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Our arrival in Siem Reap was welcome after a five-hour plus drive from the Thai border at Anya Prathet. We had driven in the van from the Hotel Fortuna and the driver was trying very hard to convince us that theirs was the best hotel in town for us. At first we didn't buy it. We had a recommendation from friend as well as the usual picks from Lonely Planet and we were determined to try these first.

And so we did. But each had its problems. One overlooked a street that had become a building site. Another had no rooms with air-conditioning. Another couldn't offer us two rooms (we wanted to book a room for Dave and Jhap who were planning to meet us here from Bangkok). We didn't believe that this was a particularly busy time of year for Angkor visits, but somehow the day we arrived we could find nothing to please us — except for the Hotel Fortuna.

It turned out to be a reasonable hotel with a great price and a not great location. We were a ten-minute walk from the center of town and the road-building we had found in the center extended this far out and further. But the Fortuna property was deep enough and the gardens pleasant enough that we really thought it would do very well, and to the pleasure of our travel companions who got kudos and perhaps even commission it did.

Cambodia was still recovering from the civil war that followed the killing fields and so it was remarkable to us how welcoming and friendly they were. The city, however, was working feverishly to bring its infrastructure up to the quality expected by the bus and planeloads of foreign tourists now coming to admire its temples. They were trying to pave the main streets in town and it was causing not only chaos for the traffic but also dust and dirt beyond reason for the poor money-paying tourist.

Still, it managed to offer a decent number of restaurants at reasonable prices and as almost everybody spent almost every day at the temples, a couple of kilometers out of town, it wasn't too, too, bad. We purchased a 7-day ticket to the temple and overlapped with Dave and Jhap for three days and then took a day off, said goodbye to them, and then went back for our last three days. In spite of a relatively high price, it was well worth it.