Cooking up a storm

One of the biggest surprises for us in Cambodia was the food, just delicious! To be honest, before I arrived I had no idea what Cambodian food was being more familiar with neighbouring Thailand and Vietnam. For 10 days I virtually lived on Khmer curry, so good! In fact it was so good that we decided to do a cooking class. Unfortunately the herbs used were generally unknown and unrecognisable... so I don't know how we'll go replicating it back home, but we'll try!

Our cooking class started with a trip to the market to buy some last minute ingrediants before we whipped up a Khmer curry, fresh spring rolls, mango salad, and Amok. I would like to say that we were the stars of the class, but we got admonished for not chopping fine enough, making our carrots pretty enough and not rolling our spring rolls tight enough. The food still tasted good though!

Marvelling at ancient temples

It is all too easy to wax lyrical about the temples of Angkor, where we spent three days exploring temples devoured by jungle, examining carvings of dancers and gods and admiring statues of Buddha.

The most famous temple, for it's sheer size, is Angkor Wat. This wasn't however the first temple we visited, or by any means our favourite. We started off in Bayon which is within a larger complex Angkor Thom. This was amazing there were two levels that were accessible and within these you could wander around, over and through. Every surface seemed to be carved and we felt much more like we were exploring the site than we had expected. Some temples were under restoration and lots have scaffolding holding them up, but others like Bayon are in amazing condition. One, Ta Prohm (made famous by Lara Croft), has not been restored allowing you to see the state they were found in. Enormous trees have caught root in the temples forcing the stones apart. There are many areas of Ta Prohm that were in serious danger of falling down and wooden walkways take you around these, but once you are inside you are able to climb over crumbling pillars, squeeze through doorways and appear in a surprisingly intact room with carvings hundreds of years old (and usually no other tourists).

From bicycles to motorcycles

From the land of whole families being driven around on bicycles to one where they've added a motor. We started off with a few days in Kuala Lumpur revelling in being somewhere that felt like home (albeit a little bit more modern in parts). It helped that we were staying in Chinatown which probably feels the same everywhere... plus large numbers of tourists and a public transport system that works. Ok, that's not like Sydney but maybe one day. We spent one day to go up the twin towers and take in the view from the skybridge. We had expected this to be a 2 hour affair at most... but after queueing foran hour and a half we secured tickets for the 12:45pm visit. The skybridge is free as they bombard you with advertising for Petronas. We spent the time we had to wait exploring a shopping mall... with shops we recognised!!! Oh, the things we find exciting now, it's quite sad. The view from the bridge was spectacular and I spent a long time watching the fountain display from on high. We also indulged in our first cinema viewing experience in months!!

From there a quick flight to Cambodia brought us to the hottest place we have ever been!! Walking for 2 minutes leaves you dripping with sweat from places you didn't know sweated, and few places have air con so there's not much relief. We did decide to splurge on a room with a/c for that reason (a whole $13 for a double). Although we are now somewhere where they drive on the right again, it's not so noticeable here as you have to look every whichway when crossing the street including on the pavement.