WestwardGo!

Our first impressions of Vietnam were that there was an exponential increase in the number of mopeds on the roads and that the driving style involved a lot more horn tooting and a lot less rule-following.  For mopeds pretty much anything worked as a roadway, the wrong side of the road and pavements being very popular options. Crossing the road had suddenly become an adrenaline sport! Having safely avoided the worst taxi scams we made it safely to our hotel and wrote off the rest of the day. Sadly the next day had Mike feeling poorly so we didn't manage to do much exploring beyond making it to a restaurant where we were given lots of tips from a wonderful waitress.  We needed to buy some stamps to finally send the postcards we had been carrying around since Pai (Thailand) and so headed to the central post office, a tourist attraction in its own right and situated next to Vietnam's Notre Dame. On the way we browsed a large indoor marketplace for more s

A short flight in a tiny plane had us landing in the beautiful Cambodia.  Our first confusion was to do with money, we couldn't find anywhere to get Cambodia Riel cash before arrival and bizarrely this continued after arriving. It turns out the whilst the official currency is the Riel everybody uses US dollars. As it is a coin-free country all change less than $1 is given in Riel. This took us a while to get our heads around and made Cambodia far more expensive than Thailand for items such as drinking water and market items.   After surviving yet another hair-raising taxi ride to our hotel we headed out for dinner and enjoyed a Khmer curry with Lok Lak beef and garlic sautéed morning glory. We were much relieved to note that Cambodian food is less mad about chillies than Thailand. We then made a surprising discovery of some superb Italian gelato before browsing the night markets for souvenirs.   Up early the next morning we crossed town to the meeting point