We met the Laos/Cambodia border mafia in Stung Treng on the day we left Kratie. After a few hours in a lovely, spacious minibus (and an unexplained 20 minute stop in a gravel mine) we got dropped off next to the Mekong river running through the town and were immediately mobbed by about 15 smiling locals offering us whatever we wanted. Wherever we were going they could arrange, cheap, quick and easy...want a room, food, drugs, women? No sweat. Having heard of these Cambodian parasites we steered well clear. We were both convinced that whatever they arranged for us would have a costly sting in the tail. We grabbed the next shared taxi out and sped on (albeit slowly along a bumpy unfinished dirt road) to Banlung.

Gotta love those local roads!

Banlung is a tiny village in the middle of the back-end of absolutely nowhere, tucked in between the Laos and Vietnam borders in the far North East of Cambodia. Its red dusty streets are lined with less than pleasant, not at all collonial or charming corrugated iron buildings and rough wooden shacks. The food is bad, the air at the start of the rainy season oscilates between drippingly humid and unbearably hot with startling speed and there are spiders, snakes and moto drivers everywhere. So why, I hear you ask, would anyone make the considerable effort to go?

Well, for one there are no land mines, always a bonus in my book. This was the homeland of the Khmer Rouge, where they started, attracted the most popular support and one of their very last strongholds. Nobody wants to mine their own back garden. And what a garden... Banlung itself might be a great hole in the ground but it's surrounded by lush rainforests, great crater lakes, rushing waterfalls and ancient rice paddies. This place is a regular Asian garden of Eden, green, damp and scenic; and for once a hiker doesn't have to worry about being spread over a wide area very quickly with one unlucky step. It is impossible to find a good veggie fried rice in Banlung though. After a couple of tries in various cafe's we just gave up, smiled and hoped that what the waitress was going to bring us for lunch wasn't still moving.

This portable wood burning generator (honestly) powered the town television

As soon as we arrived we decided to leave again. Banlung town really isn't all that nice. A quick call later and the Yaklom Hill Ecolodge had sent out its finest minibus to pick us up. It came as quite a surprise then when it arrived looking exactly like a couple of mopeds. It was a very good job we'd not brought our rucksacks along.

Yaklom was an ecolodge in every sense of the word, solar power, insects and vegetarian food (Yay! from Amanda... Boo! from Jez who likes a bit of chicken curry every now and then and wouldn't say no to the last sausage at anyones barbie). The shower was cold (Thank God) and the lights at night were barely enough to read a book by. At least there was a mozzie net, and that food might have rated a 10 on the hippie scale, but was decidedly good.

Life in the wild, a little spider hole

We spent only two nights there, I'd had enough by the time I found a scorpion on the bathroom floor at one in the morning. Determined to meet the local people we took a guide and spent the whole day tracking through the undergrowth from hut village to farm shack saying hello to the local Tempuan Hill Tribe. Amanda found some traditional weaving to buy and I had brought a couple of umbrellas so everyone was happy. After a few chance meetings with older tribes-people I couldn't help notice that they'd all had their ears pierced with those huge stretchy holes, but none were wearing any jewelery in them. Instead their ears hung slack and empty. Ren, our guide explained that tourists had been coming here buying any original local artifacts they could for peanuts.

Amanda single handedly upholding the local cloth economy

The elephant ivory earings and bracelets, a symbol of their cultural identity that probably first belonged to these peoples grandfathers has now been lost forever. I thought it was a massive shame. With no idea of the value of their traditional lands some have sold off their farms for a quick, but laughably small profit to developers. Now there are many people in the countryside living in large expensive houses with no more money to buy food.

Singin' in the rain (forest)

Tired from the sun, humidity and overwhelming sense that someone just tipped a large bucket of sweat over our heads we decided to go for a swim the next day in the 'famous' Yak Lom crater lake. It took about an hour to walk there, a very hot and sweaty hour, but my God it was worth it. Mirroring the blue sky with scientific precision it stretched almost a kilometre away from us ringed perfectly by green tropical bushes and trees. We skirted the outside for a while (to avoid the millions of kids and picniking families near the entrance), and found a quiet little jetty to dive off from.

Unfortunately after I'd taken a dip and Amanda was gingerly lowering herself into the clear cool water a hoard of local families descended upon us and started to set up their copious rice, curry and mango dishes for a feast. Amanda turned around, started swimming, and didn't stop. When she was a few hundred metres accross I realised she was going all the way so I gathered all our kit up and went to pick her up at the other side. According to local legend a mysterious presence exists in the centre of this lake. Fishemen won't take their boats near it, swimmers don't venture more than 100 metres from the shore, Amanda plowed on regardless. She says she felt a bit weird in the middle, like something was going to grab her leg. But she reached the other side safe and sound. I was very proud of her, it is a really long way.

Is that a tentacle I see in the distance?

Back in town at last (I got fed up with sharing my room with half the six and eight legged population of the forest) we settled on the Star hotel run by a Mr Leng. He used to own the immensely popular Ratanak hotel on the main street but the other hotel owners got jealous of his success and forced him to close it.. This is a very strange country. Someone tried to sell Amanda a lovely dead rat stretched on a wooden rack in the market, apparantly they're good luck, but there's only so far we will go in the name of cultural understanding.

That night we climbed the hotels water tower for a ring side view of the panoramic sunset. In the field below us a large group of Vietnamese visitors had gathered with vans full of forensic equipment, here to test whether or not any of the latest find of human bones were of Vietnamese origin. I had to pinch myself.

So... Lake, countryside, rice paddies... check.

It was time to check out the local waterfalls and complete our list. Two local guys on mopeds met us in the morning and drove us all over the surrounding area to a couple of Ratanakiri provinces beautiful waterfalls. Firstly Ka Chang, through a real life rubber plantation, local farmers cut deep slashes into the trees and allow the white sap to drip into hollowed out coconuts, when full, whats left is rubber. We sat for a while by a fantasy pool in the shade of palm trees, allowing the hypnotic song of falling water to soothe our stressed western minds... until we realised we were being bitten to death by a million mozzies and had to leave.

Canaima revisited

Cha Ung falls were even better, there were way less mozzies for a start. After a steep climb over wet, slippy rocks we were able to actually walk behind the falling sheet of water. At some point it started to rain heavily, but we didn't care, distracted by the effort it took to take a shower in the spray, catch falling drops on our tongues, and not slip and break out necks on the rocks below.

Lumphat Ghost town

On the way back to Banlung we stopped off for a walk around the abandoned town of Lumphat. The former capital of Ratanakiri province once stretched languidly along the Srepoc River, was populated by a couple of thousand people and almost certainly was a more pleasant place to live than Banlung. Unfortunately the Americans bombed the daylights out it in the early 1970's hoping to catch a few Commie Red Viet Cong type guys on the Ho Chi Minh trail and the town was slowly abandoned, then decimated, then overtaken again by the jungle. (By the way, this town, apparantly (probably according to the Lumphat tourist board) was the inspiration in Conrads 'Heart of Darkness' for that place Colonel Kurtz was holed up in. To be honest I couldn't really see it myself, but I thought it was worth a mention.) As we drove in we passed dozens of craters left from the bombings, now full of water and home to all manner of nasty biting insects. All that remains of the town are a concrete water tower, decrepid and riddled with Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese bullets, and a silent secondary school. In one of the classroons were still rows of rotting wooden benches and stools, an empty box of pencils and a blackboard. Spooky!

US Bombs make big holes

Forced to make a quick stop in a Buddhist Pagoda on the way back for the loo we were fussed over by a big group of young, trainee buddhist monks who insisted on cleaning the toilet thoroughly before allowing Amanda in. Which was a shame because she was really desperate and began to wish she'd just found a convenient bush.

How to fit 8 in a taxi
With sore backsides and heavy hearts we bid Mr Leng and Banlung a fond farewell the following morning and grabbed the first shared taxi driver in the group that mobbed us as soon as we showed our Barang (which means 'pointy nose, round eyes' for those who are interested... Farang in Thailand) faces at the bus station. Driving back along the unpaved road with us were six other people, two in the front passenger seat, four in the back and another sharing the front seat with the driver. How we all didn't die I don't know. About halfway back to Kratie some genius had decided to lay fat logs along the oncoming lane to discourage unnecessary wear and tear on the gravel, unfortunately a hapless moto driver hadn't noticed them in time. We passed him sprawled across the road, wearing his motorbike like a hat and had to stop for a while to make sure he wasn't dead. Other than that the journey was horrendous.

At least we were able to check back into the Udom Sambath Hotel in Kratie, enjoy the sunset one last time from the terrace, watch a film on HBO and partake of the beautiful coconut curry in the Hang Heng restaurant down the road before heading back to Phnom Penh. All worth the gamble in a Cambodian taxi!!!