Hotel Santepheap Kratie (Kracheh)

... from the strong late morning sun. I admired the floating village on the banks of the Mekong. I rode further and further south and randomly decided to turn off at a small dirt track and head further into the countryside. I travelled through rice paddy fields filled with labouring men and women and I eventually reached a farm and narrowly avoided knocking over several cows!<br><br>At about 11 I turned back and headed north ...

... tree here. A mobile was passed to me and on the other end was the organiser from Phnom Penh, I chatted to him for about 5 minutes during which time my tree had actually been planted. Rather disappointed, I hammered in the sign with my name and country on it and had lots of photos taken with it.<br><br>From there we pushed the bikes through rice paddy fields and thick mud and I was shown at the other end of the island the Vietnamese floating village ...

... to get some air.<br><br>I started the hour long cycle ride back to Kratie and stopped off at a Buddhist temple situated a few hundred metres down a dirt track on the top of a small hill. I had the same idea as two Dutch twenty somethings and together we climbed the hundreds of steps together to the top where we were greeted by a monk cleaning the small 10 metre square temple. The view from the top through the trees streched many ...

... we stopped for tea in a nice restaurant that serves typical Khmer food. It's run by (of course) some of Rog and Sue's mates. We ordered and our delicious meals came 10 minutes after each other as they only had one cook! Some more ex-pats turned up. Three Aussies who work for WWF, two of them relatively hippyish and young and the older one slightly deaf. <br><br>I arrived back, brushed my teeth and fell straight asleep when my head hit the pillow.<br><br>

... only living in some parts of the Mekong river in Cambodia and Laos. <br><br>The next day we got up, hired a motorbike and off we went to go dolphin spotting. It took us about 40 mins, driving through village after village. we noticed a huge contrast between here and Laos with villages just constant and way more people.<br>Got to the boat yard and chartered a boat for $9 each to go up the Mekong. The river was so so ...

... us to pay him before he showed us the bikes; we insisted we do it the other way around. Turns out, the bikes weren&#8217;t actually at the shop; we had to take a short ride on the back of a motorcycle down the street to a random house to get them. Under the house were four tired-looking bikes, stacks of building materials, and a random guy hanging out in a hammock. Weird. The bikes we were given had flat tires, sketchy brakes, and ...

... school, than Oxford.<br><br>The &#8216;that&#8217;, was asking Soprey where I can get one of these ace &#8216;Cosmic&#8217; motor oil T-shirts I see everywhere here. Turns out you can only get them by buying motor oil. Looks like I will be getting some motor oil then.<br><br>As they talk about this and that and about how ill I am, the lady is squeezing my thumb over the dish to take a sample. I find myself trying to block the pain in my head, the thick, fluffy, viscous head, the brick dust ...

... flapdoodle") fades out in a couple of seconds yes, but if &#8216;fading away&#8217; is to be opposed to &#8216;burning out&#8217; than in this context it must take a much longer time. So if you burn out on a Saturday, and I start to fade away on that same Saturday, the chances are high that when I lurch out of bed at 11ish and casually strudel down the Leaf &amp; Bean on Sunday afternoon for a lovely sandwich and some salt &amp; vinegar crisps and a beer&#8230; You will not ...

... hired him for all 3 days but decided we wanted to bike the 2nd day. He got a little testy with us towards the end of the day because we wanted to get our money's worth and fit in one last temple before the sunset one but other than that we were pretty happy with him. We have heard some horror stories of tuk tuk drivers forcing their "clients' to walk from temple to temple (which is ridiculous since that's what they are hired for and the temples are FAR ...

... the streets were flooded several feet high and the downpour was so heavy. <br><br>While looking for a place to say we were able to check the town out a bit and were honestly disappointed. The book raved about the architecture and other than a few cute buildings here and there, I thought the town was not worth stopping off at all. You can take a half day trip to see some very rare and almost extinct dolphins but since it was raining (and we've seen ...