Lush Cambodian countryside

This photo was taken driving back from the last of the temples we visited near Siem Reap. Our tuk-tuk driver Baby had just rescued a couple of distressed tourists who we found on the roadside. They'd hired electric bikes to visit the site and had run out of juice in the middle of nowhere. With the girl's bike strapped to the front of the tuk-tuk carriage and her man riding along beside us, grabbing hold of the tuk-tuk's armature, using its momentum to keep him going, we made our way back to town. The road was typically pot-holed, packed with impatient motor cyclists, van drivers, luxury car and coach dirvers, and the cops would have had Baby's hide had they caught him with the extra load. But we made it back to town without too much in the way of frayed nerves.

We missed the sunset, but we drove so slowly I got some great pictures of the paddy fields in late afternoon. We were making our way back to town just as the workers were making their way home for dinner. Vans passed us full of men and women in conical hats, grubby from a day in the fields. A crocodile of bicycles passed us, all piled with grasses.

People were lighting fires for the evening in front of their homes. Much of life is spent outdoors in these villages. Many houses are built on stilts, even the new frou-frou affairs of the newly rich, the ones with the finials and gaudy paint. Sleeping quarters are well above ground level to keep people dry when it rains, when the rivers burst their banks, and when the deltas flood. But cooking and sitting and working takes place in the open air, often by the roadside. It's easy for passing tourists in tuk-tuks to be nosy.