The day started off on a not so great note, with our room phone ringing at 6:45am repeatedly until a half-asleep Martin reached for it. "This is your wakeup call...oh, wait, sorry. Wrong room." I wonder if this happened to some other poor person in Saigon when we never received a requested wakeup call. We grumbled, stretched and promptly fell back asleep...for almost an hour. The phone rang again. "Hello, would you like to order breakfast?" Um, what? You told us last night to call anytime between 7a-11a and tell you our free breakfast request...but clearly, that really meant that they would call us by 7:30. Hmm. Having not gone to bed until 1:30, I was pretty grumpy, never a good start to any day but life was brightened a bit when our breakfast was delivered ... read more

Another lovely day in Saigon has come and gone. We pulled ourselves out of bed a little after 7, an impressive feat given we'd gone to bed late AND the wake-up call never came. We enjoyed another free breakfast at the hotel and then headed just a few storefronts down to Sinh Travel, where we'd booked a tour yesterday. We took off at 8:15 for a full day tour of the Cao Dai Temple and the Cu Chi Tunnels on a fairly comfortable air-conditioned bus. After about 2.5 hours of listening to music and playing hangman on our iPods, we arrived in Tay Ninh province, the area of the temple. Caodaiism, as described online: Syncretist modern Vietnamese religious movement with a strongly nationalist political character. Cao Dai draws on ethical precepts from Confucianism, occult practices from ... read more

We made it! Today was primarily another travel day. We got up at 7 and ate breakfast at our hostel- I had a tofu, carrot, sprout whole wheat breakfast sandwich thing and Martin had a fried egg with veggies on a baguette. :) By 8, we were full, checked out and in a shuttle van to the bus station and by 8:30 we were boarded onto the Mekong Express Limo (what?) Bus and on our way to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The Mekong Express gets a definite good rating from us. There was tons of leg room, we were given 2 pastries & water and they made the border crossing pretty painless by even filling out the necessary forms for us and basically just calling our names at the Cambodia exit and again at Vietnam ... read more

Note: In case you couldn't tell our writing styles apart, Martin and I have been switching off days. I wrote days 1 and 3, he wrote 2 and 4...and so on. We're equal opportunity. :) Today was another early day...but this time to board a bus rather than go see more temples. It was time to leave Siem Reap...a place we fell in love with completely in only 4 days and a place we definitely want to come back to at some point in our lives. We woke up and headed back over to Two Dragons to have breakfast and wait for our bus to pick us up. We enjoyed a tomato/onion/cheese omelette, potatoes, toast w/jam, bacon (for Martin of course) and two delicious iced Vietnamese coffees. Mmm. A shuttle bus came around 7:15 to pick ... read more

It's been a long while since I've woken up at 4:30am. The last time I saw that time on a clock wasn't too long ago, but it was simply because I hadn't yet gone to bed! We managed to get up, however tired and angry at us our bodies felt and were out the door and into the tuk tuk at 5am. The ride out to the main temple, Angkor Wat, was dark (of course), cold and very quiet, as only the crazy tourists heading to the same place as us were awake in their own tuk tuks or motos. We cursed ourselves for not bringing along a flashlight, as we quickly realized walking around a rocky temple with a moat around it in the dark could be dangerous. I only tripped once though, and we ... read more