What we did at the Office Today

Too Much Fun?

Just in case you thought we were only here to enjoy ourselves, we thought we should give you some info about our jobs and why they need doing. So not too many pictures and rather less frivolity in this post for once. It may seem like we are on permanent holiday, but actually we have only had 2 short breaks, one of 3 & one of 4 days in the 8 months we have been here, revolving around Khmer bank holidays - apart from the 10 days leave we used to go back to UK for Anna's lovely wedding.

No, we don't live in a hole in the road with the rats. Yes, we have made sure we have built up an essential social support network. Yes, we try to eat properly and take some time to relax. Yes, we take every opportunity to enjoy the wonderful childlike humour & good nature of the Khmer people we live & work with - they would be mortified if we did not. If we did not do these things neither of us would be able to do the jobs we do with any energy, efficiency or effect. If that counts as having too much fun, then, as a Canadian colleague of Sarah wearily said (about a particularly demotivated & dim government department in the murky bowels of the Dickensian workhouse of the Education Ministry):

''Well, you might just as well take 'em out & shoot 'em... Eh?''

We know that most of you that read our reports, & know us, 'get it' - you read between the lines, have imagination, & many have researched & read about the dreadful recent history of Cambodia & understand a bit about why it is how it is today. For anyone that doesn't, we hope the following accounts will fill in some of the gaps - photos not really required.

Sarah's Tale

We both work long days (8-5.30 or more) in and out of our offices & some of those days seem longer than others when there are power cuts. This is excluding the many evenings & weekends we have both put in. We do not lead a glamorous expat lifestyle, eat out at 'fancy' restaurants or drive airconditioned anythings. We cycle all over town & quite honestly risk life & limb every time we do so! We do not have a cleaner or cook as we are trying to live within our allowance - it is quite tiring doing all that ourselves. Even our Friday evening get together with colleagues at one of the bars usually turns into a strategic session of arranging the essential contacts & meetings which the various ministries aren't so good at.

I may have touched on this before, but we are guilty of only taking, & showing you, rather nice pictures. As I said, I don't feel I can intrude on people's lives & take pictures of families living in dug out caves in rubbish dumps, small children with lice festooning their hair weaving their way through the traffic at main junctions, begging with babies in their arms who I'm pretty sure they are not even related to; sometimes I'm not sure the babies are even breathing. Young, barefoot boys pushing their handcarts along the quiet streets late at night, scavenging the rubbish for recyclables to sell.

It is not a lot of fun basically ignoring these children, most of whom are addicted to glue or other substances, & kept that way by the people who run them. We also cannot afford to give to all the disabled and disfigured people, both physically and mentally, that live their lives out between the gutter and the mercy of the owners of whatever building they are in front of at the time.

It is not much fun cycling past the children & young adults who sit slumped up against the wall around the villa housing my office, with needles hanging out of their arms, on my way in in the morning. I wonder why they choose our bit of sidewalk - maybe they can see we are an NGO & feel somewhat safer there. Our security guard is a sweet-natured man who I don't think would kick them into the street.

I finished the Valuing Teachers report, although still have to do the final copy edit before publishing, then it goes to the printers in November. Anyone who is interested to read about the sobering state of education, let me know & I will mail you a soft copy. I presented the recommendations to various committees and groups of concerned parties and to the Minister and the Secretary of State, who received them in friendly manner that bodes well for future communications & continuing cooperative work. Frankly, the only way is up.

3 weeks ago I started my job at the Disability Action Council. There will be a lot in future blogs about the work that has & is yet to be done by this organisation - those of you with a nervous disposition... Basically it was formed at the government's request in 1997 to act as an advisory body to the government & the ministries involved (health, social affairs, education etc.) on how policies on disability should be developed, & a provider of information on monitoring & helping to implement those policies to the national branches of international & Khmer organisations concerned with disabled people. We work in the fields of education, livelihoods and rehabilitation (anything from prosthetic limbs to social rehabilitation for leprosy sufferers). To give you some idea of the scope, with one small example from each sector:

• No deaf child has ever completed their primary education in Cambodia - mind you, probably only about 40% of all enrolled children do anyway
• Disability = dire poverty
• There is a culture of unhelpful pity that is tied to Buddhism: the concept of Karma means that if one is born with a disability in this life it is because of some transgression in the last, and there is a general stigma attached to any disability, reminiscent of how I remember people's attitudes in the UK 40 years ago
• There are only about 150 physiotherapists in the whole of the country and the one spinal injuries unit (people fall out of trees quite a lot apparently & there are a distressing amount of road accidents) is due to be handed over to government control, for reasons too convoluted to address - which basically means the kiss of death.

(That's in a very small nutshell!)

I have recently been to several of our member NGOs - fantastic organisations who try to improve the prospects of adults & children who are blind, deaf, physically or learning disabled, including those children with profound disabilities. I could kick myself for forgetting the camera as it would have been very interesting for you to see how, & in what conditions, these dedicated people work, but there will be plenty of opportunities as the weeks fly by.

My main objectives as Inclusive Education Advisor are to strengthen the existing network of NGOs and to capacity build at DAC. About half of our staff are disabled themselves (polio, cerebral palsy & loss of an arm by a mine are examples), and the rest don't really have much knowledge of disabilities. They all need support with planning, proposal & report writing etc etc. They are mostly bright, young, motivated to learn & dedicated. The oldest (apart from Granny Sarah here!) is a lovely, gentle 41 year old man who graduated as a physiotherapist in 1989 & worked for 14 years at the Spinal Unit. He got a scholarship of $1.50 (one dollar and fifty cents), 10kgs of rice, a bar of soap & a spare set of clothes. He is passionate about raising the awareness of communities about the potentials of disabled people & about helping them to earn their livings and is a one man power house.

One of the problems is the perception in Cambodia of what a disability is. After the war, the many millions of landmines led to a great number of people losing limbs (if they survived) and most attention & development aid and funds naturally went to them. Now, although the number of mine victims is still a substantial 66 a year, the vast amount of disabilities are not mine related. Disabled people themselves tend to think that any policies or initiatives are not relevant for them - that they are only for mine accident survivors. Disabilities range from every sort of congenital cause to deafness & blindness, often potentially treatable or avoidable. Because there are no reliable statistics yet (due some better ones next year), it is hard to say, but there seem to be a very large number of deaf children for example.

You would be justified in asking, what on earth do I think I can do about any of this, & some may also think that there are plenty of good causes and problems back home. One thing that happened on Monday brought it home to me. We arranged a meeting between 3 speech therapists from London & some of our Phnom Penh members, the head of the school for severely disabled children, workers at the nutrition centre (an orphanage for abandoned severely disabled children who cannot eat or drink independently), & others. There are no speech therapists in Cambodia, most of our staff did not really know what they are & certainly not the range of resources they can provide. By the time we finished, we had established the role therapists could play in each of the organisations and how training might be implemented & developed a contact strategy to the ministries (in order for any development work to be effectively sustainable, it has got to be government supported, however painful & tedious the process!)

How will I know this will help any particular child? I don't, but one of the conditions that causes completely avoidable infant death, social stigma & educational exclusion is cleft palate. Now... I hope my dear brother & sister-in-law have no objection to me telling the happy story of my fabulous little nephew Cameron, now nearly 3. He was born with a cleft palate, diagnosed shortly after, and had feeding problems because of it. They were referred to a specialist, had advice on how to feed him, later he had surgery & follow ups, has seen a speech therapist & now speaks really well & will be following his big sister to school in a couple of years. Luckily, he did not need any help or advocacy from me whatsoever.

I'm very sad to say that a baby born here, unless lucky enough to be born into a family who could take him to another country for treatment, or near enough to the one children's specialist hospital, and to parents with the resources to do even that, would likely die from lack of nutrition before a cause was ever found. If he survived, he would be regarded as a victim of his fate & maybe even kept out of sight at home. He would never learn to speak & certainly would not go to school. Maybe that Monday meeting will help some babies like this in the future.

Everything we do here is drop by drop & step by step. My predecessor was instrumental in getting the policy for Education for Children with Disabilities adopted by the Ministry of Education this February - a great achievement. If I can help to get the monitoring of the implementation of that policy underway, that will be the next step. And I hope some of it will be fun!

Perry's Tale

Cambodia's population is around 14 million and growing at about 2% per year. 85% of the population is rural; 34% of the entire population live below the official national poverty level of about US$0.45 (45 US cents) per person per day (that's $2.25 for a family of five). In Cambodia, if you earn just $1 per day, you're not classified as poor. 78% live on less than $2 per day. That's eleven million people each living on less than about £1.25 per day. Cambodia ranks 131st on the UN Human Development Index. In simple terms, that means things are pretty bad in many ways, although they could still be a good deal worse: there are 46 countries in the world below Cambodia.

Infant mortality is 98 per 1,000 births. A further 43 will die before they reach the age of 5. Put together, that's one in seven. In the UK, it's one in two hundred. The maternal mortality rate is 1 for every 169 live births; in the UK it's 1 in every 125,000. Think of the implications for families of that. At the other end of the journey, life expectancy is just 58 years, compared with the UK's 79. Think about that too, those of you (like me) over 50. These figures are actually quite a bit better than ten years ago, so progress is being made in improving people's lives here, but the process of change can be painfully slow and fragile. And there's a long way to go.

33% of the population is undernourished: i.e. they simply don't get enough to eat. Malnutrition - not getting enough of the right things to eat - is an even bigger problem. Let's just give you a quote from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (one of the organisations I work quite closely with): "Malnutrition, especially in rural Cambodia, is widespread, particularly among children under five years and among expectant and nursing women." Malnutrition is one of the biggest direct and indirect causes of child mortality. Even of the children that survive, over one third will be stunted due to the paucity of their diet. Malnutrition continues to affect people here, especially poor people, throughout their lives. Malnutrition is often the root cause of disability.

In the West, we pretty much take it for granted that we can eat a range of food types to keep ourselves healthy. In Cambodia, up to 80% of the diet (and sometimes more) is made up of just one food: rice. Rice is very good indeed for carbohydrates but there are an awful lot of essential nutrients that it doesn't contain. Cambodians need to get their vitamins and minerals, especially iron, zinc and calcium, from other food sources. Fortunately, they have the Mekong river system and its fish. Cambodians get over 80% of their protein from fish and, for the rural poor, the figure is close to 100%. In Cambodia, fishing isn't a hobby.

But we have a problem: there's a limit to the amount of fish you can catch without critically depleting the stocks. You've probably read in the press all about this kind of thing with respect to cod stocks in the North Atlantic. In Cambodia, if we take all that we think the rivers and the sea can reasonably provide, we're left with a gap in meeting our nutritional requirements, and the gap is growing as the population grows.

Bear in mind that the picture above shows the challenges that population growth could cause in maintaining the current levels of nutrition, let alone actually improving matters for the poor. But the situation is actually potentially much worse. The Mekong is under a great deal of pressure from damming for hydroelectricity, especially in China, and is also starting to suffer from pollution. At the same time, demands for land for the growing population are leading to habitat destruction. All of this affects the ability of fish to breed.

Meanwhile, most Cambodians have no realistic alternatives to fish and the first priority for people who are hungry is to find food now. Consequently, Cambodia's harvest of wild fish has been running at the limit - and arguably above the limit - for some time now. Over-exploited stocks are at risk of collapse: if too many fish are taken, then too few are left to breed. Today, the fisheries are filling the nutrition gap but, if the catch of wild fish were to drop by just 10% per year (and some rivers have shown much more dramatic declines than that), then the situation would turn very much for the worse.

So we need to act now to increase production from other sources like aquaculture (fish farming), whilst simultaneously reducing the demands we place on the river and lake systems. My job is to help work out how to turn this:

into something like this:

These projections are ones I recently made based on the latest available data. It's the first time anyone here has really done demand forecasting as part of strategic planning and it has helped to show us where our priorities need to lie.

Without doing this, we wouldn't have known, for example, how much we need to increase the catch of fish from the rice fields (they swim in and breed when the fields flood, and they are caught as the fields drain and dry out). We knew that we could increase the catch if we dug lots of dry season refuge ponds for the fish, we just didn't know how important it was. Now we do, because we're basing our statistics on consumption, not production. I take no credit whatsoever for this particular change in data collection - that goes to the Mekong River Commission (a multinational body) and long pre-dates my arrival here - but my job was to say "what does this mean to us in terms of demand and sustainability?" and to help people to take it from there.

At the same time, I'm working to improve the understanding of how to do planning for fisheries staff across all 22 provinces of the country. This is also a first, and it's going to be a long, challenging task. I'm also helping to produce all the action plans that will go to implementing the progress we need to make. At the same time, I'm continually working to improve my knowledge and understanding of all aspects of the fisheries sector.

So that's the context my job sits in. I work with some highly talented and very capable people but there just aren't enough of them. The ravages of the past have left Cambodia short of leadership, education, management skills, training and just about any sort of infrastructure you can mention. My job is to try to help: to fill some of the gaps, and to try to help them to work out better ways of doing things.

There probably isn't very much that I do that a Cambodian couldn't do - if he wasn't already overloaded with everything else that needs to be done. And if he had got the right education, training and experience. And if he had survived the devastation and difficulties of Cambodia's recent past. Bearing in mind my own age and background, and especially how someone like me might have fared in the years from 1974 - 1979 under the Khmer Rouge, it's perhaps not surprising that I don't have as many direct counterparts as you might at first expect. The good news is that there are quite a lot of very fine people helping in the Cambodian fisheries: as consultants, as research partners, as volunteers and, last but not least, as donors.

By the way, we also now know, thanks to some excellent research, that by eating a particular type of small fish we can also significantly improve nutritional standards for the same weight of fish eaten. So our plans can not only prevent things from getting worse, they can actually start to make things much better. Now we just need to get it done.

Pressing On

So that's what the two of us do every day. It can be frustrating, annoying, infuriating, dire, hilarious, challenging and intensely rewarding: often all at the same time. But, every so often, it makes a little bit of a difference.

Our normal, lighthearted service will be restored soon. In the meantime, please don't forget the need to keep supporting VSO through our Justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/jagoteers. Our thanks go out again to all those of you who have already contributed so generously. You're helping to make a difference.

Back by Popular Demand...

Especially for those of you who liked the bugs and beasts (Ellie), here are a few more of the creatures we have encountered. We found the strange looking insect below sharing a swimming pool with us. We fished it out because we thought we should rescue it from drowning, and then found that it was some sort of water dweller - the long tail is not a stinger but a breathing tube. We have no idea what it is, but it was huge (when you blow up the picture, that's about how big it was).

In case you think it looks a bit like a scorpion, here's what an actual Cambodian scorpion really looks like. This picture isn't one of ours; it was taken by a friend who's working up the Mekong in Kratie. We were planning to go and visit her soon but now we're not so sure...

Especially for Kate, here's a cutesy little Cambodian wasp. The preview is about full size and it spent quite some time apparently wanting to be our friend and coming back every time we shooed it off. We actually don't get very many wasps at all but we do get some fantastic bees: they're about twice the size of a big bumble bee and are a lovely deep shiny blue colour. They never seem to stop long enough for us to get a good picture, but if we do take one we'll add it to the blog (there's probably going to be at least one more beastarium before we're done).

Just kidding, Kate, it wasn't really that big. It was actually only about two thirds of the size you see above.

Moving from 6 legs to 4, there are lizards everywhere. We have quite a few geckos that live in and around the house and we love them because they're cute but especially because their favourite food is mosquitos. They seem not to mind us most of the time, although one did object to being waken up one morning when Sarah popped some bread into the toaster where it was sleeping. I'm not sure who was more surprised, though: the gecko at having a slice of bread dropped on its head or Sarah at seeing a lizard suddenly fly out of her breakfast. We have now got into the habit of checking the toaster every time before we use it - not something we particularly had to do back in the UK. They tend to grow up to about 6 to 8 inches long (although the one in the toaster was a baby, only a couple of inches long). Here's one of our little mozzie-munching friends, hanging on upside-down on the ceiling of our balcony.



The rather bigger creature below is a Tokay gecko that used to come out at night at the small hotel we were staying at in Siem Reap. He was about 2 feet long and rather striking.

The big problem with Tokays is their somewhat irritating habit of letting other geckos know how big and strong they are. They do this by shouting "geck-o, geck-o, geck-o" at the tops of their voices, which are surprisingly loud. Unfortunately, they're nocturnal, so they do this in the middle of the night from the wall above your bed.

The lizard below was rather less chunky but also probably about 2 feet long. However, in this case, most of it was made up by what we hope you'll agree was a pretty amazing tail.

The next lizard was just the most striking bronze colour - just exactly the colour that Sarah has been trying to get some shoes made in. Not out of lizard skin, obviously (although we didn't see this lizard again, so I shall be keeping a good eye on the bottom of the wardrobe).

Next, here's a few more butterflies, because we're moving our eyes gradually upwards now...

This one was on the earth.

This one was on the grass - spot the small dragonfly next to it. We get lots of dragonflies here, sometimes dozens and dozens all in the same small area, and some are simply huge. No good photos yet, though; they're just too quick

This rather lovely swallowtail was on a bush.

And this beauty was resting in the lower branches of a tree.

And now we're in the trees, let's see what else we can find... Ah yes, another gargantuan orb web spider. Please bear in mind that this picture was taken from about 30 feet below it. How many European spiders can you even see from that far away?

And while we're up here, there are even bigger things. What looks like black fruit hanging from the trees below are actually fruit bats. They've got a wingspan of about 4 feet and when they fly they look like something out of a Hammer horror movie.

OK, so back down to the ground again and something that looks normal. The toads here look just like toads in the UK. They are bigger, though (of course).

And the frogs look nothing like the ones we used to get in our pond. What's more, they can also climb up walls.

But we love the frogs and toads because they also eat mosquitos. As does the lady below, when she just wants a small snack. She was walking across the floor of a village house we were visiting on Tonle Sap lake, so Perry started taking pictures. She wasn't amused by the attention and reared up ready to strike. Since she was about 8 inches long, Perry moved his fingers away fairly rapidly.

And while we're back on bugs, take a look at the extraordinary length of the front legs of this spider.

She had spun her web over a fish pond but her targets were flies, not fish. Just as well, as she was only an inch or two long and the fish here can get quite large. The Mekong has two of the biggest freshwater fish in the world, the Mekong Giant Catfish and the Giant Freshwater Stingray (click on the links for pictures from National Geographic). Both grow to over ten feet long. In Cambodia, there are also tigers (although not many any more), leopards, wild elephants, bears, and freshwater dolphins. When we get the photos, we'll show you. If we survive.

More soon. In the meantime, please don't forget the need to keep supporting VSO through our Justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/jagoteers. They need the money to keep up the payments on our medical insurance.

Waterworld

During our trip to Siem Reap, we had a wonderful opportunity to go out to a village on the Tonle Sap Great Lake to see how people live there. We went by boat with a large family group of Cambodians, plus a Dutch couple and a Swiss couple who were visiting Cambodia. Because we were travelling with the Cambodian family, we went to places that see very few tourists and where the way of life is genuinely Cambodian.

First, though, we should put a few things in context. You probably know that the Mekong is one of the biggest rivers on Earth. It's about 2,900 miles (4,600 kilometres) long. Its headwaters are on the Tibetan plateau and it and its tributaries flow through China, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Viet Nam before flowing out into the South China Sea. The Tonle Sap is one of its tributaries. At its lowest flow, the Mekong discharges 16,000 cubic metres every second. At its peak in the rainy season, that rises to 40,000 - 2½ times as much. Just for comparison, the River Thames discharges 65 cubic metres per second. No, that's not a typo, 65 compared to 40,000. In the rainy season, its level rises to 50 feet (15 metres) higher than during the dry season. As you've probably guessed, that means it floods.

At its peak, the flooding inundates a huge area of Cambodia. But the story of Tonle Sap lake is particularly interesting. The headwaters of the Tonle Sap river are in the hils of western Cambodia and Thailand. It forms a large lake of about 1,000 square miles (2,600 square kilometres) in the centre of Cambodia before flowing on to join the Mekong at Phnom Penh. The picture below shows where the rivers merge: the Tonle Sap is in the foreground and the main channel of the Mekong in the background. The low-lying spit of land on the left is what divides them. This picture was taken in the dry season, with the rivers at their lowest.

However, during the rainy season, the level of the Mekong gets so high that the Tonle Sap can no longer discharge and its flow reverses. Rather like a backed up drain (but somewhat bigger), water from the Mekong flows back up the Tonle Sap to the lake, which increases to four times its original size: 4,000 square miles (10,400 square kilometres). That's just over half the size of Wales.

So it was onto this small puddle that we set forth...

... in the middle of the rainy season.

The only way to get around on the lake is by boat. You have to navigate around the clumps of water hyacinth that grow everywhere, and also try to avoid hitting the treetops that stick up out of the water. Mind you, not hitting the ones that are just below the water is more tricky.

On the lake, villagers have two choices: build your village on stilts anything up to 10 metres (30 feet) high,

or just float the whole village.



Either option brings a few challenges. On land, keeping pigs isn't much of a problem.

But try it when your house is perched on top of poles and the ground they're resting on is under 25 feet of water.

Or when your pig farm is actually a boat.



There are some islands of dry land in the lake. In the dry season, they are hills.

These islands form busy hubs of activity, where all traffic is by boat.



They are where you will find the markets,



village halls,



and temples.

The islands are also where the villagers keep their ceremonial boats. Every year, when the flow of the Tonle Sap reverses to normal, a huge festival is held in Phnom Penh. All the villages race their boats against each other down the river, and VSO also enters a team each year. So far, the only time the VSO team hasn't come last is the year when the boat sank. This year's water festival is in November, so the embarrassing pictures should be here some time after that.

But most of the people on the lake live not on the islands but in the stilted villages. In some areas, the houses form streets and the whole thing feels extraordinarily like the Grand Canal in Venice.

The villagers do everything with their homes that land-dewllers do. They have restaurants, bars, shops, farms and even flower gardens. This is the family home that we went to for lunch.

And this is their farm: a fish farm.

The houses are entirely made of wood and are very open. Even the floors are made of slats with gaps between them that drop straight down to the water. Not only does this keep them wonderfully cool, it also makes sweeping the floor nice and easy. Here, some of the family members are preparing lunch.

After lunch, all of Cambodia goes to sleep for about an hour. This is the view out of the back door.

And this is the view from the back door looking in.



But then the villages come back to life, people go back to work...



.. and the kids start playing.

Because it was the last day of the Pchum Ben festival, this particular afternoon was something special. From about 3 o'clock on, more and more boats started appearing on the lake, racing each other up and down.

As we went out and joined them, it became clear what was going on. It was one great big, rioutous, joyful water fight! Everyone had come armed with small plastic bags that they were filling with lake water and hurling at each other as they went along. The idea seemed to be to sneak up blindside as fast as you could, soak the other boat and then try to get away before they could retaliate. One boat had a great trick of looking like it had lost power until another was just in range...

What was really special was that the villagers appeared to love the fact that barangs were joining in the fun. Unfortunately, we weren't armed so were something of a soft target. Some of us tried to hide behind umbrellas but we all got soaked: none more so than Perry, uncompetitive as ever, who was hanging out right off the boat trying to catch the bags that were being thrown at him so that he could throw them back. He caught precisely zero.

But the soaking didn't matter at all. It was just a wonderful experience, full of shared fun and laughter. We even saw Lypeng on another boat, waving madly as he recognised us. But all too soon, it was time to go yet again so we set off back to the shore.

I'll bet none of you have got a trip on Tonle Sap lake on the last day of Pchum Ben down on your bucket list. You should have - it's an experience of a lifetime.

More soon. In the meantime, please don't forget the need to keep supporting VSO through our Justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/jagoteers.

Angkor

Cambodians love a public holiday and who are we to disagree. For the Pchum Ben 3-day holiday in October, we decided that it really was about time that we visited what is truly one of the great wonders of the ancient world: Angkor Wat. So we hopped on a bus to Siem Reap, put on our walking sandals, hired a guide (whose knowledge of and delight in Khmer culture and history were simply wonderful) and sallied forth.

Actually, referring to Angkor Wat is a bit of a misnomer. There are actually hundreds of ruins in a great many complexes spread out over many kilometres; Angkor Wat is just one of them. And throughout them all, you will encounter majesty wherever you turn.

Most people have heard of Angkor but nothing prepares you for the size and scale of the ancient buildings and monuments in the area. The Angkor civilisation built an extraordinary series of buildings from about the 12th to the 15th century, many of which have survived largely intact despite centuries of intervening neglect and return to the jungle. Below is the Bayon temple, one of the highlight of the Angkor Thom complex: a walled and moated city of over 3 square kilometres.

The Angkor civilisation transitioned from Hinduism to Buddhism during the course of its existence, and the Hindu influence can be seen very clearly throughout the architecture. Carved stone faces of gods and demons appear everywhere and in all sizes from the immense to the miniature. On most of the temples, all of the walls are covered in intricate carvings, while the turrets and towers are host to gigantic watching faces.

Each block in the face below is about a metre square. The sheer physical effort that must have been involved in its construction - in about the 14th Century - is mind-boggling. Added to that, all the stone came from quarries over a hundred kilometres away and was brought through the jungle to the site. Shows what you can do when you put your mind to it!

In all, there are many kilometres of beautifully carved walls, most of which are wonderfully preserved and show scenes of Cambodian life from over 500 years ago - some of which are remarkably similar to scenes of Cambodian life today.

They also show great events from Cambodian history and from Hindu mythology.

Our guide Lypeng's hand gives you some idea of the scale and the amazing intricacy of the carving. Renaissance Italy, eat your heart out!

This fellow reminds us of someone. Suggestions on a postcard...

Not all of the temples are particularly big, and not all of them were built by people with T-squares and straight edges. But they all have the most extraordinary feeling of antiquity and majesty, even when you're not quite sure whether the builders really meant them like that or whether overconsumption of Cambodia's beloved Angkor beer actually dates back 800 years to the Angkor period. Actually, we've had one or two cans that taste like there might be something in that theory.

One temple has a particular eerie majesty of its very own. Ta Prohm is not particularly large or spectacular (although it is reputed to have once had a tower with over 1,000 diamonds in, the recesses for which you can still see today). It is, however, the temple that has become the most at one with the jungle. Pictures can not begin to do it justice, but we'll show you a couple anyway.

To give you some idea of the scale, that's a 6 foot 1, 220 pound barang in among the tree roots in the picture below. For those of you reading this in metric, that's 186 cm and 100 kg. Lypeng stands well clear on the right (perhaps he's read the bit about Old Man Willow in The Lord of The Rings).

And now on to the most famous of them all: Angkor Wat itself. You approach it across an artificial, perfectly rectangular lake that goes right around the complex and makes the lakes in every western park we've ever seen look like garden ponds.

After you pass through the outer portico, you're not even nearly there. You then follow an elevated stone causeway for about a kilometre to the main temple building with its five beehive towers. The building is square and each side is 1 kilometre long: now work out the size of the lake!

Every available surface is covered in carvings. There are over 1,000 of these dancing girls (called Apsaras in Khmer) but this one, hidden around a corner that you have to lean out madly over a 5 metre drop in order to see, is the only one that is smiling. The motivation of the artist is a mistery, but I think I would have liked him.

Inside the main temple, the sheer scale is breahtaking.



And there are surprises around every corner.



All too soon, the sun started to come down and we had to leave, despite hardly having scratched the surface. We'll be going back.

The classic view: Angkor Wat in the jungle clearing (and if anyone out there can tell us how to photoshop out the scaffolding that seems to follow us around the most beautiful spots on the planet, we'd love to hear from you).

More soon. In the meantime, please don't forget the need to keep supporting VSO through our Justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/jagoteers.