I'm glad we waited a couple weeks instead of coming here first thing. The anticipation has been building and it was well worth the wait. Anisa suggested going to see sunrise over Angkor Wat, the main temple, which sounded like a wonderful idea to me. I didn't realize that if we watched the sunrise at 6am we would have to leave town in our tuk tuk at 5am, which meant waking up around 4"3O am. It was easier than I thought it would be and was a pleasure to be up at that hour since it's not swelteringly hot and humid at 5am. 7am is another matter. That sun is strong. The temples. I'm not sure I can put them into words. I tried to write in my journal earlier and came up with lots of ... read more

Anisa needed a break after her last week of school so we went directly out to the beach on Monday. It's technically the rainy season - though it hasn't really rained much yet - so we were almost the only tourists there. It was very relaxing and we didn't do much besides sit around on the beach reading. I've been feeling pretty sick since Sunday morning: stomach cramps, probably from eating poorly washed vegetables in Vietnam. Poorly washed doesn't just mean washed with tap water it can mean washed in the river or not washed at all. The south along the coast is much greener than around Phnom Penh. The scenery between PP and Sihanoukville was beautiful. It was a big change because we started into the hills, everything around Phnom Penh is flatter than the ... read more

This was also a full day, and I had to say au revoir to the French couple I made friends with. They were a lot of fun to travel and talk with. Ingrid has been doing an internship in Phnom Penh but they have to go back to France this weekend. Thursday we toured the canals more and saw a "Monkey Bridge for the first time. They're the traditional bridges that people use to link islands together, but the government is trying to replace all of them with ugly cement bridges. They're very narrow and I suppose not used much since everybody does everything by boat there. A monkey bridge is basically Xs of crossed bamboo across the canal with narrow logs laid in the bottom of the top half of the X. Along on of ... read more

Today I started my tourism in ernest. I signed up for a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels just outside of Ho Chi Minh. It was my first time with a group like that, but very interesting. The tunnels are where the people of the village of Cu Chi hid when Americans were in the area or when the area was being bombed. The tunnels include rooms for sleeping, cooking, meetings, medical clinic, etc. Some of the rooms are as deep as 20 meters, and the tunnels themselves are very narrow. You almost have to crawl through them. The tour was accompanied by the typical government propaganda, but in all it was a very positive experience. The guide had fought for the South and when his side lost he had to do eight years in a ... read more

Hello Everybody! Anisa and I went for the morning to Phnom Odong, which is just west of Phnom Penh. We went because one of her tourist books recommended it, though we weren't exactly sure what we would find there. As soon as our taxi arrived we were swarmed with children. Six of them attached themselves to us, despite our insistance at 'no guides'. Two of them spoke fairly good English: Nem and Jai. They followed me for the entire day and the other four hovered around Anisa, so close that she almost tripped over them. As the day wore on they became more useful and polite, at first they were rather annoying. Phnom Odong is basically a hill in the middle of incredibly flat land. There are several stupas each in varying stages of reconstruction. The ... read more