The hotel had a fairly generous check out time of midday and as our flight wasn’t until 7 there was no rush. The restaurant manager the evening before asked if we’d had the Khmer soup for breakfast yet from the dedicated station yet, we hadn’t, and after confirming that he was also working the breakfast shift…

As the holiday neared its conclusion there was a shift towards a greater proportion of our time spent ‘at leisure’. On our last full day we went to the nearby ‘Wat Phnom’ for an hour or so in the morning. It’s a religious site contained within a well-maintained park and the temple on the top…

We visited the Cambodia history museum, the exhibits were almost exclusively statues along with the longest hand-sown scarf in the world. It seems as though Cambodia has a long history of artefacts being looted or maliciously damaged. Maybe the British museum should’ve taken more of them previously. Some of the oldest statues from c.6th century…

We’d been told by our waiter at breakfast the previous day that the Royal Palace should be visited and the morning would be the best time as there is a sort of festival, Pchum Ben, that takes place over 15 days and affects which areas of the palace grounds can be visited in the afternoon…

After a good sleep in the very comfortable hotel bed we had our first breakfast in Cambodia. It was a definite step up on the Saigon breakfast and varies slightly each day. Crucially for those of us that like a lie in it’s available until 10.30am! We were picked up at midday by our guide…

A couple of days earlier, as part of the world’s effort to make visiting Cambodia as awkward as possible, I had a message saying that the 9.45am coach that we’d booked wasn’t available due to ‘temporary maintenance’, but there was another one available at 8.00am. It meant an early start and no breakfast but only…

As jo wanted to visit Chinatown we took a half hour taxi ride to the heart of Chinatown. It was the most chaotic place in Vietnam we’d visited and after 15 minutes of experiencing this in the sweltering heat Jo decided that there were better places to be. So we took another half hour taxi…

With no particular plans for the day we decided to walk in the vague direction of Chinatown, stop at a coffee shop and take a taxi the rest of the way. However shortly after leaving the the hotel a man carrying a wooden yoke started chatting to us as we headed in the same direction…

I woke up with a cold (possibly Covid), potentially caught from our tour guide at the Ho Chi Minh museum who should’ve taken a sick day, with a long day ahead of this as we were going to visit the Cu Chi tunnels and take a boat trip down the Mekong. We skipped breakfast after…

We went down to see what the buffet breakfast was like at the Orchids, mediocre compared to what was served up in Hanoi. No pastries on offer, however tauntingly, they were available for purchase in the lobby cafe adjacent to the buffet hall.  The weather this morning was much nicer than what we were greeted…