February 27th: A travel day to Vientiane where we immediately hopped on another bus to Thakhek. That's where we had a 2 day motorbike trip to the Khonglor cave and back! The first 105 km were absolutely boring but it was a good exercise to get used to the gears (I'm a pro now!!!!) ... the next 81 km were absolutely gorgeous. Of course we had some trouble with the bikes: First the chain of Karen's bike broke down ... luckily we were close to a village and found a mechanic. Then my bike had battery problems, but now I'm also a pro at starting the bike manually. Even with all those troubles, we've made it to Khonglor and visited the beautiful cave first thing in the morning ... after some breakfast of course :)

Back in Thakhek, we took a bus to Si Phan Don, also known as 4000 Islands ... we had to take the night bus which had AMAZINGLY HUGE seats ... unfortunately there were no seats available for us :( ... so we tried to steal some ... but that didn't work. We got stuck on a plastic chair in the alley for 3 hours before some seats became available.Next day we arrived in Don Det (one of the 4000 Islands) where we chilled for the next 5 days. We slept 2 nights on the Sunset side and 2 nights on the sunrise side. We read, I swam in the Mekong, we ate, we slept and that's about all we did. Oh, and I also went to the Lao hairdresser ... NOT a good idea!

On the 6th we travelled back to Pakse because we had a flight there on the 7th to go to Siem Reap in CAMBODIA. That's where we had the greatest guesthouse EVER, if somebody is going to the temples of Angkor Wat, you must stay at the ‘Golden Mango Inn' (Thanks Angie & Thomas for the great advice). The first day in Siem Reap we visited the temples of course (which are G O R G E O U S), the second day was shopping/donation day: first I donated some blood at the children's hospital, we bought some souvenirs there and we donated some clothes. We went eating at Haven which is a training restaurant & sanctuary for young adult orphans in Cambodia and then we did some shopping in (of course) some shops that support local creativity. At night we took the sleeping bus to Phnom Penh. We were amazed when we saw we had the best beds of the whole bus (upfront) and in the end we almost didn't sleep because we were that scared (being upfront). We arrived in Phnom Penh were Karen had arranged the ‘Suite' of a boutique Hotel in the centre of town .... NICE ... vely nice! Phnom Penh is really a nice city to visit but we started to get excited by our next destination ... first a bus to Sihanoukville where we had to spend 1 night before we could take our boat to Koh Rong Saloem .... You can also call it LAZY BEACH!!!! And that's what we did there for 4 days ... being Lazy! Well we also did some snorkeling there and we took the 20 minutes jungle walk twice to go to the White sand beach at the other side .... The most beautiful beach I've ever seen!

On March 16th we had to go back to the mainland .... Snif ... but we did spend one more day at the Beach. Again we got a great tip for the guesthouse (thanks again Angie & Thomas) being Mushroom point: Our room was a mushroom (duh), with a round bed and the bathroom was also a mushroom .... Smurf was very happy there!

And this was Cambodia: Loved it but unfortunately we only spend 10 days here. People are again soooo nice, women are dressed in their pajamas :). It's a country that suffered big time in the past but they keep on smiling! I'll come back!