Today is our final final day of our holiday. Today we actually leave for home. Taking advantage of the opportunity we sleep in very late, and when we wake we organise our stuff and pack for the final time. Ready to leave now, but with our flight not til 7:30 we have some time to kill.

We head off into town with our hearts set on finding a massage. The streets between our hotel and the centre are littered with massage places so we find one which looks good to us and pop inside. Mrs Tom opts for a traditional Khmer/Thai massage and I for an aromatherapy relaxation one. Mrs Tom also decides to get her finger and toe nails tarted up too. Both our massages are ok, though not amazing, and when I come back downstairs my massage lady had doubled up on Mrs Tom to speed her nail treatment along. They do a reasonable job on the nails (so she tells me, I have no idea) and after drinking my tea we settle up with the massage folks and set off for lunch.

We find somewhere not too far away fromthe massage place, and away from the main centre, and sit down for yet another good meal, our last in Cambodia and last of the trip. We sit with our drinks for a while, and then head off for the more mainstream area. On the way we pass the “old” market and peruse the stalls and I take a fancy to an oil painting. We have a look around the chap’s stall but I’m kind of set on the first one I saw, so I agree to buy it from the seller, who wraps it up nicely for me in a rather pretty looking tube made of palm leaf.

Happy with my picture we move on to a cafe bar type place where we both have a beer and watch the world go by. It’s not long before Mrs Tom spots the banana split on the menu, with cookie crumble I might add, so we order one. Though in appearance it is a bit more like an ice cream sundae we don’t hold that against them and scoff it down, very nice it is too. Once I’ve finished my second beer, it’s time to head back to the hotel to grab our stuff and head to the airport, so we tuk tuk our way back to the hotel.

Once we’ve cleared out our room and ensured we’ve not left anything behind, we drag our bags down to the foyer and check out of the hotel. I’d already arranged with a tuk tuk driver to pick us up at 5 and dutifully he is waiting for us when we emerge from the hotel. Like a gent he takes our bags from us and loads them onto his tuk tuk and on we clamber too.

It’s further to the airport than I remember but still not more than a 15 minute journey. Soon we’re at the entrance and we grab our bags and say goodbye to Mr B, our driver. We’re 10 minutes too early to check in so we sit and fill out our immigration departure cards and by the time we are done, a nice queue has formed in front of us at the now open check-in desks. It still goes quickly and then it’s off to the payment booth – you have to pay $25 a head to be allowed to leave the country in Cambodia as a foreigner ($18 as a national), so I hand over our cash. The lady checks the notes very carefully (which I’ve just gotten out of an ATM) and hands one of them back to me, pointing at a rough edge on one end of the note. This rather snookers us because we have no more money, and I didn’t really want to pay by card if I could help it. I discover that the offending rough edge is just the result of some sticky, Sellotape sort of clear paper which I peel off, and thankfully the official is then happy to accept the note and give us our stamp.

It’s then through immigration and security checking and finally we are in to the waiting area. We only have three usable dollars to our name now as I’ve ballsed up the money calculations, so we sit outside a coffee shop with no coffee wating for our flight to be called. With 20 minutes until the planned take off time I begin to get concerned that we’re going to be late, and at 15 minutes to go we start to board. Amazingly the flight still takes off at 19:30 on the dot, how’s that for efficiency.

The flight is a short one of pretty much an hour dead, so when we land at the other side we have around four hours until our next flight is due to take off. This though is taken care of by the airport systems, who happily while away our time for us. First we go through immigration and then collect our bags. We then go through customs, and then out along the exit complex and up to the 4th floor for departures, where we have to go through immigration and customs again. By the time we get through all of that there are less than two hours to go until take off. We wander around the shops for a bit, nicking free samples of goodies along the way and eventually find our gate. Once through a boarding card check we are able to sit down and await our flight on our backsides. Mrs Tom manages to finish her book before the flight boards, which turns out to be around 20 minutes late, and eventually we find ourselves on the airplane in our seats.

Not so lucky with the flight this time, we get two seats on the right of the plane next to another chap, so no spreading out for a comfy lay down. Almost as soon as the flight takes off this bloke is snoring loudly, and a chap three places to my left across the aisle is snoring even louder, his body cavorting in his sleep like he’s having some sort of fit. Thankfully the fitting business stops eventually, but the stereo snoring continues for much of the flight.

I said it at the beginning and I’ll say it now, Thai Air is awesome. As I sit here right now having my breakfast served, I’ve got loads of leg room, I’ve had a free beer and wine with my dinner a few hours ago (chicken curry, very nice), my seat reclines without amputating anyone’s legs, there are plenty of toilets, the staff are polite and friendly, it’s just fab. And all on economy too.

Ok, we’ve just had breakfast and it was shit, but it’s been the only bad experience on both flights with Thai Air.

There isn’t really much to report on the flight as apart from the meals we spend most of our time sleeping, me writing this diary during the times when I’m awake. Eventually we land on time, grab our bags and wait for the bus to take us to the car park. After a minor blip finding the bus stop, eventually we get our bus back tithe car park and pick up the car. Home at last, in the blistering cold land of blighty. Well, nearly. The car battery is flat, so we wait for the chap with a battery starter to help us on our way.

Holiday, finally over. It had to happen some time.

As I wake this morning the feeling that everyone is gone kind of hits me, and I become a little sad that it’s all over, and spend most of the day feeling this way. Darren, Steven and Summer all departed by the time we awake, we definitely won’t see them, but we do manage to bump into Barry and Gaynor on our way back from breakfast and get another chance to say a goodbye to them. We never see Rafaele again either though. I’m sort of missing everyone already.

We return from breakfast and do exactly what we’ve stayed the extra day to do, be lazy and do not very much. Eventually we decide we’ll take a walk out to explore a little and set off towards what I thought was the royal residence.

Turns out I’d navigated us in the exact opposite direction of the royal residence so we ended up more towards familiar territory, but never quite managed to find the main area. Not to be put off we keep walking, and soon we are well and truly lost. As there are still tourist shops, tuk tuks and guest houses around we feel ok but after a while these all disappear as we walk along tracks where locals seem to live. We eventually resign ourselves to being properly lost, so double back to where we can find a tuk tuk and transport ourselves to the legendary pub street.

In pub street we settle into a small restaurant and sit down for lunch. The food is good as always and we enjoy sitting, slowly passing the time with a beer and some grub. School finishes as we are out so late and so children start to appear selling postcards and other junk, but we know what to do now, even though it’s still hard. These guys are basically begging, and buying from them encourages it, so guide books, guides and locals alike all tell you not to buy from them. We also see a rather random act appear and disappear as we sit to eat our lunch, a chap wheeling about a ring which he pops up on a stand. To the rim are fixed knives, the pointy bit of which points towards the inner of the ring. The man, a very svelt chap admittedly, then runs at the ring and dives through it onto a mat he has positioned the other side. He’s only there a few minutes, then he rolls up his mat, folds down his ring and wheels it off somewhere else. Bizarre, but interesting and quite impressive. I would have had a go myself but ie got this twinge…..

Exhausted from all that doing nothing we successfully navigate our own way back to the hotel and have yet another nap. When we wake we decide to go for a brief swim to refresh ourselves from the heat. The cold water certainly does that and after initially sitting and reading for a bit we have a wee swim, before retiring to the room and having a suprise bonus nap. I love napping now, it’s wicked. I want to try to introduce it to work, it does wonders.

When we awake from our umpteenth nap we head off out quite late to get some dinner. Taking no chances we get a tuk tuk to the centre and quickly find a restaurant that is happy to have us still. We both enjoy our last dinner of the holiday together and then head off to the market so I can buy my tuk tuk t-shirt.

Tragedy. Not the ABBA song but actual tragedy. They have run out of large size tuk tuk t-shirts. I’ve been to the market the two previous nights and had an opportunity to buy one on both, but left it until tonight so’s we’d have something to do. Damn and blast. The young girl tells me though that they have a website, this stall actually selling good quality merchandise with real branding and individual designs, so I take a card and fingers crossed I can get one online. It won’t be the same feeling though, and I’ll certainly be paying more than $5 for it. Bugger.

Rather miffed at my t-shirt experience, and neither of us really wanting to look around any more, sort of being “shopped out” we grab a tuk tuk back to the hotel for our final night’s kip of our holiday.

With the alarm off at 4:30 this was one of those times when the snooze button probably isn’t a good idea. We get dressed into our temple gear, without showering. We sort of made a group pact the day before that most of us wouldn’t shower and that we’d put up with the resulting stench. Sometimes sleep is just more important.

As it’s early in the morning we make the temples quite quickly, and amazingly there are already folks there selling stuff. Rafaele buys a coffee to get him started. The sunrise over the temple is supposed to be an amazing sight on a good day. We’ll have to take others’ word for it because clouds pretty much obscured the sunrise completely, so the net effect was it just got lighter. Not my favourite use of a 4:30 rise, plus over an hour waiting at the temple for the sun to come up.

With god clearly angry with us we crack on with the temple tour of Angkor Wat, the early morning doing nothing to dampen the details churned out by Vantha. The temple is quite a sight, the main focus being a centre tower surrounded on four corners by four slightly lower towers, and originally there were another set surrounding those, which though still visible are clearly not in the same good shape the others are. The towers form the shape of the lotus flower which apparently looks pretty neat from the air. There are more fantastic carvings depicting tales which Vantha guides us through, and as we go around he enthuses about the engineering feats of not only building the place, but even to the extent of the drainage. Apparently even the practicalities of what to do with the rainy season waters was taken care of all those centuries ago.

After we finish exploring the splendour of Angkor Wat temple we stop for breakfast at a place situated near to Angkor Wat itself. My egg sandwich was smashing and Mrs Tom’s banana pancake was not bad, but what everyone marvelled over was the opportunity for a proper cup of tea, something which we’d all been craving. With proper milk too (opposed to sweetened condensed milk in most places). It was so nice Steven has two cups.

After breakfast we take the 45 minute trip to our last temple, much smaller than the others. It’s special property is it’s red tinted limestone which was used to make it. Unfortunately its small size and the fact we apprear to arrive at the same time as the Japanese world record attempt at number of people in a small temple means things are a little cramped. Nevertheless Mrs Tom, on camera duty for the day, gets a few good snaps of the place and its high points and we set off back to the coach. Temples of Angkor Wat, done. Well not quite, we’ve actually barely scratched the surface, but it’s all the main ones we’re going to see anyway.

On the way back to the hotel we stop at a landmine museum ran by a chap called Aki Ra. He was actually a child soldier for the Khmer Rouge who laid up to 1000 landmines a day whilst working under the oppressive regime. At 14 he defected and joined the Vietnamese army fighting the resistance against Pol Pot, and when they eventually pulled out he joined the Cambodian national liberation (think that’s what it was called). When he was young Aki Ra didn’t understand the horrid implications of what he was doing with the mines, but when he did realise, driven by guilt and a desire to undo his bad deeds, this inspired his defection to the good side and he set about de-mining. With an acute knowledge of mines from his days laying and building them, dismantling them is a piece of cake for him. Sadly though because no proper maps exist of where mines are laid, the job of removing them is not a simple one. Add to that the aerial dropping of mines by the Americans in their conflict with Vietnam and you have a large scale issue. The museum was setup to provide an awareness of the dangers of mines an unexplored bombs, and to bring attention to the cause of de-mining. There are thousands of deactivated landmines in the museum, yet this is a small portion of what Aki Ra has achieved. He has also trained others to carry out his work, including the Cambodian army. There is a worldwide pledge to rid the planet of landmines by a certain date, giving 10 years to complete the project. That date is nearly up, and Cambodia is being granted an extension, such is the scale of the problem here.

Something strikes as not quite right though when viewing the museum exhibits. There was a global movement to end the use of landmines in warfare due to their destructive long term nature, but there is a list of countries who have failed to sign up. Some you might expect, but one big one you’d think would know better. The USA. They are also on a list of countries still actively manufacturing land mines. Come on America, sort it out. Oddly Vietnam has not managed to find its way onto both “good” lists yet, and after all the problems they’ve had you might think they’d be barging to the front to be first to the pen.

Given our early start we were due another nap, one which for us turned into a full 3 hour kip, once we’d gotten back from the temples and the museum. We had planned to get up an hour earlier and clean up and sort some of our stuff out, but sleeping won.

After the mega-kip we had a little boat trip to a floating village in an enormous lake (whose name I’ve forgotten) measuring 140×40km, and home to the largest stock of fresh water fish in the world. After a short bus ride to the boat we board and set off along the river towards to village. There are boats along the way with children playing and dogs and chickens on board too. As the river and the lake water levels rise and fall so dramatically because of the rains in the rainy season, folks who live in the floating village have to move their houses (either proper boats or hours built on rafts) as the lake’s levels levels begin to drain. Throughout the year they are moving from place to place as the levels rise and fall, leading to a rather nomadic lifestyle for the folks of the floating village. As we reach the main part of the village our boat is chased down by a small powered boat with a young boy and presumably his father on board. The little lad jumps across to our boat and tries to sell us drinks from a cold bucket. Pretty much like being invaded by pirates it was. Though rather enterprising, Vantha has warned us it’s not a good idea to buy from them as it encourages this sort of behaviour and so we politely let the lad go back to his own boat where he picks up his snake again – did I mention he had a snake in the boat with him?

Eventually we reach the mid section of the village where there is a small place with information about the it and the practices of the villagers which Vantha talks us through, and we look at a fish farm and a crocodile pen they have at the site for us to look us. Not convinced the crocs get a good deal, I think they are quite likely doomed. Once we’ve looked round and Vantha has talked us through everything we have a quick look around and buy a drink, then it’s back on the boat for the return journey. On the way back Gaynor’s question about what the children do for education is answered – a floating school of course. Mrs Tom tells me there was also a floating church which I never saw. Genius. Once we’ve made our way back to dry land, we disembark the boat and head for the bus. As we’ve come to expect we are ambushed by children trying to sell us postcards and bangles and what have you, but there is a twist this time. Rather resourcefully they are waving little plates at us, the centre of which contains a picture of each of us, a bit like the log flume at the theme park. Incredible, but still not really what anyone wants, and probably not long term helpful for us to buy from them anyway.

After the bus trip back to the hotel we say goodbye to Vantha and our driver of the last two days and get back into the hotel with about an hour to go until our farewell dinner tonight. Though tomorrow still counts as part of the tour it is everyone’s leaving days with flights booked at different times, so no excursions are planned. Darren, Steven and Summer for example all have early morning flights, and Barry and Gaynor fly out at 1pm. That just leaves us, with our extra night booked at the hotel and a 7:30pm flight booked for the following day, the only ones left. Even Rafaele is leaving tomorrow, so we’ll be truly on our own.

Rafaele has booked our final dinner together in a place which appears to be in a small marketplace of nothig but restaurants. It’s called Amok (or Amor, I’m not 100% but given Amok is the national dish I think it’s more likely) and everyone orders their grub. Tonight everything runs very smoothly and we all get what we order very quickly, and everyone is pleased with their food. The longest part of the meal comes when we all want to pay and they try to work out our separate bills. Once that’s out of the way we empty out onto the streets, and all except Rafaele hit the market.

The previous night when in the market we discovered the “fish massage” phenomenon. Rafa had told us that the original place started inside the market and was called Dr Fish, but now there are dozens of the places, all called the same. Basically you dip your feet into a tank filled with loads of small fish and they eat yor feet. They sort of clean them by eating away your dead skin, and in doing so kind of masage them too. Everyone except Gaynor and Barry has a go and the little buggers go crazy for my feet, dozens of them nibbling away. Initially the sensation was of an electric shock as they all started prodding my feet. That sensation then turns to tickling, with most of us giggling away for a minute or two. Eventually you are used to the tickling and settle in to the experience. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a massage, but it’s a pleasant enough experience, and it probably does some good. I need to look up the breed of fish though as nowhere seems to indicate what it is, perhaps we can get a tankful at home.

Once fully eaten up we head off back to a bar called Angkor What? (see what they’ve done there?) where poor Rafa has been holding a table for 8 for over half an hour on his own, and it’s damn busy. It’s also very very loud, and I feel a bit sorry for Gaynor and Barry that we’ve chosen this place for our farewell drinks as it’s clearly not their kind of scene. I have a word with Darren and we decide to pop somewhere quieter so that we can have a good old chat about the trip first, with a view to coming back to this place afterwards as it’s open til 3. Unfortunately it’s a little too much for Gaynor who starts to feel a bit unwell so her and Barry decide to leave earlier, so we follow them out into the street to say our goodbyes. Farewell Barry and Gaynor, it was great travelling with you, thanks for being part of our fantastic experience.

Even with Gaynor and Barry gone we still want somewhere where we can reflect on our trip so we choose a quieter bar at the other end of “pub street” and pull up some chairs there. We discuss our favourite and least favourite parts of the trip, though I don’t really think anyone had any low points, and I also have a chat with Rafa about his past life as a project manager before he set off for India, and finally became a tour guide in South East Asia. Just one drink in this bar is enough for us to spill out our feelings about the trip and be a bit nostalgic, then it was back to Angkor What? to get pretty darn drunk.

There is beer, cocktails and shots consumed, Darren dances on a table, we take stupid pictures, do a lot of silly dancing and generally exactly what you might expect. We have a jolly good time basically. Angkor What? is a bar where there is graffiti covering the entire inside, and most of the outside. Stuff daubed by travellers over the years it’s been open. I manage to find a small unoccupied space right at the top of a pillar and scrawl “Raff’s Dec 2009 crew!!” there to mark our visit. When the place finally closes at 3 we get a tuk tuk back to the hotel, and after taking some more silly pictures with a cyclo that the hotel has sitting next to the lift, we say our goodbyes and hug each other before disappearing to bed. That was the last time we would see each other on the trip.

Farewell Summer, Steven, Darren, and of course our lovely leader Rafaele. It was brilliant travelling with you all, the group experience made it for me. I hope to see everyone from the trip again one day, all of you.

Tired, drunk and a little emotional (me anyway) we plop ourselves down and sleep our final “tour” sleep.

This morning we have a flight at 9:45 to Siem Reap so we need to be up and ready for leaving at 8. In true form we leave stuff late and just about scrape in breakfast before we have to leave. I’m back on the omlettes by the way.

We grab a bus to the airport and Rafa takes charge of all the admin stuff. This time though, concerned at how much our purchases will have affected our baggage allowance, I hang around to see how much our bags weigh. Under 15 kilos a piece, so we’re still fine. We wander through security and into the premises of a splendid looking “Costa” type coffe place where most of us grab what turns out to be a very nice coffee. Before too long it’s time to board the plane for the flight and so that’s just what we do. The flight is quite a short one but they still give us a muffin and some water to help pass the time. These little flights are quite cool.

Once on the ground we admire the entirely manual baggage carousel (one man shoves bags through, the other shoves them along runners) and grab our bags as soon as they pop through the flaps. On the bus Rafaele explains the plan of action for today – as soon as we’ve checked in to the hotel we’ll set off for the temples of Angkor Wat and try to see as much as we can today, hopefully giving us more free time tomorrow and less chance of folks being “templed out.” This sounds good to all and so once we’ve checked in and ensured our attire is suitable for temple seeing, we meet in the lobby ready to board the bus.

When we return to the lobby Vantha, our guide for the next two days, is already there, and once I’ve quickly ran back to the room to get our camera we are ready to go. The temples aren’t too far away, and after what feels like less than half an hour we are there.

I’m afraid I’ve forgotten then names of the individual sites we visited, perhaps my fellow travellers can help me out there if they read this. I’ll have a look in the book too when I can. All fall under the umbrella of Angkor Wat, but they each have individual names with Angkor Wat itself being the most impressive. At the first site Vantha stops us at one of the entrances, of which this place has 5, one facing each compass direction except for (I think) East which has two. Running towards the entrance is a road flanked by a ballustrade made up of statues essentially playing tug of war with a naga, or three headed snake. This depicts a famous scene from Hindu mythology of Vishnu and the churning of the milk. Look it up, it’s a bit weird. Vishnu appears as a turtle with the mountain on his back and the demons and the good guys basically play tug of war with the naga to churn up milk from the sea. Yeah, I know. What immediately springs to attention with Vantha is his depth of knowledge. He explains everything in the most incredible detail, expressing admirable knowledge of every aspect of what we see. He is an absolutely splendid guide to have with us at sites containing so much history.

As we move on into the temple we are told of the construction methodology of the temple, which basically amounts to plonking perfectly shaped blocks of sandstone on top of one another with no bonding agent whatsoever. Looking at the buildings from any sort of distance you would struggle to see the joins as the blocks are so perfectly cut. When you do get up close you see that the Walls all around are adorned in the most detailed and intricate carvings, some entirely decorative but many depicting legendary scenes from Buddhist and Hindu tales or battles of ages gone by. In some parts the carvings are incomplete because the King who had ordered them died before the completion, and (I think) what seems to happen is the next King orders the construction of a new gaff. Vantha tells us this place would have taken around 40 years to be constructed to the level we see now, and it was knocked up in around the 8th century. For it to remain (mostly) standing after such a long time and for the details of the carvings to also still be there is pretty damn incredible. Hats off to the construction team and artisans of the 8th century.

Our next temple is one which is impressive but for different reasons. Though much of the temple is still, roughly speaking, standing, the majority is dilapidated and currently being either put back together or reconstructed. What is impressive though about this temple is that trees have began to grow atop the parts of the temple themselves. Imagine a tree just growing out of the top of your house, it’s a bit like that. We get a lot of good snaps in here and marvel at how the trees are either destroying parts of the temple, or holding it together. According to what I think was a bit of a guess by Vantha, many of the trees are over 150 years old, standing atop buildings which (I think) date from around the 10th century. As we are leaving we also see a stripey dog, one which we guess has been painted. If it hasn’t, that was one weird tiger and one crazy dog.

As it begins to get dark we round off the temples there and head back to the hotel for a nap before dinner. A long day of flying and temple walking in the sun is just cause I reckon. After the nap we round up in the foyer for our penultimate dinner as a group in a place Rafaele has booked for us in the brilliantly named Pub Street (*though this is on the signpost I guess it’s probably not the proper name for the street).

The restaurant is called Soup Dragon, and I think the food is rather nice. Though some meals come out quite late, my meal was great and Mrs Tom’s was too (though she was the last person served). Those who ordered lamb weren’t hugely impressed but their meals looked alright to Mrs Tom and myself, and to be fair it’s probably not too often they cook lamb, what with there being no sheep here and all.

After dinner we pop off to the night market to have a look round and are pleasantly surprised to find what we later decide is the nicest market we’ve seen on the whole trip. There are stalls selling things we might actually want to buy, which we’ve not really seen since Luang Prabang. I buy myself another beer t-shirt and then find a stall selling t-shirts with tuk tuks on which I decide I want, but we have ran out of money for the evening. We decide we’ll go back on our own after everyone else has gone and pick one up then.

Whilst in the market I happen across a stall selling nice looking photos with a young local chap minding things. He asks me the usual starters and I ask about the pictures. He hasn’t taken them, a Canadian man has, but it’s the basis for a little chat anyway. When he asks where I’m from he follows up by telling me he has been to Hawaii. When I ask how come he tells me that he was injured by a landmine, and shows me his blackened, skinny left leg. Local doctors wanted to cut it off, but another took him to Hawaii where he spent a year, and learned English whilst he was there. His leg is much better now, he never had to lose it, and though he cannot walk any great distance he can still walk. He’s now back in Cambodia and going to school, and working in the night market in the evening to help him keep up his English. He says that when he returned to Cambodia he had actually forgotten the Khmer language, but he’s ok with it now. His name is Sok, and he is a very brave and very nice young man. It’s easy to forget that there are so many victims of landmines in Cambodia, and a vast number were laid by their own people during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Sok is one of the lucky ones, and good luck to him.

Commited to a very early start in the morning, we catch a tuk tuk back to the hotel and get straight to bed. We’ve decided to take the opportunity to watch the sun rise over the Angkor War temple in the morning, for which we will need to leave at 4:50….. Hmmm….