For once the date is accurate

We're still in Siem Reap!

We caught a 3 hour, $15 boat from Battambang to Siem Reap which eventually took 7 1/2 hours. At the port, the boat was swarmed with tuk-tuk drivers desperate for ouy $1 fare. It was incredibly, incredibly stressful, mostly because we we hot and tired and hungry and sick from malaria tablets. We picked someone at random, because how are you meant to tell what is what when you are surrounded by a dozen shouting men? We were lucky, though.

Siem Reap is the supply line to Angkor Wat. As such, it has grown fat on tourist money. There are proper streets which don't suddenly turn into dirt and there is a free hospital for children and pregnant. If every city in Cambodia had an Angkor Wat, the economy would be sorted overnight.

Our port tuk tuk driver also became our guide to Angkor Wat. Again, $12 for a day and we have seen wonders, the like of which can't be described. Angkor, and the other smaller wats, were enormous, vast, expensive and imposing structures which seem like film sets when compared to real Cambodian villages. That they have been abandoned, lost and rediscovered is both tragic and brilliant. To spend hundreds of years building something, only to lose it a century later - in Cambodia, it doesn't seem all that unnatural.

Tomorrow, some of the more distant temples, and then a swim in the waterfalls. Then a floating bamboo village, and then we travel to Pnhom Penh.