Between travelling from Cambodia to the south of Thailand I did a stop off in Bangkok for a couple days as it was Songkran - Thai New Year. Laos celebrates Songkran at the same time as Thailand and Cambodia's is concurrent except it's called Khmer New Year. Cambodia seemed to be fairly quiet about the whole thing as we were expecting big celebrations, at least in the evening, as we were in Siam Reap and just presumed the bigger cities would celebrate in style.. T...

After spending the night on Otres beach we caught a tuk tuk at 6.30 am in order to catch the boat from Sihanoukville to take us to Koh Rong. The journey took 2 ½ hours and I slept on the bow of the boat for most of the way. But when we were about 15 minutes from the pier the boat broke down! So a small fishing boat had to come out to tow us back in. We arrived at a rickety bamboo pier where we had a brief induction by one of the dive school teachers informing u...

We spent a couple more days in Phnom Penh visiting various sites. We spent one afternoon walking aimlessly around the Russian Market, where I somehow got sucked into buying a pillow case and dragonfly jewellery holfder. That same day we also went to visit the Royal Palace but turns out it's only open for a couple of hours each morning and afternoon and so we would only have about half an hour to walk around it. As we were planning to leave the next day at around ...

- We caught the bus straight from Don Det to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. We said goodbye to the rest of the group as they were also on Don Det and although they were going ahead to Cambodia also, they were off to Siam Reap instead. My plan was to go to Phnom Penh first (about the centre on the country) and then head south to the coast and maybe visit some islands, before heading up to Siam Reap in the north west as it is close to the border and this woul...

- After a very uncomfortable/cramped 'sleep' we arrived at a bus station and with everyone as confused as one another we all collapsed on chairs waiting an hour for a separate bus to take us down to where we were to catch the boat over to the islands. - - The next bus took about 4 hours an then we were able to hop onto a long tailed boat which took us over to Don Det. This tends to be the most popular island amongst backpackers as it tends to have more places t...