Feb 23 - We left the Koh Ker guesthouse/brothel at about seven. Despite the evening's disturbances, we actually had a pretty good night's sleep. We stopped in at the same restaurant for breakfast (noodle soup!) and then hit the dirt roads north towards the Thai border, and the mountain temple of Prasat Preah Vihear.

Shortly into the drive, it dawned on us that the whole of Preah Vihear province is burning. Although we drove along winding roads through beautiful forest with tall trees, it was heartbreaking to realise that anyone who comes here next year will just see barren, empty fields. Almost without execption, every tree was in the process of being killed. The smaller trees had been ringbarked, and the larger hardwoods (particularly mahoganies and the local gums) we chopped down, or fired to harvest the resin. During the three hour drive north, we saw thousands of trees burning - twists of smoke curled up as far as the eye could see. The scale of the operation must be huge, as this would all have happened in the last few months. I can't describe how sick this made us feel. There was no sense or management to the process - it was just profligate stripping of natural resources, with no view to replacement or recovery. The trees were still green, and in flower - but in a few months they'll all be logs or ashes, and there's nothing anyone can do about it now. Oh, did I mention that this drive was through the middle of one of Cambodia's national parks?

We wound through Preah Vihear province, feeling worse and worse about the man-made natural disaster unfolding around us, although there were a few spots where the trees seemed to have been left alone (maybe 5% of the road). At Preah Vihear, we engaged 4-wheel drive, and crawled up the broken dirt and concrete track that led to the top of Chuong Phnom Dangrek - one of the hills on the Thai border. We were the only vehicle to arrive on the Cambodian side of the border, and walked up a stone track to the base of the temple, which has been a bone of contention between Cambodia and Thailand for most of the last century. The International Court awarded the temple to Cambodia in the sixties, after Thailand forcibly seized it in 1959, but access from Cambodia is still pretty tough (as our numb backsides could attest, after three hours in a Pajero). There's a tar road all the way to the Thai border crossing, and so the temple was fairly full - mostly with Thai tourists and monks making pilgrammage, although there were also a couple of Westerners walking around.

The temple was built by Suryavaraman II - the same king who commissioned Angkor Wat, and the location makes for something spectacular. Preah Vihear is constructed in a series of layers, leading you up to the apex of the cliff, and active Buddhist shrines are still maintained within the walls. The main temple buildings were built right up to the cliff's edge, and you can look south over the former forests of Cambodia, which today were clouded in a smoky haze. It honestly seems that all of this will be desert in a few years, although there are still a few patches of pristine forest (normally some distance from a road). So if you want to see it, our advce would be to go now!

On the downside, the temple itself is pretty filthy, and doesn't compare to the main Angkorian sites in terms of the maintenance of buildings and grounds. I guess that may be because of its inaccesibility from Cambodia, coupled with large numbers of visitors from the Thai side. There's a dirty little shack that serves as a loo (you need to pay in Thai baht to use it) and vendors are selling incense, offerings and touristy rubbish on blankets scattered all over the temple itself. I saw one of the site workers collecting rubbish bags from the bins, and thought that at least they were making an effort to clear up. She then wandered over to the edge of the hill. and tipped the rubbish over the edge. Filthy food wrappers and polaroid film boxes scattered the whole hillside, and it definately took something away from the place. Despite that, it's a pretty impressive monument, and you've got to take you hat off to the people who managed to build something so big and ornate, in such an inaccessible place.

We met up with Roehn and drove back down the hill. For some reason it was hairier than on the way up - something like a dust and concrete ski-run (blue-to-red!). We stopped in the village at the bottom of the hill for lunch, and unwound a bit - looking up at the hill in the distance. After about ten minutes we were joined by a Dutch couple (in their fities) who had cycled here! Major kudos - it's a long way from anywhere, and they'd been camping and staying in villages all over Cambodia for the last seven weeks. They take three months off every year to travel, and almost always by bicycle. They told us about another couple they'd just met who were five and a half years into a cycle trip - and planned to keep going for twenty! We were in awe, but still fairly happy to get into the air conditioned 4x4 and drive on to Tbeng Meanchey (which funnily enough, the locals also call 'Preah Vihear').

So after travelling another three hours to arrive in a place with the same name, we checked into the Prom Tep guesthouse. It wasn't bad - a bit grim and institutional, possibly a former prison or hospital. Tbeny Meanchey is a bit of a hole. There's not a whole lot there to see or do, but it was definately a step up from the previous night's accomodation. We had our own bathroom (sort of!) and there was no livestock to be seen anywhere! We had dinner at the Kunthea restaurant - which was actually a great little place; we had some of the best chicken soup ever, and chatted to our guide a bit about his life growing up in Cambodia.

Roehn is a really nice guy, and his English is excellent. I didn't realise it earlier, but he's a bit older than us, and told us about growing up in the war years. Luckily, he said, he was too young to be drafted in as a soldier. He does remember being separated from his family, though, and kept in a group with a whole lot of other boys for education and fieldwork. All families seemed to be broken up in those days, with husbands and wives sent off to different villages. "Some people would know where their family were," he said. "But they weren't allowed to go and visit. They'd be killed if they tried to cross to the next town." After the war, he reunited with most of his family, although some aunts and uncles were never heard from again. "I hope they are in America," he said. "Some familiy members went to a spirit medium to try and contact them, and they said they were living there. I don't know if I believe it, but I hope so - lots of people never find each other again." He then casually dropped in that he'd lost his left eye in a landmine explosion; he'd joined the army for six years after school, and they were fighting Khmer Rouge troops entrenched in the Northeast. "I'm lucky, though," he said. "My friend stepped on the mine that did this, but he died. Now at least I can drive." The thing that struck us the most is that he doesn't seem to have any bitterness at all, and he spent the rest of the evening talking about his three kids, and what his hopes were for their futures.