About to leave Laos, time to write about Cambodia!

We left Siem Reap to head for Kratie to find Rob and some dolphins, we were successful on both fronts! We expected the bus to Kratie to be nice and straight forward and to start with it was, got on your average Cambodian coach, nothing special but nothing out of the ordinary. Spent 6 hours on it going to Kom Pong Cham, when we got there they told us we had to get off the nice big bus and get into a Toyota Camry (The Cambodians favourite car, they all have them). Again we thought this wasn't really a problem until they told us how many people were going to be in this saloon car. They put 8 of us in it, 4 in the back, 2 on the passenger chair and 2 on the drivers chair. It was an interesting 3 hours but as everyone keeps saying, its all about the journey and we survived the journey so it wasn't to bad. Got to Kratie in the afternoon and thought rather than just sit around we'd get on and go and see the dolphins the same day. Got a tuk tuk for 30mins out to the place on the Mekong river with the dolphins. Luckily we went past Rob and Mao on their motorbike on the way so they followed us, we had a quick reunion and then Colm, Kris and I went out onto river to spot the illusive dolphins. They're not so illusive, we saw loads of them, and they breathe out when they get to the surface so their even telling you where they are, even so, as you'll see from the pictures, they are extremely difficult to get a decent picture of. But we did get to see them so it was mission accomplished. That night was our last night with Rob, we all had a romantic candlelit dinner because the whole town was out of power. The next morning we all met up for breakfast again and then Rob and Mao left South for Kom Pong Cham again and we headed North East to Bang Lung. The journey up to Bang Lung was another bone rattling one in a minibus but as we went on a few people got out and we ended up with a reasonable amount of space. Bang Lung (in Ratanakiri province) seemed to have very little going for it when we first got there, our bags were absolutely caked in dust from the road when we got there. The following day we got on a push bike each and cycled out to what we thought was a volcanic crater lake but some people have told us it was a meteor crater lake, we're still not sure which it was but we had a great time there, it was a pretty much a perfect circle of really nice water. People have built platforms around the lake aswell, we managed to find one of these to ourselves and proceeded to spend a good few hours swimming about, jumping in off the platforms (hopefully the video's worked the other day) and chatting on the deck. That afternoon we cycled the other way back through town and went to a couple of waterfalls. They were both pretty nice and again we pretty much had them to ourselves but we did all sort of wish we'd spent the whole day at the crater lake.The next day was another bumpy ride in a minivan to Stung Treng and then from there another minivan up to the Cambodia/Laos border. Got across with no drama's and from there it was off to Don Det in the 4000 Islands (South Laos).