Feb 28 - We woke up early at Phnom Meas. Everyone here seemed to get up with the dawn, and there was all sorts of activity going on as we crawled out of bed. We were still feeling a little fragile from the truck journey, and weren't up to anything too energetic today. At breakfast, there were the five of us, who'd got in the previous day (Cheryl, myself, Zilia, Baptiste and Rainer) and three girls from Gloucester. Tree seemed to be the main English-speaker at the group - in fact the girls told us that when they'd arrived and asked to check in, they'd been presented with a chicken! Obviously part of a phonetic language learning programme... We also learned that they'd arrived on the bus the day before us (although with two flat tyres, and a couple of hours late), so we blamed our hair-raising trip on them, for breaking the bus!

Our group of five planned to go and see a couple of the sights of Sen Monorom. In the morning, we were going to head out to Bou Sraa waterfall, and then come back to Monorom Falls in the afternoon. We also discussed plans for the next few days; Rainer was undecided, Baptiste and Zilia wanted to go for an overnight trek in the jungle, and Cheryl and I planned to go for slightly longer, to get a bit further away from it all. We also chatted about how we'd get up from Sen Monorom to Ratanakiri and Laos. Tree suggested a moto-trip, saying that the road was currently passable, and Cheryl and I jumped at the chance (not wanting to risk another trip on the pickup!) In the end, we decided to leave the next day, spend three nights and four days trekking in the jungle, and then come back for a night before taking the bike trip up north.

Before heading off to Bou Sraa, we stopped off at the local market. We had a couple of things to buy, and also picked up food for the day (bread and fruit). I picked up small 'North Face' backpack as well, for about four bucks, as I couldn't face lugging my 70L Osprey through the jungle for four days. Loaded up with food, we set off West for Bou Sraa Falls.

The road to Bou Sraa has just been refurbished - apparently it used to be one of the worst in the country, but Tree managed the 40 kilometers OK in his tuk-tuk, with a little bit of struggling on the steeper hills. The falls are pretty popular with the locals, and foreigners have to pay an entrance fee, which goes to the local community. The falls have two main drops - a 10m head to some pools at the top, which then flow over a 15m drop to the river below. There were a whole bunch of people washing and picnicing in the higher part of the falls, and the first thing that struck us was the litter. There were sweet wrappers, cigarette boxes, and food cartons in every pool. A plastic shack has been set up near the top of the falls for people to change, and little stalls line the path to the pools, selling fruit, drinks and other stranger wares (we saw some squashed, dried monkeys for sale in one, and deer skulls in another!).

We crossed the top of the lower falls, and made our way down a steep wooden ladder (with 120 steps) down through the treeline, to the river at the bottom. This was fairly littered, but much less crowded, and quite a pretty spot. We sat down and ate our lunch, just enjoying the sunshine and relaxing. We bumped into a couple of people that we'd seen in Kompng Cham. Bruno was a French guy who'd left Paris 15 years ago after 'working too hard', and planned to travel for the rest of his life. Cambodia was his favourite spot so far, and he spent about six months of each year here. His Cambodian girlfriend was from Siem Reap, and she seemed a bit distressed about the state of people - "Everyone is very unhappy here," she said, and the locals around the falls did seem pretty miserable.

As we left, we reflected that Cambodians just don't seem to get tourism. The falls were a reasonably beautiful spot, although not so amazing that you'd go out of your way to see them. Add the litter and crap all over the place, and it just became pretty ordinary. It would be easy to mobilise all the kids around there to pick up litter once a week - they could probably pick it all up in a couple of hours, for about five bucks. We talked about it with Tree, and he agreed it was a problem, but it didn't seem to be anyone's place to tell the community how to manage this. We set off back for Sen Monorom, although we had to stop halfway, after one particularly steep hill, to cool off the tuk-tuks engine. Clearly it wasn't used to five large foreigners!

We drove through Sen Monorem, and dropped in to visit Monorom falls, which is apparently a popular local swimming spot. We arrived in the middle of a building site. With the assistance of the Japanese government, there's a project underway to divert the local river to fuel a micro-hydroelectric plant, which will provide 50% of Mondulkiri's electricity. The falls are actually quite beautiful, and it will be a shame when they're cut off (with flow probably disappearing completely in the dry season). I'm not sure what Mondulkiri's future economic plans are; everyone you speak to says it's based on tourism, but it seems there will be less and less to see every year. We took a few pictures, chatted some more, and then headed back to the guesthouse.

On the way, Tree decided to drop us off at a local hill. "You can see great sunset from here," he said. "I need to go and meet the bus." Mmmmm... fresh tourists. He parked at the base of the hill, as his tuk-tuk was clearly feeling the strain, and we walked up. It was quite a climb, but there was a pretty pagoda at the top, and views out over the lakes of Sen Monorom. Tree had given us a map as well - showing how we could walk to another hill, with views out over protected forest. "You go. Turn left, go straight, turn right. Easy - you can't miss it." Unfortunately the map wasn't to scale, and treated things like relative North & South with complete disdain. We wandered around, walkng a good few kilometers before admitting defeat, and then heading back to the hill for the sunset - slighltly dustier, as the Sen Monorom roads are all dry red clay at this time of year. The sunset was great; a bunch of students on tour had come up to see it as well, and as we headed back to the guesthouse, they roared past us in their air-conditioned Pajeros, spraying dust everywhere. We wondered why we'd let Roehn go so soon, and carried on walking!

We decided to try the next-door restaurant that night. The place was called Long Vibol, and it was quite highly rated in the Lonely Planet. It was mostly empty; the five of us arrived, and the Gloucester girls came along to join. The choice wasn't expansive - you could have noodles & vegetables, with or without pork! The beers were cold, though, and we had a good evening chatting. The girls told us that their guide for the next day had a cricked neck from a bad reaction to anti-psychotic medication, and walked with his head twisted to one side. Tree had also said they'd get a lot of fun out of him if they bought a few bottles of wine for their trip; so we were looking forward to catching up with them on the way back!

At ten o'clock Sen Monorom's power shut down. We were plunged into darkness, but luckily a couple of us had our head torches on. We paid the bill ($14 for dinner and drinks for all eight of us!), and headed back to Phnom Meas.