A Final Top Ten

Whenever we found ourselves enjoying something during the holiday we'd ask each other "Sure, but is it a top ten?" Ultimately we had about two dozen in our top ten, but here's our final list, all in a scientifically calculated order of preference:

	1. Our First Day in Akaroa (Day 37) - after three weeks in cold, urban Japan we landed at Christchurch and drove two hours through spectacular and sunny countryside to Akaroa, the most picturesque place on earth. We topped it off with the best meal of the holiday, in the most beautiful location.

	2. The Primeval Forest of Yakushima (Day 31) - we didn't allow nearly enough time to get to Yakushima Island and look around it, but we loved hiking through its dark and otherwordly forests of twisted trees during the three hours we scraped together. We'll be back.

	3. The Tokyo Morning Fish Market (Day 16) - I wouldn't have predicted a fish market would make the top ten, but the vast range of seafood was visually stunning and watching the market come to life as the sun rose was a great introduction to Japan. Plus: fresh sushi breakfast.

	4. Mount Doom and the Tongariro Alpine Crossing (Day 53) - not only was this walk a bit more of a challenge than most of our other treks, it also took us through landscapes we'd never seen before. The absolute highlight was the glorious Red Crater and its rumbling sister, Mount Doom.

	5. A Helihike Up The Fox Glacier (Day 47) - our first helicopter ride was exciting enough, but then we got to clamber around a completely alien landscape, exploring ice hole and other beautiful formations which had never been seen before, and wouldn't be there tomorrow.

	6. Wine Tasting In Marlborough (Day 50) - what could beat a lovely sunny day cycling in the countryside? Tasting ten superb wines, perhaps, and meeting with some of the friendliest wine makers in the world. A slow, relaxing and incredibly pleasant day.

	7. The Temple of Ta Prohm (Day 68) - this jungle-infested temple was visually stunning and a great place to spend an afternoon clambering across rubble, exploring dark corridors and imagining the thrill of discovering our own, long-lost temple in the jungle.

	8. The Penguins of Oamaru (Day 39) - we'd been told we might not see any yellow eyed penguins in Oamaru as they're totally wild, and so our expectations were set low. When a family of penguins waddled up the clifftop to stand a couple of feet away we felt like David Attenborough on a good day.

	9. Frolicking On Ocean Beach (Day 59) - we somehow didn't get round to swimming in the sea until we reached Ocean Beach in week four of New Zealand, and we'd initially only stopped the car to have a look. The beach was soft and sandy, the waves were huge and warm, and we laughed throughout.

10. Carrie Fisher at Studio 54 (Day 5) - we came across Studio 54 completely by accident, booked on an impulse and had one of the best afternoons of laughter on the holiday. A very New York diversion on a cold, Christmassy afternoon in December.

So now you know! Thanks for reading.

x

Days 79, 80 and 81, the end

Since getting back to London we've been spending a lot of time getting used to the time difference. This is more than just an academic exercise in my case as I'm due back at work tomorrow, yet still I'm collapsing with exhaution at around 6pm and then waking up again at 2am.

On Saturday we felt up to a spot of socialising, and had brunch with Terrie in Crouch End and then later invited Julie round for a roast chicken supper. Today I wanted a proper lazy Sunday in London, and for once the weather complied with a crisp and sunny spring afternoon. We had a pleasant stroll across the heath to Hampstead, watched the superb The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo from a big red sofa at the Hampstead Everyman cinema, then strolled back across the heath to the Bull & Last for dinner. Alas, we fell at the final hurdle as the Bull & Last had stopped serving food, but then we never did need much of an excuse to retreat home and order delivery from the Tiffin Tin.

And that, I suppose, is that.

Days 77 and 78, in which we go home

After breakfast in our room and a spot of pottering, we left The Quay at 1pm and didn't stop travelling until we arrived home 25 hours later. This was in part due to a massive margin of error we'd been given for our transfer at Bangkok, allowing a total of eight hours to go from one plane to the next. We were kicking ourselves at our extreme risk aversion until we realised, ultimately, that if we'd gone for anything less we wouldn't have made it as our flight out of Phnom Penh was delayed by several hours, and then once at Bangkok we had to go through the lengthy immigration process just to get out to pick up our suitcases, then back through the seperate and lengthy check-in, security and immigration processes again to catch our flight to London.

We'd grown manic about Cambodian food hygiene after I suffered seven straight days of major tummy upset from my mango salad in Siem Reap. After that, I didn't tolerate salad on the side of my plate, ice in my drinks or even cutlery which might have been sitting on the table since the night before. In Bangkok airport we loosened the leash a little and tucked into chicken satay and a giant sushi platter, washed down with white wine, and finally knew we were on the way back to normality.

The flight home seemed to go quite quickly, and we soon found ourselves motoring through the streets of London. It was wonderful to come home and realise how beautiful London is: the buildings are largely fabulous, Regent's Park was sheathed in a low mist and there wasn't an ounce of litter on the streets. It felt great to be back. It may be thirty eight degrees colder here, but I can definitely live with that if it means living in such a superb city. In this sense the holiday was very well planned, as I doubt I would be so sanguine about my return if we were coming straight from the glories of New Zealand.

Entering our flat felt like seeing it for the first time, and we went from room to room cooing like we were viewing it on the market. As a child I called this the Carpet Effect - whenever we got home from holiday, I was always shocked by how gaudy the living room carpet seemed - but today the Carpet Effect was entirely positive. We couldn't believe how lovely everything seemed. "This kitchen is really nice," I enthused, running through the flat. "And the living room is so cozy." Things were helped by our A-class housitter, spimcoot, who'd cleaned the flat from top to bottom and stocked the fridge with welcome eggs, smoked salmon and prosecco. We need to go on holiday more often.

The afternoon was filled with opening mail and processing paperwork. Around 5pm I started to flag and fell asleep on the sofa. I've grown so used to waking up having no idea where I am, it took me literally 30 seconds to realise I was finally at home. "Those curtains look like the ones at home," I thought groggily, "but I'm thousands of miles away, so it can't be home." When I finally realised I was in London I felt quite dejected and it took a while to realise the Big Trip really hadn't all been a dream.

Day 76, in which we go to see the king

After a stroll along the river - which close-to turned out to be little more than a giant concrete gutter seasoned in garbage - we started the day with lunch at the FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club) bar, a long-standing institution of Phnom Penh which – during our visit at least – saw large numbers of western tourists pass through its doors in search of a bubble of civility away from the noisy streets outside. The restaurant bar sits on the second floor of a charmingly ramshackle colonial building, the terrace to the east overlooking the river and to the west looking out across a park to the lovely red National Museum. It's one of those extremely rare spots in the city where everything looks really quite fabulous, and we reclined in big leather arm chairs and ate fish and chips to celebrate.

Topped up with energy we were finally ready again to face the challenges of being a tourist in Phnom Penh. The capital goes one better than Siem Reap as there are four things for tourists to do here. Having already been to the National Museum – and having taken a tactical decision not to tour the Killing Fields or visit the army base in order to fire a machine gun – we were left today with visiting the Royal Palace.

It was, unsurprisingly, baking hot and queueing for tickets just to enter was a trial in itself, with sweating tourists taking it in turns to step out of the queue into the shadows for some brief respite. It's only five degrees hotter here than Bangkok, but it's five degrees which pushes you from 'slightly cooler than core body temperature' to 'significantly more' and for this reason, I think we got less out of our visit to the Royal Palace than we have many other sights during our trip. But still, it was interesting to see the long Throne Room where King Cambodian gets to sit, and the treasury where he keeps what appeared to be a series of old pots and plates, and the so-called Silver Pagoda, which isn't silver at all but which does have a floor made entirely from silver tiles (an expensive affectation in such a poor country, and not a practical one either. The tiles were held together with the wider kind of cellotape).

Our favourite part of the visit was the tower above the Throne Room, which has four faces around the top and looked like a palatial version of Thomas the Tank Engine. I also really liked a cast iron building which apparently Napoleon III had posted over to Cambodia as a gift, but it was currently undergoing renovation and sheathed in green tarpaulin. We otherwise took polite photos and enjoyed the scenery, but didn't hang about in getting home to the air conditioning.

During dinner in the super little Italian Pop Café the weather finally changed and the skies opened, drenching the streets in rain. The sewers here are non-fabulous, and the gutters quickly flooded, lifting rubbish from the ground to form rather jolly flotillas of disease.

Day 75, in which we visit the source of Pol Pot's inspiration

Today we visited Cambodia's National Museum, an institution with a dubious history as it is said that Pol Pot grew up nearby and was so inspired by tales of the great Khmer Empire that he grew up and tried to emulate its success – admittedly by marching the middle classes out of the cities for execution, rather than planting rice in the alluvial waters of the Tonle Sap lake as the Khmers had done. The guide book reports however that the National Museum was not rewarded for its role in Cambodian history. Under the Khmer Rouge, treasures were looted, the roof collapsed and a colony of bats colonised the rafters, their guano destroying much of what was left.

Given this dark past, it's perhaps not surprising that the museum is still dragging itself to its feet and contains only durable stonework The main complex is a square of corridors around a single courtyard, and the galleries within contain a seemingly endless parade of statues looted from the Angkor temples in the north. Dozens of identical Buddha statues jostle for space among a score of statues of Rama, with elephant gods, monkeys and horseheaded young men filling the gaps in between. It was less a museum, more a holding bay for artefacts. There was no real explanation of how these items fitted together, nor any examination of their historical context or variances across the region. The tour guides we overheard spend most of their time simply introducing each deity and explaining how they fit into the country's current religion, and it was rather surprising to come across several active shrines in the museum, with incense burning and flowers for sale to make as offerings. I guess I'm just used to the gods in museums being long dead.

Having studied archaeology for three years I suppose I've had quite enough of understanding historical context anyway, and even in a good museum I don't really spend much time reading the footnotes. The museum made for a pleasant afternoon's diversion, and it was nice to see the sort of statues which had once graced the long empty temples we saw in the north.

It is currently too hot to do anything for more than a few hours at a time, so we returned to the hotel for cold water and air conditioning.

Day 74, in which return to Phnom Penh

After a bracing dip in the Indepdence Hotel's pool, followed by a swim in the bath-warm waters of the ocean, we loaded our luggage into yet another taxi and set off for our last destination of our entire Big Trip: Phnom Penh. I'd expected to be sad to have reached this stage, with 74 days behind us and only a few more to go, but Cambodia doesn't reward the tourist who stays too long and I'm quite looking forward to getting home.

Driving back north was the usual hair raising experience. There don't appear to be many traffic laws in Cambodia, and it is left to the driver's discretion which side of the road he should drive on. Most choose the right, but this doesn't stop them switching to left when taking a left turn. Overtaking is also more an art than a science, and it is not at all unusual for a car overtaking a truck to find itself being simultaneously being overtaken by another car, while another truck comes the other way. Almost half of the attempted overtakes our driver made were abandoned halfway through, and of the remainder half ended with oncoming traffic blaring their horns and flashing their lights as they got dangerously close.

The road from Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh is only single carriageway, with the lane in each direction being about the width of an average car, but this does not stop the enterprising Cambodians acting as though the other lane is simulatenously their fast lane, crisscrossing between oncoming vehicles and out onto the opposite hard shoulder just to get another car ahead, forcing cyclists and smaller cars off the road and simultaneously dodging the other cars as they do the precise same thing in the other direction. At several points so many people were overtaking that all of the vehicles found themselves travelling on the wrong side of the road. It would all be hilarious if we hadn't seen a crash scene on today's journey, a car smashed into a ditch and a startled woman with blood on her face climbing out with her baby in her arms.

And among all of this chaos are meandering herds of cows and clouds of mopeds and scooters, the latter serving as transport for the whole family: father driving, toddler in front of him holding onto the handles, the wife perched on the back of the pillion, one arm around the husband and another carrying a newborn baby, and a second toddler squeezed between her legs. Behind them might be another moto dragging a large plastic storage box on a makeshift trolley of recovered pram wheels, a man perched on the lid to protect their cargo. Other oddities zoomed by as we made our way to the capital, including a bride in full make-up and a strapless white sequinned dress driving herself to her wedding on a rusty scooter.

Phnom Penh is the only real city we've seen in Cambodia, and as Sihanoukville and Siem Reap are among the only other major settlements I would guess this is the only city in the country. It's sprawling and noisy and, while the guidebook claims it retains its colonial air, I have struggled to see it. I suppose bits of it look like an Arndale Centre, quite modern for these parts, but as your eyes drift upwards you can see shanty towns built on the rooftops: houses of bamboo, straw and plastic sheeting built three or four storeys above the capital's streets.

Thankfully we're staying in an elegant boutique hotel on the waterfront, The Quay. Our top floor room has fabulous views out across Mekong River, air conditioning and fully filtered tap water so it almost feels like we're not in Phnom Penh at all.

When we venture outside for a mooch around, tuktuk drivers flock around us like flies. "Tuktuk sir?", "Tuktuk sir?", "You want tuktuk?" ... it's baffling so many of them try even when they've seen others fail two seconds earlier. At 40 degrees centigrade (falling to 36 at night) it's simply too hot to waste any energy, yet still they seem to hope we turned down the first dozen tuktuk drivers on a whim. It makes me realise how desperate they are, and how utterly broken the economy is. You wonder what the government's economic policy actually is, beyond crossing their fingers and diverting development aid to their private accounts (corruption is a serious issue here and, although anti-corruption legislation is currently pending in the Cambodian parliament, the bill was drafted by the incumbent party and the opposition has been given just 48 hours to review it).

As we strolled back to the hotel this evening, a driver leaned over and shouted "Hey! You want I put you in a tuktuk and take you to the Killing Fields tomorrow?" I think that's the best pick-up line I ever heard.

Days 72 and 73, in which we sleep in the company of ghosts

We took the taxi another 300km south this morning and checked into the towering white edifice of the Independence Hotel, in the beach town of Sihanoukville. At first glance it seems that there's not much history to Sihanoukville - the city is not yet 50 years old, carved out of the jungle by the French as Cambodia's first industrial port - but it soon transpired we were staying in the heart of the town's history.

The Independence Hotel was apparently Cambodia's first luxury hotel - attracting guests as fabulous as Catherine Deneuve and Jackie Onasis - but the current owners aren't quite honest in stating it has been a "luxury spa resort since 1963" on three counts: i) construction wasn't finished until 1964; ii) it doesn't have a spa; and iii) it was taken over by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, who used it as a local base for four years after which it became a base for bandits and criminals.

The hotel doesn't go into this aspect of its past - its 'History Hall' literally only contains a photograph of a road and an old piece of wood whose provenence is unattributed, and the large sequence of photos in reception stopped at 1969 - but it seems it only reopened in its current form in 2004 after Canadia Bank invested $35 million to turn it from a broken, bullet-hole riddled shell into the lovely place it is now. Among their original plans was to convert the existing pool into a 'floating spa', however I cannot imagine this would be a relaxing experience as apparently the clover-leaf pool was once used as a prison, roofed over with bamboo. Thankfully the pool is now out of use, hidden on the far side of reception, but there are still local rumours of ghosts haunting the hotel proper, including a woman who killed herself in one of the rooms and four smugglers who were executed in another.

We tried not to think about this history as we enjoyed a slap-up lunch in the restored ballroom - a circular glass dining room with views out onto the terrace - nor while down at the private beach, sitting on the soft sand watching the sun set spectacularly across the ocean and preparing ourselves for a slap-up dinner. Unfortunately it was hard not to think about it, especially as we seemed to be the only people staying in the hotel and so whenever we left the room to walk through echoing corridors or sit in vast empty dining rooms it felt we were in a remake of The Shining. Several times I jumped with surprise when we came across another human being.

We had quite a large dinner, but alas the Immodium was beginning to wear off and Day 73 was mostly a write-off, spent in the hotel.

Day 71, in which we drive south

Knotted gun statue in the centre of Phnom Penh

Knowing we were due to travel 300km south to Phnom Penh today, I bunged my digestive tract up with Immodium and we had a thankfully uneventful journey. You can take a bus to Phnom Penh for less than £10, but we paid rather more for a private car which we figured would be quicker, more comfortable and contain fewer idiots. Even still, the driver took a few liberties – taking an elderly Cambodian man as a third passenger, pulling into cafés and roadside stalls trying to get us to buy things, and making claims about five minutes before we were due to arrive that his wife had recently given birth to a baby boy. Our previous driver also had this habit of becoming a father just before we were due to pay and it didn't particularly warm me to him.

Being sick, I spent most of the five hour journey with my eyes closed, but when I did look at the countryside strolling by I was not impressed by what I saw. Huge drifts of litter line the roads, and while no one seemed to be making any effort to clean it up, plenty of locals were throwing cans into the road, emptying rubbish out and even in one case pouring a bucket of what appeared to be raw sewage into the street. We later saw a herd of cows wandering around their field trying to get at the grass hidden beneath a thick carpet of litter, with one particularly enterprising cow chewing at a blue plastic carrier bag in the apparent hope it might contain hay. I tell myself not to be too shocked, to remember that this is a developing country and they're despertately poor, but then recall from my archaeological training that even in the bronze age Britons were burying their refuse in deep middens behind their homes. The feeling seems to be more that the locals have just given up. It is really no surprise the flat and filthy landscape has not inspired a Cambodian Wordsworth.

Personal hygiene also seems to be a major issue, and I read in the newspaper that several villages have been decimated from dysentry and their solution has been to erect scarecrows to scare away the evil spirits. It seems to me that boiling drinking water and thoroughly washing hands after going to the toilet might be a better start. Our driver would appear to be an educated man, but when I mentioned to him how odd it is that there is never a sink to wash your hands in the public (non Western) restrooms he just grinned indulgently as though washing the hands was a Western decadence. I wonder whether the locals are even aware of the correlation between their poor hygiene and the high infant mortality rate. A development priority should probably be a non-scarecrow based programme of hygiene awareness.

In Phnom Penh we checked into the Pacific Hotel, a clean and air conditioned bolt-hole for the night while we wait for the second leg of our journey to Sihanoukville tomorrow. Having napped the whole way in the car, I fell asleep at 8pm, slept straight through into morning and woke feeling fresh as a whistle.

Day 70, which is lost to sickness

Our bodies did not appreciate the Cambodian food we ate last night, some unwelcome news which was expressed through our bowels. I have been worse hit than Paul, and when we put on our CSI: Cambodia hats we concluded that the culprit was the mango salad, which I had ordered and Paul only sampled.

Oy vey. The NHS website reports that 30-50% of travellers to the developing world get diarrhoea, and that the main cause is faecal matter contaminating food through poor hygiene. How delightful, the Cambodian Soup Kichen should really mention their special seasoning on the menu. We're unable to eat much at the moment, but when we do eat we eschew anything that isn't sealed in a packet and manufactured overseas. Dorito crisps, Laughing Cow cheese and M&Ms might not sound like the healthiest meal, but faced with either figuratively or literally eating crap I know what my choice is.

We had planned for today to be a day of rest anyway, having exhausted two of the three main tourist attractions in Siem Reap (the floating villages and the temples). We don't plan to partake in the third main attraction – sex tourism – which is just as well as our hotel strictly forbids it. They even have a special sign forbidding it on the fridge, next to the “No Smoking” sign and the sign advising you not to bring grenades into the room. The hotel welcome book goes even further, advising (in among information on room service, breakfast and the mini-bar), “4. Sexually exploiting a child is a criminal offence in this country. Therefore only your own child who has checked in and travelled with you is allowed inside your room”. Healthy country.

Day 69, in which the sun rises after we do

At 5am this morning Panha drove us north to the temple of Angkor Wat – perhaps the most famous of Cambodia's temples – where rumour had it the sun was due to rise. Although the rest of the temples in the area face east, symbolising new life by catching the rising sun, Angkor Wat was built as a mausoleum for some god-king and so faces west, making it the only temple in Cambodia where you can watch the sun rise behind it. It also claims to be the largest religious structure on the planet, although they cheat by including the perimeter walls which run around a mile or so away from the temple itself.

It turned out we weren't the only ones to read about the sunrise in the guide book, with three or four hundred other people clumped around a small lily pond two hundred feet in front of the temple, trying to get the same photo of the sun rising behind temple, reflected in the pond. Figuring we could probably see plenty of pictures of that through Google, we went a bit closer and so were the only ones standing in its shadow as it rose, which was a lot more atmospheric.

We were also the first ones into the temple once the sun was up, and for a brief moment I was able to race around the deserted corridors in search of chambers, sunken pools, grassy clearings and eroded towers. Alas, as the tourists started filing in and the security attendants took their places to enforce a one-way route around the temple it turned out to be a rather symmetrical and dull place. While it's easy to get carried away and see the temple as a mysterious accomplishment of the ancients, it's informative to note that it was built at pretty much the same time as Notre Dame in Paris, which I would consider a more beautiful and enduring building.

We wandered back to the taxi – taking the obligatory lily pond shot as we passed – and had some special eggs and pancakes for breakfast before pressing on to our next sight: Angkor Thom.

When we visited Angkor Thom I didn't know anything about its history, but we've since learned that it was once the capital city of the Khmer empire – apparently once the greatest power in South East Asia – but was abandoned in the sixteenth century when the king moved his seat south. Although most of the city has now been lost to the jungle, everything built from stone remains, including the city gates, a number of temples and a series of raised terraces. We entered the city over a bridge flanked with dozens of ancient statues to reach the South Gate, on top of which are carved gigantic heads facing in the four directions of the compass.

We then drove through to the main temple of Bayon, which from a distance appeared to be no more than piles of stones but, as we got closer, turned out to have yet more huge heads carved into each tower. Bayon was great fun to clamber around, although in my excitement I did stumble across a dark recess high up in the central tower which the security guards clearly used as a urinal.

Less exciting was Bayon's neighbour, the temple of Baphuon, which you can only view from a single raised platform. Built on tiers of sand, Baphuon finally collapsed fifty years ago and is now undergoing reconstruction. As restoration goes, it looked like a bit of a dog's dinner. The central tower – which in a Victorian etching looks sleek and elegant – is built from random stones piled up higgledy-piggledy, some bearing carvings that don't even match up with their neighbours. We later learned that the ruins of the temple were entirely dismantled and catalogued by Cambodian archaeologists in the early 1970s, and then Pol Pot waded in and had them all executed and their records destroyed. The result is a giant 3D jigsaw, and it would appear the Cambodian's solution has been to take whichever stones they came across first – scooping them up from the ground with tractors– without applying any archaeological insight at all.

We were by this point suffering from the heat. Even before the sun had risen the air was hot and muggy, and by 9am the temperature was approaching 36 degrees (as attested by the dog pictured above, resting in the shade of its stone brother). We popped around the corner to take a look at the temple of Phimeanakas which – along with Baphuon – predates the founding of Angkor Thom and was incorporated into the new city. While Phimeanakas might have been exciting to see at the start of our visit – you know, when ancient temples in the jungle were still new to us – we were hot and tired and, apart from an odd looking sheep statue, it was really nothing special. We dutifully clambered up, stopped to catch our breath in the shade and then clambered down again without pausing to take in the view.

We walked down to the Terrace of the Elephants – a raised walkway with lots of elephants carved on the side, some faded or rudimentary and others detailed and pretty amazing – and then straight past the Terrace of the Leper King into Panha's air conditioned car. It was by this point only 10:30am and, since we'd hired Panha for the day, we figured we should see one more thing. As I couldn't bear the idea of going straight back out into the heat we decided to check out the temple of Banteay Srey, which is 15km north of Angkor Thom and so required a long and comfortable ride in the air conditioned cab. Banteay Srey is a small but elegant temple dating back over a thousand years and carved from a particularly cheerful shade of red sandstone. They have lots of monkey statues there, which I suppose is because it's dedicated to Rama, but really it was too hot to take much notice.

Only just midday, we returned to our hotel for a well-earned nap which saw us through to dinnertime. We ate summer rolls, green mango salad, Khmer soup and a chicken thing at the Cambodia Soup Restaurant on Pub Street, with explosive consequences for our bowels.