All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Last night Kel woke up to the sound of someone trying to get into our hotel room. Not the most pleasant sound to wake up to in the middle of the night. The person/people rattled the door and kept trying for a good 3 or 4 minutes. I woke Nigel up and said "Nige, someone is trying to get into our room!" He said "Hmmm" and rolled over. I don't think I was successful in waking him up, but perhaps they heard me as they stopped rattling the door and went away.

Mmmmmmmmm, peanut butter and our usual iced coffee for breakfast.

We don't normally drink a lot of coffee but in both Cambodia and Vietnam they use sweetened condensed milk and it rocks.

At 8:30 we piled in the back of another pick-up truck for our trip out to Bokor National Park. This is the place we skipped after Sihanoukville because Kel hurt her foot (thank you all for your emails of concern). The park is about 7kms out of Kampot and the road inside the park is very bumpy. The tour provided some old cushions for our comfort which we appreciated but still ended up a little bruised. The view from the back was great as we drove up the steep hill through the dense jungle to the top of the mountain. At the top we stopped at a couple of abandoned buildings that were once a restaurant and dining building. We walked around looking at the graffiti on the walls and enjoying the views out to the ocean. We then took a 2 hour hike through the jungle and met our guide on the other end where we had the vegetable curry lunch the tour provided. From here we walked to the Popokvil Falls which would be very spectacular in the wet season but all we saw was a lot of rocks and a few puddles.

After another short drive we went to the deserted Bokor Palace Hotel. It is a huge building on top of a cliff overlooking the jungle and the ocean. It is said to be haunted as the Khmer Rouge executed about 200 people (hotel guests and staff) here in the 1970s. Nearby are the remains of a Catholic Church, a wat, a casino (once inside the hotel itself but eventually moved), a post office, a water tower that looks like a UFO, and a few other buildings. At one time it was like a small resort/vacation village on top of the mountain but now there isn't much left. It was really eerie and creepy walking around inside the old hotel, as it's still pretty much intact. The red fungus growing on the inside tiles looks like blood splatters. More than one image from 'The Shining' went through our minds! We checked out the casino and the inside of the church. The church actually looks like it could still be used after a bit of cleaning up. During one battle between the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge guerrillas in 1979, the Vietnamese were holed up in the church and the KR were in the old hotel, shooting at each other only 500 metres apart. During a walk up a hill near the church, Kel and one of the English girls ran into a snake on the path. Luckily they had been chatting and it crept off into the weeds before they got too close. Nigel immediately climbed to the highest point he could find.

We bumped our way back into Kampot, had a cold shower, and headed out for a few cold beers. We met up with the other 8 people from the day for dinner at a streetside restaurant. It was good, cheap food and good company as well. We had us two, five English, 2 Belgian guys (they were hot) and an older Austrian guy. We enjoyed their company, and it actually made the day a bit more interesting. We checked out the lively street entertainment happening in Kampot and then headed to bed.