Friday, 8th July 2016 The fact that it is only now as we are sitting in Siem Reap airport departure lounge that I'm able to start to write about our time in Siem Reap says a lot about how busy we've been here. We've had a brilliant time and I would highly recommend visiting the city and its surrounding area. The city reminds me of Chiang Mai some twenty five years or so ago. It is not too big, the people are very friendly and there's plenty of more than interesting and affordable things to do. Firstly, I'll mention our hotel, the Sarai Resort. It is beautiful and luxurious. We paid a drab Premier Inn room price for a stunning family suite which overlooked the swimming pool. The service and support is first-rate here. You wouldn't be disappointed if you chose this hotel as your base for Siem Reap. The only thing I would say is that the price of laundry is very expensive and apart from one or two items that needed very careful washing, the rest went across the road who adequately returned all our dirty clothes at $1 a kilo. On our first day (Friday), we stayed close to the hotel as we needed to catch up in the afternoon on a little of the many hours of sleep we had skipped in Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta earlier in the week. And in the evening, we dined in the hotel's restaurant.....my vegetable curry was delicious.... before turning in very early. Saturday was to be another pre-dawn departure. Saturday, 9th July 2016 Up and wearily out of our bed following our 3.30 a.m. wake-up alarm, we were in the mini-bus outside our hotel at 4.30 a.m. Following extensive research reading up tripadviser reviews before hand, I booked a sunrise bike tour of the main temples with Grasshopper Tours. It was very expensive, in Cambodian terms, and on reflection we could have had more or less the same experience with another tour guide company we used a few days later, the exceptional Butterfly company. Anyway, six people were due on the trek but after a young Australian boarded, the two others seemed to have missed their wake up calls and our guide San decided to press ahead without them as the morning's sunrise would not wait. They clearly preferred their swanky hotel's beds to the adventure ahead of us. We picked up the three day passes in a building where several hundred tourists were photographed individually and their passes processed within minutes. Theose responsible for the Vietnamese visa-on-entry system, which was an interminable process at the tail end of a long flight, should take a long look at how customer friendly the temple pass system is in Siem Reap. It's expensive though at $40 each for three days of temple touring. But fair enough! This is the rainy season. This means that the rains may rain. They may rain heavily for ten minutes or the may do so for hours and hours on end. Imagine the rain that soaks you to the skin in seconds. That's the rain here. But when the sun comes out, you're dry in no time. Our dawn experience, watching the morning sky lighten in front of us at Angkor Wat, sitting among the low-season hundreds (perhaps thousands) was not spoilt by a downpour or heavy clouds. We were lucky. We've ticked that one off the bucket list and have many postacrd quality photos as evidence. But to be perfectly honest, it was just an okay experience. Many better ones were on the way. San took us around Angkor Wat in these early hours and gradually the crowds thinned as they headed back in lines of tuk-tuks to their low cost fan-cooled rooms or higher cost fancy-dan suites for a few more hours sleep before breakfast. We absorbed paragraph after paragraph of facts and figures about the huge temple's history as the temperature headed upwards. Very soon my perspiring head was a mini-waterfall and the bottles of water handed to us a little earlier as fridge-cold were approaching acceptable bath-warmth. We entered layer after layer of the temple and marvelled at the scale of the temple. Thousands, if not millions, of blocks of stone were brought from some considerable distance to build the Hindu / Buddhist temple. Being here you realise the scale of the task. And the huge number of intricately sculpted designs too. This place definitely deserves a visit is a bit of an understatement! Following our detailed guided tour by San, we were mini-vanned to our al fresco breakfast and introduced to our bikes for the next four or five hours. We cycled along good paths for much of the time but the rainy season made some of the forest trails a little more treacherous. Nothing too serious though and we all reached the moat area of the second most visited temple (the multi-faced Bayon) with no more than a slip and a slide here and there. Instead of going toward the centre of the temple from the main south gate, we cycled up onto the external walls above the moat towards the cornered towers. No tourists near these as the invaders from all corners of the globe tend to be tuk-tukked to the same parts of the temple grounds. We did eventually end up at the main temple with its many tiers and multi-faced stone carvings and were enlightened by San as to their historical significance. Yet to be "templed out"! More cycling along unchallenging paths took us to the "Tomb Raider" temple, Ta Phrom. This is the one where the jungle got hold of the abandoned grounds so that huge trees still claim their place within, through and above the buildings. Extra factual stuff can be googled if you're interested. More than a few photos later, we were off again on our trusty bikes, without Alyson yet to whinge about saddle soreness, along a trail that took us through villages and beside paddy fields. At oneish, we were ready for our meal. We didn't pause for long to decide against the frog meals on the menu but had a tasty vegetable sweet and sour meal. We are learning a few Cambodian words as we go along and our attempts to use them seem to raise a smile every time. We're finding Cambodian easier than Vietnamese. Here's our current crop of words phonetically spelt to the best of my imperfect ability; thank you - oh gwn, hello - sue slay, good - lorna, strong - clang, beautiful- sahaat, how are you? -sock sue by day?, very well - sock sue by, delicious - chinanga. We've also started to learn the numbers and Caitlin is able to count pretty quickly up to 20 in Cambodian. Me? I can get up to 20 very slowly! After our two wheeled jaunt, we needed some respite from the heat which gave Alyson and Caitlin time to have various body parts massaged by the hotel's layer of hands. I refrained from the experience but did join the two superior members of my family to the tripadvisor recommended vegetarian restaurant, "Banlle". I pronounced it in Welsh for the proprietors which made them smile politely for a moment before telling me that the place was pronouced as "Banlay". Once again, the service and ambience was delightful, but the food was not the best we've had. Far from being bad, of course, but a little bland and the huge chunks of tofu were flavourless. After the meal, we wandered around some of the less appealing night streets of Siem Reap where unsophisticated current Western music blasted its way into my cranium. We walked with little interest in seedyish Pub Street and swiftly moved away from the "50 cents to take a photo" signs for non-eaters of crickets, huge spiders, etc. In the Night Market, Caitlin had an intricate henna tattoo painted onto her wrist and with that completed, we hired another tuk-tuk driver to get us back to the hotel for $2. As our plans for the next day involved a non-early wake up, we didn't accept our tuk-tuk driver's offer of servicing our transport needs in the morning.