Greetings from Camodia!!!

We arrived in Siem Reap early sunday morning, somewhat bleary-eyed after a 4am start from Charlotte and Aiden's in KL. Most of sunday was dedicated to a spanish tradition known as "siesta", as i'd opted for watching United v Spurs and the start of England's surrender to the Welsh late on Saturday night, rather than get some much-needed shut-eye in! Headed out late sunday afternoon with priority job number 1 being to call my mum and wish her a happy birthday.. (i'll have a cute little niece or nephew to compete with soon, so i'm going to have to work hard to maintain my status as Golden Balls!)

Despite what we'd been told, Siem Reap is a lovely little town. Alright, much of it is dusty and dirty and it's easy to see that this is easily the poorest country we've been to yet, but the town centre and the bars and restaurants have got a really nice feel to them and the atmosphere is good, with the colonial french architecture giving it a fairly familiar theme. We came for 2 nights and we're staying for 3! The jugs of beer at $2.50 a pop certainly help with the attraction too!

Yesterday we did what we came here to do and that was to visit Angkor and its temples. A World heritage site with hundreds of temples covering an area of about 3000 square kilometres, like many people, this is the reason we came to cambodia in the first place, so expectations were high!!!

Another early start saw us collected by tuk-tuk at 7.30am, the idea being to try and keep out of the heat if we could! The day started badly as rachel had a run-in with the looky-looky kids... "it's ok, thanks" said rachel as she was offered t-shirts / flutes / bracelets in quick succession... "It might be ok for you, but it's not ok for me" came the reply!!! This was to be the first of many encounters with the determined road-side sales people...

Over about 6 or so hours we worked our way round Prasat Kravan, Banteay Kdei, Ta Phrom, Ta Keo, Thommanon, Angkor Thom and finished at the most famous of all, Angkor Wat. An amazing day really... incredible to think that these temples were built about a thousand years ago, then abandoned and left to the jungle until the french "discovered" them in the 19th century. The highlight for us was probably Bayon in Angkor Thom, which with its 54 towers was more impressive than the temple of Angkor Wat itself. That said, the huge grounds and the 100m wide moat which surrounds Angkor Wat make it a truly impressive sight. Well worth coming all this way!

We're heading to the capital, Phnom Penh, tomorrow morning and so enjoyable has our first experience of Cambodia been, that instead of heading straight on into Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh City from there, we're now planning on heading out to the coast for some Cambodian-style beach action around Sihanoukville towards the weekend.

Hope all is well! Take care! xxx