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so we're back. we survived, and will live to blog another holiday.

everything finished up well with excessive amounts of shopping and eating.

in summary some of the highlights of the trip for me would have to be:

the first night in siem reap - eating amok and everything just being perfect and beautiful and amazing.

wandering the streets of the old quarter in hanoi and marvelling at the streets of like shops (shoes street, glasses street, tinsel street)

riding in hue through rice paddy cemetries and over dirt paths and bamboo bridges and thinking we were lost and local women appearing and calling out to us "you" and pointing down the path.

meeting the apheda people and having so many of my ideas about aid and development changed.

riding around dalat and seeing the various industries and realising how much tension there still is between north and south vietnam

the last night of the trip going over to the china town area of ho chi minh and buying up piles of random red and gold tet decorations whilst presumably high on ventolin, involving lots of animated non verbal discussions with the nice lady running the shop enthusiastically miming to us how things worked.

so now its just a matter of working out how to find the money to get back there as soon as possible. also i plan to try and learn khmer if possible, if anyone is interested. i also plan to learn spanish. hmmm. pity i dont have any sort of gift for langauges.

i hope to be able to go back later this year and do some work with apheda, i dont know what or where yet. working in developing countries has always had a romantic appeal to me, but i didnt think i could actually handle living away from home. being away has made me realise that however difficult it may be, the experience would be worth it. although clearly i'd have to finally get over my phobia of squat toilets. although having made it through japan, cambodia and vietnam has really just made me feel like its my new life's challenge - to travel the world without ever using a squat toilet.

clearly posting photos just isnt going to happen. or at least, not by me. talk to laura and she'll probably organise something.