The temples @ Siem Reap

Siem Reap

My first ride on a motor bike. Thought it would be less scary with my eyes closed... but definitely wasn't! Siem Reap is a great place, really good atmosphere about it. The first day Ollie and I just had a look around the markets and I had my hair highlighted again. Everything was going fine apart from when Ollie asked me if bleaching hair damaged it, to which I replied 'Yeah, but its not to bad'. I then pulled at a clump of hair at the top of my head..... and it came out. I stayed calm and informed the hair dresser that my hair was falling out and she decided it was probably time the bleach came out. Luckily it was fine and I did not end up walking out bold. We also spent a few hours in an absolute gem of a shop - 'Boom Boom Room' which sells any album for 75cents, Ollie went mad buying loads of Drum and Bass albums, and I tried on all the clothes there they had on offer. Right next to 'Boom boom Room' was the legendary 'Dr. Feet' which has put my faith back into foot massages -it was phenomenal and I walked out of that place feeling high. We ended up on Bar Street where cheap beer and good food awaited.

The Perhentian Isands

This was pancakes - the driving instructors kitten.

This was taken the night we stayed at butterfly chalet.

The first day we arrived at the Perhentian islands we stayed at D'Lagoon - where as you can see I got eaten alive my mosquitos, Ollie who has never been biten before in his life...... was fine. D'lagoon was a small beach with great coral, so we went snorkelling on the first day, then hired a boat to go round the island.

We stopped off at Coral Bay and met a lovely dutch couple who wanted to go to long beach, so we offered to drive them. (our boat was quite small with minimal horse power.... but somehow it worked)

On the way round we stopped off for a quick dip in the water and a snorkel, which was quite entertaining and the boat almost capsized on regular occasions. Unfortunately during this snorkel Ollie got hideously burnt so spent the next day in agony.

After a drink on long beach we headed back to Coral bay where we decided we would stay. We got the most amazing accomadation on the first night - 'Butterfly Chalet'. These chalets were perched right on the tip of the island so we had water right beneath us and amazing views. It also had a mozzy net - however my bites were really playing up so I spent most of the night sitting underneath a cold shower trying to cool them down.

Due to Ollies sunburn and my mozzy bites we decided to investigate other accomodation, and were pleased to find out all rooms were half price in Senja bay from september, so we got an air-con room with good views for 6 pounds each!

Over the next few days we both did two dives towards our advanced open water qualification - a wreck dive and bouyancy, plus a refresher course and a fun dive. I think the diving instructor thought I must have forged my open water qualification - first of all it took me about 10 minutes to actually get in to the water - he wanted me to do 'backwards entry' which involves sitting on the edge of the boat and rolling back, it sounds easy but for some reason it took me ages to do, i kept shouting 'this is not natural! cant I just get in the normal way?' to which he replied - 'this is the normal way!'. When I eventually got into the water he shouted 'inflate your BCP' I shouted back 'where is my BCP, and how do I inflate it?'

When we were all together on the surface of the water Mike (the diving instructor) was like 'right! lets go down'. Him and Ollie started descending, and I stayed at the top as I had forgotten how to go down. I then put my mouth piece in the water upside down and it started hissing around like an out of control shower - Mike then realised I wasnt going down, came back up and sorted me out.

When we were down we faced the horific task of filling up our masks with water and blowing it out, but after that things settled down and we had a lot of fun.

The wreck dive was good - not the best visibility at this time in the season but we still saw a lot of different fish etc. We went into the wreck - which had sunk in 1998 and there was an air pocket inside where we could take our masks of 7m underwater and breath normally.

During the night we went to long beach and there was a bar there with a good atmosphere, on the last night we met up with two other couples - who went to bristol UWE and bath uni. It was one of the girls birthdays - Agnes and seeing as Ollie and I had bought quite a lot of Vodka before getting to the Island we shared that and ended our stay on the Perhentian islands with a good dance.

Back to KL - Batu Caves

We then headed to the Bird Sanctuary - the albino crow is my favourite.




This is my favourite picture of my travels so far - I got it just when this little monkey was looking straight at me!



Cute little baby monkey
Chillin' out wid ma home boy..
It was love at first sight...
I think i make a great monkey.
Warning: a LOT of pictures of monkeys coming up! Just outside KL there are the 'Batu Caves' - we had to climb 272 steps to get to the top and there were wild monkeys everywhere nicking peoples bags, drinking cans, and just causing a general riot. It was great to get so close to them and they were quite tame. (The Hindu temple was impressive to!)



After we decided we had seen everything there was to see in the Cameron Highlands we decided to go back to KL; after traveling back we spent the day at a water park 'Sunway Lagoon'. This was right next to a HUGE shopping mall that had an ice rink smack bang in the middle of it.

It was a shoppers dream and I almost spent my whole travel budget there but in the end decided to refrain (seeing as most of the stuff i wanted to buy was from topshop :S)