Mar 01 - Considering that we went to bed at eight 'o'clock the night before, we woke up pretty late - about seven-thirty. The Pnong family were already up, so we rolled up our hammocks and went outside to have a stretch. I half-heartedly looked around for some sort of bathroom, but there wasn't anything of the sort. The ground outside the south side of the house was covered with poo - much of it strangely human-looking, which was quite a shock to see. These people were really dirt poor. We'd seen the kids playing together happily and looking after each other the day before, and in a way it looked like the idyllic family existence; in the clear light of the morning, though, it really struck home that they were living in a one-bedroomed shack with no ablutions except the river, and didn't go to school. It's hard to see how that tiny farm will be able to support all ten of them as adults.

After breakfast (beef noodles), we said our goodbyes. We hadn't really managed to communicate much with the family, which was strange, and we had that same feeling of being voyeurs on their existence. I didn't enjoy being there, to be honest, and we hadn't planned on it. We gave some money to the mum to say thank you; I'm still not sure if that was the right thing to do or not, but I hope it was. After grabbing our packs, we said goodbye to Baptiste and Zilia, planned to meet them later in the week in Ratanakiri, and headed off with our slightly surly guide.

Srau, or the Bat-Eating-Mute, as we started to think of him, was at least recovered from his previous day's hangover. It was still pretty dusty around the farm, though, and every fifteen minutes he'd give a loud hairball-clearing retch, and gob up a big green piece of phlegm to spit out. Nice, and that was almost the extent of communications. The bits of jungle immediately surrounding the river were pretty, but we also tracked through a lot of land that had been, or was in the process of being cleared. It's quite a shock how one moment you can be under a leafy canopy, alive with birds, insects and animals, and few steps later be walking through five acres of dead, smoking stumps. It happening at an incredible rate too - most of the clearing is from this year, and much of it seemed to be only a few weeks old.

We had to cross a number of rivers in the morning, wading across with our shoes off. At the third river I was just reflecting on how well we were doing, when I stepped on a slippery stone, and had a bit of a wobble. I leaned backward to balance, completely forgetting the large backpack I had attached to me. Splash! Luckily the river was shallow, so none of our kit got too wet, and I didn't hurt anything, except my pride (which was, of course, seriously injured). Cheryl at least had the good grace not to laugh about it until that afternoon!

We stopped for lunch by the river, and Srau capered about in the sand, digging up a sizeable collection of small eggs. He cooked these as he was preparing the main lunch (fried rice with beef), and handed over a couple to try. I pleaded my egg-allergy (that's worked pretty well for me since junior school), but there was no was out for Cheryl, and she had to eat a couple. "They're actually not bad," she said. Following Srau's example she bit the tops off, and sucked out the yolk. "What kind of bird are they?" We sort of mimed this to make ourselves understood. Srau shook his head, and made a slithering motion with his arm. "Snake eggs?," said Cheryl, "Great!" We declined seconds.

During the afternoon, we wound through more bits of beautiful jungle and cleared forest. Our mood pretty much depended on where we were - we'd planned a four day trek to try and get away from human activity a bit, and this was not what we'd expected. If we'd wanted to see chopped down trees, we could have gone anywhere in Cambodia. It seems that what's happened here is that the populations's exploded so much in the last fifteen years (ten kids per family) that what used to be a sustainable way of jungle life is now coming apart at the seams. There was virtually no animal life to be seen, not even spoor, although the bird and insect population still seemed OK, except where the trees had been chopped out.

Srau was a case in point. At every river, he'd dig around for snake eggs (obviously a personal favourite), and collect them all. He wouldn't leave any to hatch later in the season, and would shake his head in disgust if the earth had been turned up, and someone else had got there before him. If he saw an interesting flower, like an orchid, he wouldn't point it out - he'd hack it off the branch and bring it over, and woe betide any bat that had made a visible nest in the surrounding bamboo. If he went fishing, he was keen to pull out any minnow in the river. Quickly, before someone else did. We would have liked to talk to him about it, but miming all the questions would have been tough.

At about four thirty, we stopped by a small stream to camp. We'd just walked though another patch of cleared trees, and we both got the impression that our guide was a bit astounded himself by the level of tree chopping. I think he'd planned to camp there, before seeing what had happened. We set up our hammocks, got a fire going, went down to wash in the river - it was really great to be clean again - and came up to hang our hammocks and get dinner on the go (beef with rice, are you sensing a theme here?) After dinner, we turned in really early (before seven!) amidst a cacophony of birdsong, cicadas and other jungle noises. The stars blazed in the sky - despite all the smoke, the air's pretty clear here, and it was great to be here, just in the quiet.

So far the trip definately wasn't what we expected - the farm had been a shock, as had the areas of chopped out trees - but it was actually quite peaceful and beautiful, and we went to sleep shortly after getting comfortable (relative term!) in our hammocks, although I guess the 10 kiolometres of up-and-down hiking had helped!