We were up early for breakfast – Laura had a delicious bowl of Pho, a chicken noodle soup, while I was more traditional with my muesli. We decided to spend the brief time we had left in Siem Reap at the Angkor Wat ruins, wanting to enjoy it at our own pace and get a couple of pictures with a bit of blue sky in them.

Although it was a rush, we really enjoyed our time without the guide – again I have to advise anyone going there not to bother with a guide!

After about an hour at the ruins we had to rush back to the hotel to shower and pack for the flight and then checked out and took the tuk tuk to the airport. Sadly we were immediately told that our flight would be delayed three hours – although they did give us a food voucher! In the end a few rounds of Scrabble and a bit of internet access saw us through the hours very quickly.

The flight was fine and on arriving in Singapore we hopped on the SMRT to Bugis and made a short walk to the New 7th Storey Hotel. We dumped our bags and headed to Clarke Quay in search of food – after much indecision we decided we needed a big burger and headed to Billy Bomber’s – perfect after a few days of Asian food.

We then took a walk along Boat Quay and over a huge bridge that looked over some impressive modern architecture and the Singapore Big Wheel. Our route home also took us by Raffles and some other historic buildings – a really pleasant city.

We started the day with muesli from the restaurant – and then headed out at 7:30am for the long drive to Banteay Srei. It is a long way to travel in a tuk tuk, but the areas outside of the town are fascinating and the roads are quiet.

Banteay Srei is famous for the intricacy of the temple carvings and we spent some time wandering through the small ruins. It was an incredibly hot day and the ruins were very busy, so we were quite relieved to get back on the tuk tuk and get some air flowing.

The rest of the day was spent around various temples – Pre Rup, Banteay Samre, East Mebon, Ta Som, Preah Khan and Banteay Kdei. All very interesting, but two days is plenty for the casual visitor as we were decidedly ‘templed out’ by the end of the day.

We had our evening meal at the Kouron II restaurant – a huge hall with an all you can eat buffet and a Khmer dance show. The food was passable, but still not a patch on the meal we had on the first day. The jelly desserts were quite an acquired taste…

The dancing was very good though, and it was a nice way to end our visit.

Today, as part of our package with The Villa, we were accompanied by a guide, Sum, to the temples. Siem Reap has plenty of English speaking guides available, but we were not impressed by the first thing he said – “Sorry, I was out late last night and I probably smell” . He then spoke mostly through his hand for the duration of the tour.

To be honest, his tour was pretty poor. We overheard another guide and they seemed to had a similar lack of information. It seems from reading books about the place, there isn’t much to say… so I would strongly recommend that other visitors simply avoid having a guide. There isn’t much information and it only felt more awkward, and we were unable to explore ourselves – far better to go at your own pace.

However, the presence of the tour guide could not detract from what a truly spectacular place Angkor Wat is. We were both surprised at how huge it was – and how Angkor Wat was merely one temple of hundreds throughout the jungle. On our tour we took in Angkor Thom, Bayon, the Elephant Terrace and many others. Ta Phrom – the ‘Tomb Raider’ temple – was particularly beautiful – huge roots reclaiming the temple into the jungle.

We stopped for lunch provided by the hotel – tasty sandwiches, although we had added a few things from the mini bar to make it a bit more substantial.

We ate in the Villa restaurant that night – I had the all-you-can-eat BBQ buffet which was quit pleasant. At the time I suspected it of giving me food poisoning, but we eventually decided it was just the malaria pills. Laura had a chicken amok, but it was not as good as our food at the Amok restaurant itself.

So up to bed to play Scrabble and even watched a movie before bed – Music And Lyrics an enjoyable enough rom-com.

We left the hotel at 7am and had carrot cake and coffee for breakfast at a cafe in the airport – we tried to retain some appetite for the flight, and thankfully a delicious selection of omelette and fish noodles were served on the Silk Air flight.

Siem Reap airport is a lovely spot and the immigration and customs process was very speedy. We proceeded through the terminal straight to met Mr. Ngin, our tuk-tuk driver for the next few days. He whizzed us through town to The Villa hotel – it was a pretty unnerving ride, with no apparent traffic rules and near misses a-plenty.

On arrival a lovely local girl took us through our itinerary and provided us a with a complementary drink. The room itself was huge, with two double beds and a large en-suite. We relaxed there for a while before Mr. Ngin picked us up and ran us round to the Artisans Centre.

Here we saw dozens of young underprivileged or disabled people working on a variety of arts – carving stone, painting and weaving. The shop was very reasonable priced with excellent quality of work – although we just picked up a couple of folded paper souvenirs for our Christmas tree.

We decided to walk back to The Villa, through the old market – countless stalls of silk and paintings etc, although nothing particularly appealing. The market then became endless food stalls – the smell and cleanliness was so poor that it really was quite horrifying…

We hurried through and went on to a nearby restaurant, Amok – somehow retaining an appetite. In contrast to the market, this was a light and airy place and the food was delicious and insanely cheap at around £3 for the main course. We had a banana leaf salad, a fish amok, fried pork mince ‘lap’ and Khmer noodles. Only the noodles (which were similar to tagliatelle) were disappointing.

We continued wandering back to the hotel through the busy and often smelly streets – dumping rubbish on to the streets just seems to be they way things are done here. Back at the hotel we picked up a small picnic as part of our package.

Unfortunately, it was a cloudy evening, so with no sunset to enjoy, the tuk tuk took us to a temple in the middle of a lake – sadly this was a very underwhelming site. Some rubble peeking out of a large, half dry, huge square ditch. The lack of water meant that it was muddy and the sight of homeless dogs and local children playing in it rather tempered the pleasure of the food.

By perfect chance, the wine was from Margaret River, so we asked the tuk tuk driver to return us to The Villa where we drank it whilst playing Scrabble. Much better.