Viet Nam and Cambodia

We arrived in Vietnam early Friday morning. I got up at 5 40 am to watch us go through the Saigon River and the sunrise. However, I didn’t spend much time in Vietnam because the day we arrived I left for Cambodia for 3 days! As soon as we were cleared to get of the ship we got on a bus and headed to the airport for our flight to Pnom Penh. I thought the flight from Portland to Redmond is short, but this one was only 25 minutes!!!!

When we arrived in Pnom Penh we went straight to the National Museum. The museum was filled with stone statues and artifacts from centuries ago. There were also a lot of monks that were hanging around at the museum, which I was more interested in and I kept getting distracted from our tour to look at them. Our tour of the museum was about an hour and after we headed to the Mekong River for a sunset cruise. Along the Mekong River, we saw a lot of those cool boats that you always see in pictures of Vietnam/Cambodia. We also saw a lot of little poor villages along the river. It was sad to see how many people in Pnom Penh were living in poverty. All of the little kids would swarm us trying to sell postcards and bracelets. We were told not to buy anything from them because if they come back home with money their parents will see that they can make money, so they send them out to work on the streets instead of going to school and receiving an education.

After the sunset cruise we went to the Palm Tree Orphanage. Visiting the orphanage was an unforgettable experience!! We walked in and instantly the kids would latch onto you. This one little girl came to me and showed me around the orphanage. She showed me where they go to class, where she sleeps, the art projects that she had done, etc. We got to hangout with them for about an hour playing games and talking!!! She asked me to write down my email for her, but I am still waiting to here from her. The hardest part was saying goodbye. She cried when I had to leave and kept asking me if I could come back tomorrow and sleepover. It was vary hard to just walk away, but I will definitely never forget her or the experience I had there!!!

We headed to dinner at a very nice restaurant called Khmer Surin. The food in Cambodia was very good…lots of spring rolls!!! The next day we started off at the Toul Sleng Museum. This was a concentration camp used to torture prisoners by the Khmer Rouge, so it was obviously a very hard thing to see. Then we went to the killing fields, which is just what it sounds like. They would take the prisoners to the killing fields and they would kill them there and put them in mass graves. We walked in and the first thing you see is a tall building with windows that holds a ton of skulls of the many victims. As we were walking around our tour guide pointed out that if we look down at the ground we could see the bones of people buried in the mass graves. I felt very strange walking on the killing fields knowing that their were thousands of bodies buried right underneath where I was standing.

On a brighter note we headed to the silver pagoda and Royal Palace. This was where the king lives. He was in China while we were there, so I don’t know if you are usually aloud to go inside, but we got to and it was beautiful!!!! Very elaborate architecture. We had to wear pants and shirts with sleeves to the royal palace, so I was dying of heat!!! It was hotter in Cambodia than anywhere else I have ever been!!! Then we headed to the airport for our flight to Siem Reap, which is wear Angkor Wat is located. Siem Reap was very touristy and I was shocked at the amount of high end resorts were located there. We drove to our hotel, which was super nice, but we didn’t get to spend much time there because we were always doing things! We checked in and then went to dinner and a cultural dance show. The next morning we woke up at 5am to go to Angkor Wat to watch the sunrise!!! It was beautiful and I took a ton of pictures!!! We went back to our hotel for breakfast, which had the most amazing food!!! Eggs to order and anything else that you could possibly want!!! We spent the day touring around Angkor wat and the other temples in the area. It was very cool, but very hot and I was definitely done and ready to be out of the sun by the time we were done!!!! We went back to the hotel to check out and eat lunch. The lunch at the hotel was even better than breakfast!!! They had pasta to order , so you could make whatever kind of pasta you wanted and they made crepes for you!!! It was the most amazing meal!!!! Then we headed back to the airport for our third flight in 3 days!!! Luckily all of the fights were very short. It’s a good thing the flight was short because we were all exhausted and smelly!!! I felt bad for all of the other people on the flight that had to sit next to us!!!

We flew back to Ho Chi Minh and got back to the ship around 8pm. I was exhausted when we got back, so I went right to bed! Suzy and I woke up early the next morning to go to the cu chi tunnels. We got to crawl through them and the ones that we went through were made twice the size as they normally are and I felt a little crammed in there. I cant imagine what it would be like in the actual sized tunnels!!! E also got to try tapioca, which is what they ate during the war. It tasted kind of like a potato and peanut butter…it was really weird. After the cu chi tunnels we came back and walked around in ho chi minh and went to this huge market. I was all bargained out from China so I didn’t buy anything…probably a good thing! Suzy’s roommate Tessa’s dad came to Vietnam to visit, so we and had drinks and dinner with them. Today we just hung out around ho chi minh and walked around some more. I would have liked to have gone to the Mekong Delta, but there just wan’t enough time for everything! I guess I will just have to come back to Vietnam someday!!! I love it here!!!! We had to be on the ship by 8pm tonight, but we aren’t leaving until early tomorrow morning. So now I have to get back in the mindset of school and going to class for 6 days. On to India!!!!!!!