Edinburgh Girl

Our journey to Siem Reap was long. Instead of going straight to Siem Reap from Sihanoukville, we had to travel back to Phnom Penh and then wait for an hour at the bus station to change on to the Siem Reap bus. This meant it took us 12 hours to get there! We've definitely did our fair share of long bus journeys on the trip. I feel I can do any bus journey now after being on one for 25 hours from Laos to Vietnam. Although I vowed never to do something like that again! We stayed at Sizen Retreat and Spa in a lovely bungalow surrounded by trees. We had a restaurant beside our bungalow and a great pool. We arrived quite late at night to check in so got food at the restaurant and then had an early night. The next day we went to Peace Café for lunch. We sat outside in their massive garden enjoying the sunshine. It's a vegetarian health café and they hold yoga classes their too. We thought we would have a healthy meal after all the unhealthy food we had been gorging on. ...

The quickest and smoothed border crossing we had was from Vietnam into Cambodia. We travelled from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh with the bus company Cambodia Luong. The whole border experience was pretty much stress free. We had been dreading each journey that had a border crossing as we knew that meant hanging about waiting ages in queues to get your stamp for leaving a country and your visa for entering the next. It worked out great as our bus company basically did everything for us. We gave our passports and visa payment of $35 to our guide on the bus and he filled out the forms for us and handed our passports in to the immigration officers. All we had to do was go up to the Vietnam immigration when they called our name to show we were leaving the country. All in all, it only took us about half an hour which was such a relief! Our journey into Phnom Penh was absolutely fine. We arrived into the city centre and got a tuk tuk to our hote...

I was really surprised arriving in Ho Chi Minh City. I hadn't enjoyed the madness of Hanoi and thought we were going back to the chaos of there, but although Ho Chi Minh has more people it seems like bizarrely they have their traffic slightly in order. I'm not saying there's not a million motorbikes coming towards you from all angles when you think about crossing the road but at least here when you press the button to cross, the traffic stop when the red light shows and you can actually cross the road without fear of a random motorbike crossing your path. The buzz of Ho Chi Minh felt good to be walking through.       Our hotel Cat Huy was down an small close past some local people's houses. I wasn't pleased at the location as I didn't like walking down the close in the dark especially as it was just local's houses because that meant there wouldn't be many people going about at nigh...