10TH - 14TH NOVEMBER

We woke up at 5.30am to catch our early connecting minibus for the boat trip to Siem Reap. There was only us in the minibus, so we got to the jetty with a minimum of fuss. The boat had been described in the Rough Guide as a cross between a school bus and a torpedo, which wasn’t a bad description. I thought it looked like a hydrofoil, but it turned out not to be. Our seats were pretty comfortable, but we’d heard that the real highlight was travelling on the roof, so it wasn’t long after we set off that we ventured outside to see! It was fantastic - anywhere in Europe and the doors would have been locked on “Health and Safety” grounds - but here you were allowed to climb out of the door and walk along the side of the boat then climb up onto the roof - quite exhilarating on a speeding boat!! The scenery we went through was awesome - the river was lined with little communities of people living in just the kind of bamboo huts which we’d stayed in in Thailand, and

pottering about the river fishing. Some of the huts had a piece of land smaller than our garden at home, so it was obvious these people were real river dwellers! We stopped briefly to pick up some passengers from a broken down boat, but other than that it was full speed all the way! After around three hours we passed from the Tonle Sap river to the lake, which we could see on the map that it was pretty big - but we weren’t quite prepared for it’s enormity!! It was more like a sea - it took us over three hours to cross it even at high speed, and in the middle you could only just make out land in one direction, and that was a hill!!

As we cruised into Siem Reap we were met by the sight of lots more people living on boats, with loads of children all enthusiastically waving and yelling “hello” to us. Westerners are a big hit with Cambodians, none more so than the children, who are just the