We arrived in Sihanoukville on 17th Dec with only a week till Christmas. We hadn't previously organised to go to Sihanoukville but we'd heard that an old colleague of mine was working in a bar there so decided we'd squeeze it in for some booze fuelled fun. We headed straight for Utopia bar to meet Hemal and have a few cheeky beers while we caught up. Hemal told us there was going to be a party later that night with 4 DJs playing so obviously we headed down to the party with our dancing shoes on to party hard and dance the night away. The following morning I felt, let's just say, slightly delicate so we decided we'd chill on a quieter beach called Otress, a 10 minute tuk-tuk ride away from Serendipity beach where we were staying. In the evening we found a bar showing the Arsenal-City game live (there is a 7 hour time difference so it was 11:00 at night here). The bar gave free shots for every goal scored but it seemed wrong to celebrate the City goals so we stuck to a glass of Coke as we had to be up early for the bus to Kampot the next day.

Kampot is a sleepy little town where ex-pats come to spend there later years and travellers come to chill out and use the town as a base for exploring the surrounding areas. We managed to get away from the hotel touts and checked into the Blissful"l" Hotel (someone had rubbed off the second "L" but it was still obvious they'd made the mistake). At reception we got chatting to an English lad who's main vices and main topic of conversation seemed to be French women and Jacket Potatoes. He told us that he'd hired a scooter from Sean Ly and taken a French girl to a secret lake, so we asked for directions and headed off to find Sean Ly and the secret lake. We must have been given bad directions because we drove for about an hour and almost made it to Kep, which was to be our next destination. Slightly deflated we chose to look for some hillside caves instead. After trailing down endless dirt tracks and getting loose directions from the locals we found the caves and were greeted by 2 local boys with a torch who offered to show us around. They showed us the reamains of a Muslim temple and told us how Pol Pot had murdered the people living in the caves and destroyed the shrines and temples at the same time. They had also named many of the rock formations which did actually look a bit like elephants and tigers and we both nearlly screamed when they showed us a cave full of bats and started clapping to get them to fly. We eventually came to the end of the caves and had to scramble up a rock face to get out. We tipped the young lads and for one last bit of info asked them how we get to this bloody lake. The directions were so simple we kicked ourselves for missing it the first time, we just had to go back the way we had come and take a left down the dirt track that would lead straight there... It was worth all the effort though. The lake was enormous and so peaceful, set in a valley with hills on all sides. There were little bamboo jetty's you could chill out on and rubber rings to float round the lake too. We stayed a while but wanted to get back before sunset. The next day we took the scooter again to explore more and this time headed North top the Tek Chouk falls. Here we had fun stepping out on the rocks and lounging around on hammocks and pagodas at the water's edge. Same as before we came back before dark and found a nice little restaurant with tables on platforms over the river. A nice end to our time in sleepy Kampot.

We had been chatting to a tuk-tuk driver outside our hotel who said he would drive us to Kep the next day. We got up early and when we arrived into Kep we checked into the cool Tree Tops Resort, which as the name implies consisted of tree houses and wooden bungalows. We opted for a ground floor bungalow as it was cheaper and once we'd dropped our stuff we jumped on the free bikes to go explore the National Park. We walked for hours scrambling through the dense forest and much to Heather's annoyance I kept saying let's go further, first to the highest point in the forest then onto a loop round the forest to the "Stone Horse" (which turned out to be a rather boring pile of rocks with a ladder up it). I dragged us so far into the forest that there was actually a real danger of us getting stuck in the dark there so we pretty much ran the remainder of the forest to get back onto the main path. *That is definitely one way to piss your wife off especially considering we were only wearing little flip flops too... To make up for it that evening we went to the crab market for tea. Heatehr had a traditional Amok cooked in banana leaves and I devoured a plate full of crab. After that we were able to laugh off the events from earlier. Our final day in Kep and in Cambodia we asked our friendly tuk-tuk driver to take us to the dock so we could get a boat to Rabbit Island. We spent the whole day relaxing on beautiful sandy beaches and swimming int he clear sea. Not many tourists had come to the island that day and so it was lovely and peaceful and ended our time in Cambodia perfectly...