Starbucks, the giant US coffee chain, has used its muscle to block an attempt by Ethiopia's farmers to [trademark the names of] their most famous coffee bean types, denying them potential earnings of up to £47m a year, said Oxfam.

Starbucks, the coffee beans and the copyright row that cost Ethiopia £47m, The Guardian, October 26th, 2006.

I received a card from Oxfam to send to Phil Broad, the managing director of Starbucks, yesterday. It asked me to deliver it to a Starbucks store, who would then hopefully forward it to their head office. I did a double take when I noticed the head office address was in Parson's Green, just next door to my local tube station.

Having been to enough meetings in my time I thought I'd drop down there and see if I couldn't blag my way in through the door. I had to go buy milk anyway. So I took a walk, wandered into their reception and announced that I was there to meet to Phil Broad. Their receptionist quickly made me up a visitor pass, asked my name and put a call into Phil. Phil was in Seattle. OK, then, how about somebody in marketing. Scott was selected. Scott was a bit busy so instead of sitting down with me there and then, he asked if we could meet later. A meeting was scheduled for 10:00 on Wednesday the 31st.

I expected to be turned away at reception when it was discovered I had no appointment and Mr Broad was not expecting me. I expected perhaps to be seen briefly by somebody, to air my views and to receive some platitudes. I did not expect to be invited back! Credit to Starbucks, although I can't help feeling it was by accident rather than design.

This was my first social engineering exploit. This phrase is used by computer security experts to describe when a person exploits the trust relationships other people offer up. The receptionist expected me to be one of the other tens or hundreds of people who show up for meetings each day. Scott trusted that somebody else had already vetted me, and slipped into the default of treating me as a colleague in the world of business. He made the comment that it was a shame I hadn't booked a meeting ahead of time. That would normally be the case, and would make his normal life easier. I would never have got a meeting if I had called or emailed of course, but by physically showing up, they had to do something with me and their be-polite-to-guest reflexes took over.

Now I just have to plan my agenda for Wednesday. I have Oxfam to help out and they are forwarding me some more information. I want to know what Starbucks next move is, whether they intend to sign the voluntary licensing agreement and if they will support the USPTO application. And what they will do about this in the future. Reading through some articles covering their policies towards coffee producers on their website, Starbucks have obviously changed their policies drastically down the years and are keen to be seen to improve the situation their farmers find themselves in. It's strange therefore that this hiccup should have occurred.

A friend works at the Telegraph and was foolish enough to turn to me for pithy quotes and hard-hitting telling-it-like-it-is sycophancy about the iPhone this week. You can read his excellent write-up replete with my laser-guided soundbites in his article "The remote control for your life." How long have I dreamed of becoming a mindless talking head, now I can die happy. Oh wait, TV next.

Check out the abridged set of photos from Cambodia. We took 560-odd, so I just picked the best ones (still 140).

Phil, the Tour Manager for our Cycle Cambodia trip and all-round excellent guy, used a Garmin GPS unit along the way to keep track the route, of stops for fruit and water and the distance travelled. He exported the file from the unit using Garmin MapSource and gave it to me. I dug around and found a little utility called GPSBabel which converts between various GPS and mapping file types and used it to create a file for Google Earth.

Click below to download the file, you must have Google Earth installed.

View our route through Vietnam and Cambodia in Google Earth.

The file contains lots of stuff, the route itself, the stops for lunch and fruit, the hotels and temples we visited. Play around with the folders and stuff that appear in the sidebar when you open the file.

Thanks Phil for a fantastic trip and for the file!

Cambodia and Vietnam are fantastic places, really very friendly and beautiful. I found them to be much more chilled than Kenya, cities especially. Ho Chi Minh is on the cusp of modernisation, though currently quite ramshackle. Phnom Penh is colonial splendor and Buddhist architecture. Out of the cities, both countries are lush and very flat (at least in the southern areas, the Mekong etc).

The hard work cycling from Ho Chi Minh to Phnom Penh then down to Kirirom national park was over surprisingly soon. It was hard hot work, but the challenge was excellently well organised with regular stops breaking it down into manageable chunks.

After the cycling, it was lovely to visit an Oxfam-funded community project doing forest management, ecotourism, etc. We met the people, saw their work, and they asked for our ideas. It was extremely interesting. It's easy to think that western charities are just wallpapering over problems, but this project had become an integral part of the community of a few thousand people, improving livelihoods directly through jobs and indirectly through things like resource management (rice, forests, etc).

Sadly Louise dislocated her knee in a surprising and unfortunate accident, really just walking through a car park. She needed to be taken to a clinic for attention, but was soon able to walk on crutches. She has been in a lot of pain though and unable to do many of the things we had planned.

Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm and Angkor Thom are just amazing structures. Far superior to any other ancient stuff I've seen, though my record isn't the most complete (no pyramids, no Taj Mahal, no Great Wall). It was a bit of a shame to run around them (all three in one day, no time for any of the tens of others). Ta Prohm (the one with the trees growing over the walls) especially was an exercise in capturing as many photons as possible before legging it. IMHO Angkor Wat does deserve it's greater familiarity over the other temples, it's just incredible. Photos soon (I have 1Gb of images).

At the end of our time in Cambodia our guide talked to us about the Khmer Rouge. He had himself grown up in a children's commune and lost his parents to Pol Pot's regime. The discussion made me realise that almost every Cambodia of our age or above must have been terribly affected by the four years of genocide. Cambodia's future still hangs in the balance. Angkor provides a huge opportunity, you have only to look at the sparkling Siem Reap airport to see that Cambodians are rising to the challenge, but there is still much rot in the political system and our guide could not rule out future violence.

Returning, we had a five hour layover in Kuala Lumpur. KL is kind of like an entire city made out of the same stuff as Canary Wharf, though much more bustling. It's very shiny and new. We didn't have time to dig deeper unfortunately, but we were able to get off the plane, through immigration, on to the train, into town, transfer on the tube equivalent, look around a little bit, have supper, get the LRT and train back, back through check-in and immigration in under four hours. Louise's wheelchair did help things though.

Louise's knee was a shame, but she fought through it and keep going, unfortunately though worries about her exact condition meant we weren't really going to be able to relax in the way we'd wanted and coming home seemed more sensible. Believe me we fought it while it looked like just coming home to go to hospital, but without our personal physician (the group doctor became our doctor) and the group to keep spirits up, a week in Siem Reap looked increasingly like hard work. We went to the local A&E today and got everything checked out, we're both happy to be back and not too sad.

The group we were with came from a range of backgrounds, but really there were just lots and lots of really great people. I've come away with 35+ email addresses. The whole experience was immense fun, seeing places, meeting people, a lot crammed into a tight schedule, and we're exhausted at the end.

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Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

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