07 MAY 2009

I'm sat in the 'Singing Tree Cafe', Siem Reap, Cambodia.
We eventually arrived after spending 10 hours in Kuala Lumpur airport. It's a nice airport but not nice enough for that! We didn't manage to catch any sleep as we had to stay awake to keep an eye on the luggage. After watching the 'Friends' episode where Ross explains the concept of 'Oonagi'(vigilance in self defense, basically), we were in a heightened state of Oonagi all night, not helped by a phone call from my mother warning me not to get locked up in a Cambodian prison. Not that it's on the top of my 'to do' list...! We only had to relocate ourselves once after an Indian gentleman insisted on trying to sustain a conversation at 3am along the lines of 'will your father pay for me to come to England?'. I think I was a little rude to him but it's not the sort of chitchat we really wanted at that time of the morning!

The temples at Angkor are stunningly impressive. We can consider ourselves fully templed-out now, having very much made the most of our three day pass. Ta Prohm, the Tomb Raider temple, was visited twice! Of course we attempted a movie remake, earning us some strange looks from tourists pretending not to have seen the film... I'm sure they weren't all there to discover the intricacies of Khmer architecture though... My language skills were really put to the test on out second visit, with a German couple wanting tourist information and a French group assuming that I was a Swiss artist. My French is far better than my limited German phrases from school but I found trying to establish why they thought I was an artist from Switzerland far harder going than talking to the Germans. It was actually quite fun... I managed to get across what we're doing this year by saying 'I study biology. One year in Malaysia. Many tree. Biology. Apes.'and they seemed delighted to have such an intelligent conversation with someone other than their guide who seemed to be speaking something from another planet. I never did work out what the French were whittling on about but they mentioned mountains more than once.

Yesterday we cycled out to see Tonle Sap lake but didn't fancy paying for the boat ride at the other end. As a result we saw only mud and a police checkpoint. The Slovenian we'd picked up along the way and a guy from the village who knew far too much about Southampton Football Club were interesting company for our cycle back to town though. We then went out to the temples, covering over 50 km in the blistering heat! On the way back I saw something completely unexpected... macaques throwing themselves into the moat surrounding Angkor Wat... really strange!