With an early start (and teary farewell for Erin), we took a 2.5 hour bus ride to the Cambodian border. Border crossings have to be done on foot and this was a first for us - doing a border crossing by land, dragging our luggage behind us. It was a very hot walk across no-mans land before entering Cambodian customs. Sue's phone said it was 34 but feels like 38. We were queued up with our luggage and people were pushing past us and ignoring lines. We didn't know if they were officials or just regular people and we weren't brave enough to protest and cause a scene. We'd been told to put 50K in the passport to ensure we got through quickly but some did and some didn't. Either way the line went as fast as the line went. Some of these queue jumpers were just pushing up to the customs desk and slapping down 8 or 9 passports in a pile in front of the official. There seemed no rhyme or reason to the process but we eventually made it through.

We stopped for lunch at a roadside diner with simple Cambodian food which was very good with a cold Cambodian beer. There was a long drive to Phnom Penh where we saw lots of new high-rise constructions. The new bridges were very ornate with the traditional depictions of the Naga, a mythical seven-headed snake at each end of the bridge.

We stopped at a fairly big bank with a whole wall of ATM machines. There is a dual currency in Cambodia - Reil and US dollars. The ATM's gave us the option of either but would only dispense $100 USD notes. We needed smaller currency than that so all the notes were collected up and Steve wen't to the teller to get them broken into smaller denominations. The teller then refused to accept several of the notes because they were "blemished". We explained that they came out of their own ATM's, but they weren't buying it. They wanted to see receipts from everyone but the ATM's were not printing them in most cases. Chenda stepped in and eventually they agreed to honour them, but the most they could give us was a heap of $10 notes, nothing smaller.

We checked into the hotel room and cranked the aircon into action in an attempt to get the room cooled down. (Fast forward a day - it took some time but eventually we managed to maintain 24 degrees).

We set off on a cyclo tour of the city. We were told to really watch our belongings on this one as bag snatchers were very prevalent. First stop was the Independence monument and a statue for the father king of Cambodia where we got some very good photo's as the sun was going down. We went on around the hilltop buddhist temple and to a monument to "Grandmother Penh".

We went to a restaurant for dinner and discovered that traditional Cambodian food is very different from Vietnamese. Many of the dishes are rich, creamy curries (amok) that are not overly spicy but packed with flavour. Some are serverd in banana leaf bowls or hollowed out pineapples

We got tuktuks back to the hotel (Steve managed to use some VND across the road at a Vietnamese convenience store to buy tonic water) settled in for a couple of cheeky GnT's.