Cambodia: housing – a roof over your head, stilts under your feet.

Not much to say about most of the hotels, but they did have some good rules. Unfortunately the picture is really blurry, so I'll point out a couple of gems. "Do not spit in the room. We are not responsible for any thing stolen by prostitutes ( and not allow prostitutes in ) . NO DRUNG Exploitation."

Again, unfortunately not the best of pictures – we mostly just saw these houses while we were driving. These are the typical houses – made of wood and on stilts, with a roof of wood, thatching, or metal.

Stilt houses in the Tonle Sap riverbed – at the height of the rainy season, the stilts definitely come in handy.

We spent two nights in the Yaklom Hill Lodge near Ban Lung in Ratanakiri province. It was a great, pretty rustic place – electricity was only available three hours a day, six to nine p.m. The family that runs it is actually Laotian, and apparently Laotians suffer a lot of discrimination in Cambodia. This was the first time we had to use mosquito nets. I felt like a princess – a princess protected from malaria and Japanese encephalitis, which is probably one of the best kinds of princess to be.

Near the hill lodge is a lake in a volcanic crater. Kat and I swam all the way around it like the badasses we are. The first half had a few docks along the way, and we made friends at each - at one, American missionaries' kids [and their dogs - big, healthy, happy dogs are a strange sight there] who have lived in Cambodia their whole lives [I'm jealous of their Khmer]; at another, a Dutch guy who sounded exactly like Goldmember from Austin Powers [it was so very hard to stifle my giggles the whole time]. [photo from Yaklom Hill Lodge site]

We spent our last night before returning to Phnom Penh in a home stay in one of the houses on stilts. Our hosts were a grandmother, a young mother, and a cute little baby girl. There was no sign or talk of the husband, so we're not sure whether he's still around or what. The bathroom was the most rustic yet – just a squatter in an outhouse. The inside of the house was a little more updated – they had a TV and sound system, which they used to play more of the soap opera-style karaoke videos [although, again, no one actually sang along to them]. Cambodians seem to not be that into putting diapers on their kids – while we were all gathered around Mom's computer looking at pictures, the baby just went right through her clothes onto the floor. It happens. I actually really like Cambodian houses – they're built to be big and open and airy, which is important in such a hot and humid climate.

Some of the group spent a lot of the time during the home stay in the yard, playing a game that was pretty much hacky sack with a shuttlecock.

But mostly we just hung out underneath the house, lounging about in hammocks and communing with the chickens that were running around the place.