Today was time to leave Hanoi, which I think both of us are ready for. Hanoi is exhausting, not an ideal place for relaxing. It's just very full on. Hopefully Cambodia will be a little bit slower pace. Still this morning is likely to be quite slow, given we don't have to be out the apartment until 1pm. 

Trip to the airport was reasonably uneventful, except they didn't have two seats together, but that was fine for a two hour flight. Lounge was very good as well, nice selection of food and drinks.

We landed in Siem Reap pretty much on time, despite a small delay leaving. However, this made no difference as we still had visa and passport control to go. The visa itself was quite easy, probably because they had (no exaggeration) 8-9 people in formal police looking uniforms in a assembly line doing the visas. This was great, except 3-4 of them were clearly just watching stuff on their phone whilst doing their bit. Good to see it's taken seriously. But it didn't take long, so that's good. It was a shame the same couldn't be said for passport control, where we had a very pleasant 45 minute wait to get through. Felt very bad for the people who had done their visa in advance; they had to pay more and i think they still had to do something at the visa office, because loads of them got sent away after getting to the front. 

The hotel had arranged transport for us, which I later read would be a tuktuk, which didn't thrill either of us after our experience in V-town. It wasn't the same design as other tuktuk's we've seen, this was just a trailer attached to a motorbike, but surprisingly decent ride. Mr Ten was our driver and, after he told us about all the different trips he could take us on, we decided to use him throughout our trip rather than take a risk on any more drivers with limited understanding of the city they operate in. 

Our first look at Cambodia and we were impressed; looked very well put together, even compared to Hanoi which is much wealthier. After a 20 minute journey thought the city we got to our hotel, without hearing one beep! Bliss. Admittedly we were a bit nervous as we pulled down this industrial looking alleyway, but turns out it's just how Siem Reap looks. 

The hotel was through a little passageway and led into the restaurant and pool area, which looked very nice. The staff were very helpful, answering our questions and giving recommendations for dinner that wasn't their own restaurant. Our room was pretty decent size and fairly well equipped, although it was here you could see some cracks in the facade (not literally). This not quite looking as well as the reception of the hotel would suggest, but overall pretty decent. There were two main issues with the room thought, first was that our balcony overlooked the biggest collection of empty beer cans I've ever seen; and second, was the fact it overlooked a bar playing very loud music, which we could hear in our room. We think the manager thought this might be an issue as she was very insistent on us telling them if we had any problems with the room. So, we got all moved to the other side of the hotel which was much quieter.

We had been recommended a restaurant just around the corner, called Haven. We walked in through the front and instantly loved the place, really nicely decorated and had a great atmosphere. a busy place, so we were sat at a high table for food (no worries from us). The place turned out to be a social enterprise, helping young disadvantaged youths get hospitality experience. They offered a good training program, with accommodation, clothing and everything you could think of all for free (presumably in lieu of proper wages). We ordered some spring rolls to start, a local curry and meat dish for main and a banana crumble brownie thing for dessert. It was very, very good food. The curry was similar to Thai, but toned down a little, not so punch in your face flavour, less hot spice and more tasty spice.