he had worked 'harder than a one-legged man in an ass kicking competition'. At the end of the day he said he was going 'out on the p**s at the rub-a-dub-dub' if we wanted to join him. He was an absolute legend.

That was the end of our Vietnamese adventure - or so we thought. The journey over the border was an experience in itself. Lets just say it involved 9 hours crammed on a local bus, a mini-bus who's driver thought he was Michael Schumacher, two motorbike taxis who managed to split us up in a dodgy part of town, the worst hotel we have ever stayed in, followed in the morning by two more 'hugging hondas' taking us 50km over the border on the worst roads we have ever seen and finished off by Robin getting a Cambodian tattoo! (a burn on his leg from the exhaust - apparently the 'in' thing to have in Cambodia!) So lets just say we were relieved to get to our accommodation in Kep and even more relieved to find out it was a beautiful, although very small, town with great hotels and stunning scenery. So we stayed a few days to crash out by the pool, visit little outlying islands and enjoy some of the local seafood (although this back-fired when Robin got a nasty dose of food poisoning - he wasn't having a good few days really!).

Now we've moved on to Sihanoukville - far more touristy (it's called Costa del Cambodia - so you get the idea) but the beaches are still great and we are making the most of it before we head to Phonm Penh and then on to Siem Reap to visit Angkor Wat. That will then just about be the end of our South-East Asia trip - except for two short stays Singapore and Hong Kong... then its Australia here we come!