The entire town of Banlung is built on soil thats brick red and that creates a dirty red coloured dust that settles on absolutely everything - the bus that drove us there was spotlessly white when we started and when we arrived was coated in mud red; all the trees and plants and sides of buildings all have a reddy brown top layer, and just walking around in town for a few mintues covers your legs in the red dust that makes the place look so rustic and unique.

We stayed at a place called Tribal guesthouse which in high season would have been such a cool social place packed with backpackers about to do jungle treks in the Cambodian rainforest and rooms would have been $10 a night. But we were there low season, it was basically empty and we got rooms for $4. Pierre was here so I felt really ill and wasn't up for doing much for the first 2 days I was there.



The third day, we did a one day jungle trek in Virachey National Park. We drove on the back of our guides motorbike for about an hour and had to listen to him tell moralising stories and legends from his childhood about kings and princesses and laugh to himself whenever he made jokes.. We were led by a tiny Chunchiet man (one of the minorities groups in Cambodia but they make up the majority in Ratanakiri and are among the most deprived people in Cambodia) and his dog who ran ahead of us and who our guide told us was there in case there were still mines..

The only reason why anyone would want to go to Kratie is if you need to travel through it to get to another part of Cambodia, or if you want to go dolpin spotting. There is absolutely nothing to do in the town - which you can walk the entire lenght of in 10 mintues - and Shapiro ended up having to stay here by himself for 3 days because he had a toe infection and couldn't move on. Lol. So when me and Tom arrived, he was very relieved naturally, but still had to stay longer because I wanted to go see the dolpins. They are rare freshwater Irawaddy dolphins that live in the Mekong river, and its thought that there are only about 100 left. So we went with 2 english girls and sat on a boat for about an hour trying to take pictures of the glimpses of the dolphins we saw whenever they briefly popped their heads out of the water. And this was the best picture I got. It was a very frustrating day.

I spent our final day in Siem Reap getting a traditinal Khmer massage and it was extremely intense - I had two ladies kneading and stepping on me all over, I had my body bent in the weirdest positions whilst they massaged muscles that I didn't even know I had, all whilst listening to the strangest high pitched wailing noises that they put on as 'music' in the background.

Shapiro decided to go with the 4 guys we were with to the temples of Angkor and then head to the jungle in east Cambodia, while Tom and I decided to head for the beach in the south of Cambodia for a few days of relaxing and sun-worshipping.

We went to a little beach resort called Sihanoukville and stayed in a really nice complex of wooden bungalows in a Western owned place called Monkey Republic with really cool bar and restaurant attached and pool table that was 2 minutes from the best beaches.

The beaches were incredible where you'd sit on sunloungers that belonged to beach restaurants and they were so close to the water so if you got too hot you could just step off your lounger and walk two steps into the sea. There were children on the beach that would come up to you as you were trying to relax and sun bathe trying to sell you bracelets, and they would not leave you alone - one of the more bitchier girls threatened me by saying "you don't buy from me, you get Trouble". And then older women would come and also sit on your lounger and offer you pedicures, manicures, threading, massages, and then there would be beggars that would come and beg for money. The whole experience was so unrelaxing at first having to say no to loads of different people out to get your money, but then you'd theyd leave you alone once they realised they weren't getting anywhere.
Another form of hassle would be westerners that were out promoting different bars and clubs. There was this one lady who we heard coming from practically the other end of the beach. She was screaming and raving about her bar Utopia in the most shrill high-pitched and irritating voice, and me and Tom just looked at each other and vowed to stay as far away from her and her bar that night as was physically possible. After dinner we bumped into this lady and a bunch of her bar promoters and she turned out to be actually a bit of a legend and we ended up making friends with her so that we were her favourite people for the night and went to her bar where she gave us as many free shots as we could take and endless vodka redbull. She was called Polly and was way older than we'd thought and looked a bit like a cocaine addict and alcoholic, and had all these scars up her arm.. but she was still legendary and kept telling loads of her customers that tiffany and tom were her favourite people and telling her bar staff to get us free shots. It was pretty awesome.

We got a bus from Saigon to the capital of Cambodia and found a guesthouse to stay in with some guys from our bus and who had also been on our tour of the Cu Chi tunnels - an American from Texas, an Irish, a Brazilian and a Dutch guy. The guesthouse had such a great chilled out vibe, with a communal lounge area with tv that played scrubs all day and movies in the evening and speakers where you could play your own music from. It had hammocks strung up around the place, potted plants everywhere, a pool table, there were children and dogs running around because it was family run and it was built on stilts right on the lake so that when you looked through gaps in the floorboards you could see water underneath. And there were some interesting characters too - like a French girl called Lydia who made us want to stick pins in our eyes.

When we were having dinner, a bunch of children came up to us trying to sell us photocopied books. It was kind of sad seeing them having to work and sell to tourists, and some of the more clever ones with better english would tell you that they needed your money to buy food or go to school. There was one boy called Wee who came and sang a song to us he'd learnt in school where he pointed at me and sang 'This is my mother, niiice to meeet youu, nice to meet you too' and then at Shapiro 'This is my father, nice to meet you, nice to meet you too' then at himself 'This is my brother etc' then at Tom 'This is my ladyboy, nice to meet you, nice to meet you too' which was hilarious! Then he brought 3 little girls, his book-selling children friends over to sit with us and me, Shapiro and Tom sat and played with them for ages tickling them, playing hand-clapping games, one of them did my hair in a cool french plait, they tried teaching us Khmer numbers for a bit, and when they found out we were from London one of the girls goes in her little cambodian accent "Lubbly Jubbly! Top Banana! Diamond Geezer!" and "Oi oi Saveloy!" - it was SO CUTE, she was this 8 yr old Cambodian girl that must have learnt phrases from tourists. Amazing.

The next day we got in a tuk tuk and visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and learnt about the Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot. It was just as gruesome as the War Remnants museum in Saigon. The building used to be a secondary school which was transformed into a prison and interrogation centre - all the classrooms were turned into cells where people were subject to torture and then were killed or taken to extermination camps outside the city. Most of the population of Phnom Penh and other major towns were removed to the countryside to work as peasants so that the regime could succeed in turning the country into a socialist agrarian collective. And what the prison was for was to carry out Pol Pot's mass extermination of intellectuals, teachers, writers, any educated people and their families - even wearing glasses was a sign of intelligence. So the prison has been left largely untouched except is now filled with galleries of photos of starved tortured victims, there are rooms upstairs with beds and instruments of torture and pictures of how they were used.
We then took our tuk tuk to the Killing Fields to see the mass graves of the dead. Theres a giant tall white stupa built housing rows and rows of unearthed skulls on glass shelves, and there are untouched graves of people that were beaten to death, shot, beheaded or tied up and buried alive. There are trees with signs that tell you how they were used eg. "Magic Tree. The tree was used as a tool to hang a loudspeaker which make sound louder to avoid the moan of victims while they were being executed".
As the American guy we were with put it, it was a very sobering day in the hedonistic life of a backpacker, and I ended up feeling really homesick.


It was Tom's birthday whilst we were in Phnom Penh so me and Shapiro woke early to buy him his birthday cake. For presents we gave him a colouring book, a book of kakuro, a minnie mouse rucksack, and a chest pull/chest expander so he could work on his guns.
We tried going to the Cambodian courthouses to watch the war trials that we knew were going on but didn't succeed so went to the shooting range instead where one of the guys we were with got to fire a tommy gun.
Then we went to the Royal Palace and silver pagoda which were really pretty.

That night Hugo and Hannah and their travel group joined us so I got to have a proper girly chat and gossip for the first time in like 4 weeks. It was so great seeing friends from back home seeing as I'd felt so homesick the day before, and we went out with everyone from our guesthouse to a floating bar called Pontoon to get Tom wasted for his birthday.