Today Marina and Missy headed home. We will miss having them with us!  Marina just called to say that she had successfully boarded her SFO flight in Taipei, so now she's an accomplished solo international traveler!

Eight of us have gone on to Cambodia (me, Lenny, Cathy, Sandy, Amy, Adam, Joan and Karl).  As much as I enjoyed the other people on the B&R trip, I must say that it is nice to be in a smaller group.  It makes everything happen more quickly, and it's easier to change plans.  Our Italian guide Alessio stayed with us, and we have been joined by a Cambodian guide, Lim.

We had to fill out an Ebola form on the plane!  It basically was a health form that asked where you had traveled from recently, and whether you had a variety of symptoms such as fever, diarrhea, sore throat, etc.  Even though we all have been battling a variety of colds and minor digestive ailments, we decidedly answered "NO" to all of the above.  They ask for your flight number, seat number and cell phone number.  I took some comfort knowing that if the hacking German next to me turned out to have some terrible disease, they would be able to find me and let me know.  When we landed there was a check station with a sign saying that they could take your temperature.  I guess if you answered any of those questions "YES", you were headed to the thermometer.  Thankfully we all strolled through without a problem.

Siem Reap is the town near the celebrated Angkor Wat temple complexes.  Lim told us that the name of the town means "victory over the Thai people".  We have all been alternatively confused and enlightened about the long history of Indochina wars ... who was invading who, when ..... who was the nationalist vs the invader ... who was the liberator vs the oppressor ... it's basically been an area of constant conflict for many millennia.  Sadly, the US plays a not-so-pretty role whenever we turn up on the scene, such as putting in puppet governments, supporting brutal dictators, and generally thinking we know what we're doing when we do not.

Cambodia seems very different from Vietnam.  There is a lot of influence from Thailand and from India, which gives it more of an Indo feel than the East Asian/China feel of Vietnam.  The writing script looks like Sanskrit. Although most people are Buddhist, they still worship all the Hindu gods as well, so you see lots of Hindu iconography.  Many of the people look a bit darker and less East Asian as well.  It seems much less crowded than Saigon or Hanoi, but we haven't seen much yet, so perhaps I'm jumping the gun.

There are millions of tourists here.  Literally, millions.  In fact, over 3 million come to this little city every year.  I saw a parking lot of buses ... it looked like several hundred of them.

A major form of transportation in Siem Reap is the tuk tuk.  I remember the tuk tuks in Bangkok as three wheel bicycles, but these are motorcycles pulling an open carriage that can seat 2 to 4 people.  We went from the airport to the hotel in the tuk tuk.  We were picked up from the hike in the tuk tuk.  We went to dinner and back in them.  And the tuk tuks apparently stay with us during our whole stay here, at our beck and call for whatever we want to do.  We were supposed to figure out which was our tuk tuk and go to the same one each time, but we didn't realize that right away, so were a bit promiscuous at first with our tuk tuk drivers.

After a nice lunch at our hotel (Raffels - very imperial British feeling), we took our afternoon walk through town, along the river. One of the more interesting moments  was when Lim stopped to show us a food stall that sells fertilized duck eggs.  He checked out a few before he came up with one that he wanted and proceeded to open it onto a plate.  Inside was a partially formed duck fetus! Apparently this is a real delicacy.  To prove it, Lim calmly salted it and ate it.  You could even see the beak.  We talked about why this seems gross and it's not clear.  After all, we eat unfertilized eggs, and we eat adult ducks and chickens.  So why does this variety seem so yucky?

We walked to one of the older temples that was the prototype for Angkor Wat.  It looks much like it, but is smaller.  We made it in time to see sunset there, which was our goal.  It is a less known and important temple, so it was fabulous that we had it to ourselves, in spite of all those tourists in town.  It was quite magical to sit there, just our group, learning about Cambodian history from Lim, and watching the sunset.

Donna