Day 67, in which we decide we love Cambodia

After yet another session of fattening ourselves up at the Lebua's breakfast buffet, we gathered up our luggage and ran our final gauntlet past the hotel's beaming serving staff and out into a taxi for the airport.

Bangkok airport is one of the largest I have ever been in, and after checking in we walked for 15 or 20 minutes through the shopping mall looking for our gate. After our short flight over the border to Cambodia, we discovered a significant contrast at Siem Reap airport, where sheer walls of glass, concrete floors and thick steel frames were utterly eschewed in favour of the more traditional Khmer architecture, with a single-storey wooden framed building topped with a chirpy red tile roof and surrounded by flowers and ferns. It is absolutely the nicest airport I've ever seen.

Sadly, the entry process was less refreshing, and Cambodia proved again the rule that the poorer the country the more complex the bureaucracy. Cambodia is clearly very poor: we were handed four separate forms to fill out before arrival, and at the airport there were two men to process the application, a man to take payment, a row of five or six officials in military uniforms to process our visas, two men to hand back our passports at the other end, a man at passport control to ink five separate stamps on the visa, and three bored looking officials to wave us through customs. This was actually a great way to spend the time waiting for the luggage to be unloaded, and our bags were waiting for us as we left.

We soon found ourselves heading into Siem Reap city in an air conditioned taxi, passing seemingly endless rice fields and lush green palm tree plantations. We got chatting with our driver Panha, a chirpy young man with superb English, and decided we were unlikely to find a better prospect and hired him at a very reasonable rate to be our guide around the area for the next few days.

Siem Reap is far more impoverished than Bangkok, but I found myself liking it immediately. So far the people have all been extremely friendly and yet completely honest and pleasingly reserved, which makes them much more easy to like than the average Thai. We are staying in the Kazna Hotel in the centre of the city (well, village really), one road over from the high street, yet the moment we stepped out of our hotel we found ourselves effectively on a partially-paved dirt track lined with a combination of modern hotels and lean-to sheds verging on the shanty town. The streets are occupied concurrently by sleek SUVs, goats, stray dogs and – we saw recently – children urinating. However, oddly, it's all the more charming for it. Walking to dinner, I really felt affection for the place.

For dinner we walked to Cafe Indochine on the high street, which specialises in traditional Khmer cuisine. We ordered a range of dishes including caramelised pork, a sort of coconut chicken curry called Amok and a traditional Cambodian-spiced fish dish, all of which was very delicious washed down with a super bottle of South African sauv-blanc. The meal was extremely well priced, once you discounted the absurd cost of the wine.