I would like to begin by apologising to anyone who viewed my site last time as you have probably seen all the temple photos before!! However I am slightly peeved that it only seems to be uploading every third picture.

Anyway, enough complaining. We left at 0500 on Sunday to see the sunrise at Angkor Wat and I had high hopes as last time it was very disappointing. Well, quite honestly I should have stayed in bed as it was much the same as previously. One minute it's dark, the next it's light........great. Where's all the stunning reds, oranges and golds I'd been expecting?? Not only that, the heat and humidity had risen again and at 5am we were all dripping. Ridiculous.

We saw the 3 main temples.....Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm (the tree one where Tombraider and an Indiana Jones was filmed) and The Bayon (the one with all the faces). We had lunch at 1000 as we'd been up for so long and my coffee was 50/50 coffee and condensed milk, but they'd also added sugar to it.....as if it wasn't sweet enough without.

When we got back I checked my e mails and had the all clear from the hospital in Bangkok.................relief. This required a few gins to celebrate at one of our favourite restaurants, but ended up with many gins, lots of dancing and chips at 0330!!

Back to New Hope Monday and on with the assessments. New Hope is certainly an eye opener as it's a community centre with a medical room, as well as sewing and beauty rooms. The vilage is unbelievably poor and the sewing and beauty are taught to try and get the girls out of prostitution which is the main form of income in the area. Virgins fetch a lot of money and girls as young as 5 are sold. It's a struggle to get some of the girls to come to school as their mothers want them to work as it's the only way of getting money to feed the families. Contraception is non-existent and diseases and unwanted children put an extra strain on already struggling families. The men are often away in the army and the money they send back is pitiful and far between. Domestic violence is also prevalent and there was a murder last week. A woman stabbed a man to death and then chopped off his penis.....I'm sure he deserved it! I was going to offer my CSI services but they had already burnt the body.

The heat finally broke on Tuesday morning and there was quite a storm, but little did we know how much damage it had done until we headed to school in the afternoon. Trees and power cables were down and blocking the main road in so we took a detour through the countryside. How the tuk tuk didn;t go over I will never know. The bike went over and the passenger bit grounded and it ended up with 7 of us having to wade through swampy flood water for half a mile. Disgusting as there was rubbish everywhere and one lady fell into a prickly bush. I was going bare foot until I thought about all the trash which I could be stepping on. Fortunately by the time we finished school the tree had been removed, although the power was still down.

Thursday night we came second in the quiz.............texting was down and so I had no assistance from dad.

My weekend was actually pretty quiet and restful for a change and quite a lot of time has been spent watching the Ashes.