Whiling away the days in Siem Reap…

Posted by on Aug 16, 2012 in Cambodia | 0 comments The guesthouse we are staying at for our ten days in Siem Reap is about 3km out of town and down a bumpy dirt track away from the main road.  Our French friend Lara had stayed at the Bloom Garden guesthouse last year, so it was here that we had organised to meet up. The days when we weren’t out for any full days we spent the mornings doing school work on the top verandah after a superb ...
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Same same but different…

Posted by on Aug 15, 2012 in Cambodia | 2 comments We factored in a  ‘slow day’ where we caught up on some school work and spent an afternoon riding bikes into town for dinner and back before tackling the temples again the next day.  This time we left relatively early at 7.30am and had organised a guide to come with us in the tuk tuk as we were going to include the big one – Angkor Wat Temple. First though we stopped at Sras Srang a...
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It takes a village to raise a child…

Posted by on Aug 13, 2012 in Cambodia | 5 comments Most of you may be aware that we have been hosts for Helpers Exchange for a number of years now.  In a nutshell, we provide accommodation and meals in exchange for a set amount of hours work per day. This arrangement has proved to be a good experience for our girls to meet and interact with people from around the world, and of course a fantastic opportunity for those who are travelling (one that...
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Temples aplenty

Posted by on Aug 12, 2012 in Cambodia | 1 comment Naively, I thought Angkor Wat (the largest Hindu temple complex in the world), consisted of just the one large sprawling temple.  I had no idea it was part of an extensive archaeological site stretching some 400km2 with temples of differing styles.  One of the most important sites in south-East Asia, it contains the magnificent remains of the different capitals of the Khmer empire from the 9th...
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It’s the journey not the destination…

Posted by on Aug 8, 2012 in Cambodia, Thailand | 13 comments It was with a touch of trepidation we started out on our first land border crossing as we had read about many of the scams that exist with this particular Thai-Cambodian border.   Even though the buses are faster we have always enjoyed train journeys  so we set an early alarm for 4am for a 4.30am taxi ride to Bangkok’s main station Hua Lamphong,  a beautiful building built in Italian...
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