WORLD OF WILL

We had a lovely couple of days exploring Phnom Penh before spending quite a harrowing day visiting 'The Killing Fields', scene of some of the atrocities committed by crackpot desp ot Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge forces, an experience made all the more harrowing by doing it on the hottest day we have yet experienced. It was the sort of heat I imagine you'd experience on Venus. We left Phnom Penh the next day, using a local bus for local people. The bus was due to leave at 8.45am, but this being Cambodia, that meant it didn't start its journey until after 9.3 0am and then seem ed to make stops at every street corner on the way out of the capital and every random cluster of houses thereafte r. It meant that our journey was far lon ger and more torturous than it in any way needed to be. At one stop we were boarded by a marauding gang of shouty women selling eggs, bread and imaginativ ely carved pineapple pieces. Also, Cambodians have a weird penchant for wearing surgical ...

Walking into Koh Samui airport is like walking into a Caribbean resort hotel. The roofs are all thatched with palm leaves while the waiting room and boarding gates are all 'al fresco' - it's very laid back and relaxing. Which was good because we were about to board a propeller plane run b y an airline we'd never heard of before. We flew from Koh Samui to the mainland and then got a series of minivans, full of Russian and Aussie expats, to the Cambodian border. They were all doing a 'visa run' - dipping into Cambodia purely to return to Thailand on a fresh visa - and seemed to be old hands at this but we were novices and, as such, the whole experience seemed quite traumatic and stressful. You arr ive on the Thai side and instantaneously a swarm of locust-like locals strip the van of all its luggage in a bid to porter it to the visa control in return for cash. That visa control is about 10 feet away from the van. Once you've wrestled your bags back off them,...

The jour ney from Bangkok to Koh Samui was a bit of an epic. We got to Bangkok train stat ion in good t i me, only to find that our train didn't exist. Due to the flooding, a large section of the track was underwater and we'd have to get a bus to a station that was accessible to something other than submarine. That turned out to be three very long hours away. When we finally got to it, the train was depre ssingly tatty but we were still excited to see our private cabin with its large bench seat that folded out to become bunk beds - it was like being in a Bond fi lm! Except that 007 probably didn't have an apalling prison-issue meal and a sleepless night on a paving slab of a mattress. At 5am we were woken by a surly guard, wearing just his vest and pants, and told to get off at the next station. The rest of the morning was spent in the back of a pick-up truck, on another bus, a slow boat that stank of petrol and one mo re pick-up truck taxi . The whole journey had t...

Just north of Kanchanaburi is the Erawan waterfall. It is about a mile long, falls over seven tiers and is beautiful. It is a serene and peaceful place where monks came to pray and tourists come to walk/ swim / gawp . We went with some friends we'd made in Kanchanaburi and the five of us walked up and decided to have a swim somewhere around tier five. It was here that nature turned against us. Claire was first in the pool and after a minute or so she started to scream and thrash abo ut in the water - it was like a scene from Jaws . What was happening below the surface was that hundreds of little fish were nip ping away at her feet. It was basically a free version of those fish foot spas and the little blighters w ere feasti ng on our dead skin and bacteria - only it felt like these fish had teeth and a grudge. I suppose after weeks of eating odd creatures myself, this was some sort of payback. Then I got into a fight with a monkey. It was trying to go through our bags to ...

Our last day in Vietnam was spent in Ninh Binh province. We were taken around some temple s and pagodas where some ancient king was buried. Legend has it that this king used to ride ar ou n d on a wat er buffalo being all regal - well, as regal as it's possible to be whilst sat on what is ess entially a big cow. Outside the temple you could re-enact this event on an actual real-life water buffalo of your very own and, as you know, I'm not one to turn down a photo opportunity with an amusing ani mal. Later that same day we were taken along Tam Coc river by boat, through vast rice fields and acres of water lilies, in the shadow of an amazing range of limestone mountains. Our punt was masterfully rowed by a wizened old crone, occasionally using her wizened old feet, and she took us through cave s and tunnels in this mystical land. It was whilst emerging from one of these tunnels that w e were set upon by an armada of little boat s, piloted by local women trying to sell us sn...