CathandBrent

Melbourne We left Bangkok in the early evening and flew with Malaysian Airlines to Kuala Lumpur where we had arranged to spend the night in a hotel near the airport. We had decided to break the trip up mostly because we needed to get into Melbourne in the evening when our friends would be home from work to pick us up from the airport. It turned out to be good decision as we got into our hotel at about 12 midnight and got a solid five and a half hours sleep before we had to get up and check in again. We also had the next seven hours on a plane in daylight hours to catch up on lots of movies we had missed while travelling. We arrived about 7.30pm to a relatively freezing cold Melbourne ... read more

Luang Prabang We opted to fly from Hanoi to Luang Prabang in Laos, mostly as we had heard nightmare stories about the overland trip there and 24 hours on a bus didn't particularly appeal. The flight on Vietnam airlines was straight forward, no tropical storms to fly through this time thankfully. We got some guesthouse recommendations at the airport then paid the fixed 50,000kip for a taxi into town. Our guesthouse for the next few nights was the Lao Wooden House. It is set in a traditional Lao style house built in the last century for a member of the royal family. The guesthouse owner was extremely friendly and after some swift negotations from Cath we were staying there for 1/3 less than the asking price. Although breathtakingly beautiful, it was incredibly hot and humid in ... read more

Hoi An Our next stop, Hoi An, has been made a UNESCO World Heritage site, mostly for the colonial style architecture in the town's old quarter. According to UNESCO its an "exceptionally well-preserved example of a South-East Asian trading port dating from the 15th to the 19th century". Hoi An is also well known for the prolific number of tailoring stores which all offer made to measure clothes at varying cost and quality. but all for a fraction of the price you would get back home. We had booked a standard room at the Thanh Binh III Hotel but the room was not very nice and there were ants everywhere. Brent managed to negotiate an upgrade to their top room for only $5 more a night (nice!) and we moved across the next day to a ... read more

Ho Chi Minh City We left Sihanoukville in Southern Cambodia bright and early on a Mekong Express bus headed back to Phnom Penh. We had a two hour break in the capital (enough time for an extremely tasty lunch!) before boarding another bus which would take us all the way through the border and into Vietnam. Unfortunately we would only be able to say "Goood evveeening Vietnaaaam!" (hehe) as the bus was due to arrive about 9pm. The roads were fairly smooth all the way and there was no trouble at the border crossing as Vietnam requires everyone to get their visas ahead of time. We had to get on and off the bus a bit to go get our passport stamped and run all of our luggage through a security scanner. But then we were ... read more

Siem Reap It took the best part of the day to get from Phuket to Cambodia. We flew from Phuket airport at 6.55am to Bangkok, then after a transit of about one hour, boarded another flight to Siem Reap in the north of the country. Siem Reap is the launching point for visiting the temples of Angkor Wat, one of the seven wonders of the world. The temples were created by the Khmer civilisation and are dated between the 8th and 13th centuries by a succession of Hindu and Buddhist kings. Every temple is created out of stone and include varied and elaborate carvings, making each temple quite unique. Angkor Wat refers to the most famous temple, which was built for the king Suryavarman II in the early 12th century as his state temple and part ... read more