Angkor Wat and its surrounding temples are The Main Event in Cambodia – the country's Cash Cow - if you didn't know that before you arrive in town, you realise soon after. On the bus ride we saw more big hotels than we'd seen in the whole of Cambodia thus far, and the centre of Siem Reap is packed with tourist-friendly restaurants and bars.

We stayed close to the centre at 'Hotel 89' - easily one of the best hotels we've stayed at thus far [thanks again to Emily]. The level of service was unreal: They fixed us up with breakfast each morning, helped us get a tuk tuk driver to take us round the temples, found us a local gym we could go to, organised a massage for Sarah after a hard day of touring, booked our bus tickets on to Battambang and even gifted us two cotton scarves as we left. The icing on the cake came after our first day looking round the temples though - we disembarked from our tuk tuk at dusk, hot, tired and covered in dust, and were welcomed back by a shiny bellboy waiting at the hotel entrance with a silver tray bearing two damp hand-towels and ice cold water. Not bad for $18 a night!

Angkor was top of my list of things to see in Cambodia, primarily as it gave me an opportunity to pretend to be Indiana Jones. I didn't have the hat or whip but I did manage a modest bit of adventuring – climbing up onto the roof of one of the ruined temples and running around until Sarah spotted me and told me to get down. Whilst Angkor Wat is obviously the most famous temple, there are actually around 40 temple complexes in the area outside Siem Reap, created by the Khmer empire over a period of a couple of hundred years by successive rulers as they roamed the area. The buildings they left behind are a mix of temples, tombs, shrines to their parents, entire state capitals, and even ceremonial hydraulic works. A lot to see!

You can visit the temples by bus, or even by bike, but the best way is to hire a tuk tuk for a couple of days as some of the temples 30-odd km away from Siem Reap. We had a really nice driver called Chandy (who Sarah kept on referring to as 'Chun Li' – obviously she's never played Street Fighter). He had just re-enrolled in college so whilst we explored each temple, he sat waiting in his tuk tuk revising English Literature in the 30 degree heat.

Outside of each temple is a forest of stalls selling food and drinks from ice boxes, postcards and beads - most manned by very persistent small children. As they see you pulling up they all sprint from their stalls to mob you, and don't let up till you enter the temple or leave on your tuk tuk. They've all learned the same stock phrases, so in the few metres from tuk tuk to temple you have the same conversation over and over...
'Hey Lady! You wan' cold water? Coca cola? One dollar OK? One dollar. Cheap price'
'No thank you. I've got some water already'
'Maybe you wan' more. Very hot today.'
'No thanks, I'm ok'
'OK maybe later'
'No thanks'
'You think about it. See temple, come back, maybe change your mind.'
'Maybe'
'OK later, you wan' water you buy from me OK?'
...and then on leaving the temple...
'Hey Lady, you say “Maybe”! One water one dollar'

We went through this routine at every one of the 17 temples we visited.

In trying to decide which were our favourite temples we developed a series of evaluation criteria. The ones we enjoyed most were;
1.partially overgrown
2.partially ruined
3.labyrinthine
4.intricately decorated
5.NOT covered in scaffolding

So whilst our visit to Angkor Wat at sunrise was a real highlight, we actually prefered Bayon in the Angkor Thom complex with its complicated structure of enclosures and carved faces, and Preah Khan's tumble-down stones dissolving into the forest...

Kampot sits just east of Bokor National Park – a huge forested area sprawling over a range of hills that look out over the south coast. At the turn of the 20th century one of the park's summits was colonised by the French as a retreat from the intense Cambodian heat, and turned into a holiday town complete with a post office, church, hotel and casino. The town was abandoned to the Khmer Rouge in the mid-70s, and terminally damaged in 1979 when the hill-top became the site of one of the Khmer 's last stands against the Vietnamese. Having scaled a sheer cliff face to reach the town the Vietnamese occupied the post office, and attacked the Khmer-held Catholic church a couple of hundred metres away. After the battle, the remains of the town lay abandoned for some 30 years, given over to local wildlife including tigers, bears and porcupines.


This neglect ended in 2000, when the hill was bought by Sokha Industries, a Japanese conglomerate that seems to own at least half of the tourist offerings in Cambodia (they even own the tourism rights to the Angkor temples). Sokha is now in the process of revitalising Bokor's status as a playground for the rich by building a new casino and 5* hotel on the mountain, serviced by what is probably the best road in all Cambodia. This project seems to employ most of the local population in all manner of tasks, from checking every square inch of the new road with little hammers, to bulldozing the forest and turfing the hillside leading to the casino. We're not quite clear as to what effect this turf will have on increasing revenues, but clearly someone seems to think that green grass is integral to the 5* experience. The turfing process was incredibly interesting for us to watch (no really): a daisy chain link of 25 people stretched up the hillside, passing down wicker baskets of earth and passing up small pieces of turf, in a human chain. We've never seen anything quite like it.

We took a day trip into Bokor to get to the summit, and trekked up through a 2km stretch of the forest, guided by a 'ranger' in full park keepers' uniform, armed with an AK47. It seems that this was more of a gimmick than anything else, as the most dangerous thing we saw were butterflies! However, the walk itself was pretty hard-going, involving scrambling up steep rocks and avoiding the creepers that threatened to trip you up at almost every step, all in super-humidity. I have never seen a human being sweat as much as James did during the climb. It's left us both excited about proper trekking in Borneo, although I for one am not sure James will survive it without an IV fluid drip.

The road to Sihanoukville is a blue-grey tarmac patchwork with red clay hard shoulders, running Roman-straight through palm-dotted paddyfields. From Phnom Penh it's a four hour bus ride straight south-east, until the tarmac gives way to gravel and swerves south to avoid the mountains that rear up before the coast.

Concrete, corrugated iron, timber and palm fronds are the building materials of choice for the few houses that line the road. Most are built up on stilts in the traditional style, creating a shady open-sided living area under the house. Here, whole families rock in hammocks or lie prostrate on wooden sleeping platforms, whiling away the heat of midday. Their dogs and cows play chicken with the traffic.

Each house has farmland out back and some kind of roadside commercial venture out-front. Everyone's working an angle - mini-diners selling noodles, ice boxes full of fizzy drinks, women selling fresh pineapple and mango, and rows of pepsi bottles filled with petrol for over-ambitious moped riders. This seems to be a very popular trade, but i've yet to see anyone actually stop to fill up their bikes.

The men manning the stalls have an interesting strategy for keeping cool – exposing their bellies to the air by rolling up their t-shirts and tying them at the back. Leathery-faced farmers wearing crop-tops.

Sihanoukville – named after King Sihanouk - is the main beach town on the south coast of Cambodia, but as it's officially off-season now the restaurants and hotels were nearly empty. We checked into a nice hotel a short walk from the beach, with a pool and all of four other people staying there. Empty sun-loungers, empty bar, bored staff playing Beyonce and Rihanna 24/7 (I've only heard Celine Dion once in Cambodia thus far. They still love their ballads over here, but prefer more modern pop versions).

Luckily for us - but not the farmers in crop-tops - the rainy season is the latest it's been for years. Roads are dusty and the fields are parched – slowly turning the dull straw colour of well-worn cricket pitches. We get a few good hours of sunbathing in each morning before the wind kicks up and the clouds turn mean. There's a lot of thunder, but not much rain yet.