Day 13 Today is my birthday. Waking up in Cambodia... pretty cool. As the days have passed and the trip has progressed, we've started a pattern of beginning our days later and later. Today was no exception. We rolled out of bed around 9:30am, and by the time we were ready to make our way out into the city, we had done some internet surfing and b...

I met up with Joe and his friend in the 4 thousand islands for a couple of days. The islands are located in the very southern part of Laos in the Mekong River. There are hundreds of small islands dotting the region. We just spent a couple of days there hanging out in hammocks, renting bikes and exploring the island, and getting some reading done...

To be honest with you we didn't like Phnom Penh very much, it was a very hostile feeling place and the level of poverty was clear to see. I feel sorry for Cambodia Its only not known war for the last 10 years and it was very evident. The museums hear from the atrocity's of the Khmer Rouge are very moving and upsetting. We first went to the S21 a...

On a marche toute la journee. Au programme : le Musee National, le magnifique Palais Royal et sa Pagode d'Argent. La Pagode tient son nom de son sol compose de dalles d'argent. J'ai ete assez decue par cette derniere, moi qui pensait voir un truc qui claque comme la Galerie des Glaces de Versailles. En fait, les 3/4 du sol sont caches par des ta...

Here's a depressing one folks. Unfortunately, a visit to Phnom Penh is not complete without a visit to The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek and the Tuol Sleng Prison, more commonly known as S-21. From 1975 until January 1979, under the leadership of Pol Pot , the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge (Red Khmer) regime controlled all of Cambodia. They systema...

Five days is a scandolously short time to attempt to visit Cambodia, but it's all the time that Dan and I had available, so we tried to pack as much as we could into a little taster of the 'bodge. We started in Phnom Penh. We started out pretty early on Saturday morning and didn't head back to our hotel room until we were well and truly tourist...

Everyday I'm in Cambodia I have to pinch myself. From the first moment I arrived I couldn't quite believe that I was "in Cambodia". Cambodia was in the news and awful lot when I was a child and stories of the atrocitites have obviously lodge deaplyinto my subconscious. My first impression was that this place wasn't as scarey as I thought it woul...

Phnom Penh is now a small but busy city: shady tree-lined boulevards lit with French lamp posts, a legacy of its colonial heritage; wide grassy walkways where crowds gather in the evening to play badminton, practise tai chi, socialise and flirt;  a relaxed riverfront overlooked by a string of restaurants and cafes; bustling markets selling ever...

Vanna and I both wake up that first morning around 4:15 AM or so. That's okay, because Mom comes in to get us around 5:30 and I've had time to write in my journal. We walk down Mao Tse Tung Blvd. two blocks away from the hotel to the building where Mom's family lived on the second floor. Below, there used to be a jewelry shop that her parents ra...

Arrived into Phnom Penh from Siem Reip just as the sun was setting accross the lake. The bacckpacker area in Phnom Penh is called lakeside and as you can guess the guest houses look out onto the lake. A beautiful orange sky awaited our arrival and it really is serene looking out over the lake at sunset. We stayed in one of the main three guest h...