We were up early again but this time it wasn't to spend the day looking at amazing temples. We weren't really hungry and we hadn't left enough time for breakfast anyway so we just lugged our bags downstairs and tried to check out.

Sokkha carefully added up our bill several times before presenting it to us. I had decided the previous day to pay by credit card as I had noticed the VISA sign on the hotel literature. Sokkha took one look at my card, looked sideways at the card machine and then said that the machine wasn't working. After establishing that they wouldn't accept travellers' cheques it turned out that they had been having some problems with the credit card machine and Sokkha wasn't confident using it. By this time there were several other people waiting to collect keys or checkout too.

We tried the machine anyway and Sokkha was delighted when she managed to get my card accepted. Unfortunately she had forgotten to add two zeros to the end of the amount charged and so I ended up signing two receipts, one for only a dollar or so. With that jolly start to the day, I wondered what else would happen.

A minibus picked us up moments later and whisked us off to a travel office to wait for the bigger bus to turn up. As we sat outside fending off numerous requests for money and offers of bread for sale, we realised that we hadn't posted our postcards. Claire found out that there wasn't a postbox at the border and that the nearest one to where we were was several minutes away... by motorbike.

So Claire disappeared quickly on the back of a motorbike while I stayed with the bags. Despite our disliking and recent avoidance of motorbikes, I personally think she had the easier job. Every bread seller and beggar within 100 metres descended on me after I got change from the nearby money exchange. It took a while before they all disappeared again and by that time Claire had returned and our bus had arrived.

The bus journey on the Cambodian side was not one I'd care to repeat any time soon. My knees were bruised a bit from banging into the seat in front every time we went over a bump and there were a lot of bumps. The first 30 or 40 minutes was on sealed but bumpy road and then the next several hours was on unsealed but very bumpy roads. It didn't help that the driver didn't lower the temperature in the bus below 30 degrees, most uncomfortable.

The border crossing was swift and easy. I had been wondering what would happen with the vehicles that crossed the border and how they would change from one side of the road to another. It turns out they just do it on a stretch of road in between the two border posts in a sort of "see a gap and go for it" way.

After waiting for all of our bus group to get through Thai immigration, we were bundled into an open sided truck and taken to our waiting bus. Compared to the Cambodian bus, this one was like a spacious fridge and the Thai roads were so much better. Still, it took over five hours until we were off the bus. The last two hours were spent in Bangkok rush hour traffic, not much fun really but we did get to wave at many smiley faced locals (they tend to initiate the waving by the way) and we saw a Tesco supermarket of all things.

We grabbed a taxi as soon as we were off the bus and tried to describe where we wanted to go. We also had to remind him to turn his meter on, something that I think he had conveniently forgotten to do. As we were zooming along at scary speeds, it became apparent that he hadn't heard or understood exactly where we wanted to go but just the general area. He tried to drop us off at a shopping precinct until we successfully managed to communicate our destination with him. I suppose that it didn't help that he had no English skills at all and our Thai is limited to "Hello" and "Thank you". We finally were dropped off across a busy road from the road we wanted to get to and had to walk for five minutes to get to where we wanted to go.

After checking in, we dashed out to find something to sate our hunger and ended up in a small restaurant that leaked in the torrential rain but served excellent food.

Our hotel bed was hard but surprisingly comfortable. I awoke to the realisation that we had a big day of shopping ahead of us. Armed with a list and some money we headed out.

I had feared a truly tiring day of not being able to find what we were after but instead I was pleasantly surprised to find out that we had a truly tiring day and found everything we were looking for. Even better than that, we found a few things that we had not realised no home should be without.

Of course we now have the problem of packing everything up to take on our flight to Hong Kong. Lucky us.