Back To Vietnam And On To Cambodia

   I still have some catching up to do, but first a few observations.    Do not even think about driving in either Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City unless you have a death wish. There are many busses, cars, and probably a few million motor scooters and motor cycles, and all of the motor scooter and motorcycle seem to decide to meet at the same time and same place and engage in choreographed chaos. The drivers regardless of what they are driving use their horns and beepers liberally. Stop signs seem to be suggestions.  In spite of all the traffic, noise, and fumes, traffic moves, albeit at a snail’s pace at times,  and we have not observed an accident……yet.    Pedestrians need resolve to cross streets at uncontrolled intersections. General rule of thumb, wait for trucks and busses and cars. As to motorcycle and motor scooters, start crossing and don’t stop. They beep at pedestrians and sometimes whiz around them, but don’t stop. Just keep walking…….and pr...

   In the previous post (which actually will probably be the next post in the blog), I spent some time describing some of the ugly part of the history of Cambodia, the dark days of the reign of the Khmer Rouge. The rest of today’s catchup will be devoted only to the beauty of Cambodia, its people, and its culture. This account will be chronological, although truth be told, the days do run into each other a bit. On the day we departed Siem Reap and bussed to where our boat was we visited a school supported by Viking. The mission of the school is to teach English and computer skills to students. The age of the students ranged from elementary to secondary. The students gave us a warm welcome and sang “If You’re Happy And You Know It” for us and it was delightful. Then the students were released and ran to us and paired up with us for a tour of the school. I was chosen by a very sweet 14 year old girl whose name I can’t remember for the life of me. She showed me the English room a...

   We have been on the go with morning and afternoon excursions so time to update has been sparse. Today is a cruising day. As I write we are departing Phnom Penh. Around midday we will cross the border back into Vietnam. I will take advantage of this “day off” to try to catch up with the past few days.    We have seen a combination of beauty and ugliness since my last big update. I will do one entry on the ugliness and then have another on the beauty. I am happy to say the beauty exceeds the ugliness.   Three days ago I went on an excursion to one of the hundreds of killing fields in Cambodia. The killing fields are mass burial sites where the Khmer Rouge executed 1,500,000-2,000,000 Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge reign of terror lasted from 1975-1979. Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge and his vision of society was that Cambodia should be an ideal agrarian society. Anyone who did not fit the mold or who resisted was to be eliminated. Former government offi...

   We have been quite active with morning and afternoon excursions so I have fallen behind on the blog. I will try to do a more detailed post in the next couple of days. We caught a break with the weather today. We actually had a bit of liquid sunshine which made our cyclo tour to the Royal Palace comfortable. We are having a wonderful time. I will attach some new photos to this entry. 

   Yesterday we went to Angkor Wat, the largest temple in the world. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is a must see if you travel in Cambodia. It was constructed in the 12th century and covers an area of about 400 acres. It was a Hindu temple before it became a Buddhist temple. It is surrounded by a moat that has a bridge across it that is used for entering the temple. It is extremely impressive and was constructed over the course of 37 years, considerably less time than European cathedrals took to construct. It is believed there may have been 300,000 laborers who worked on building it. I knew a bit about because I saw NOVA program on PBS about Angkor Wat. If you can find that program, I highly recommend it, not only because it is extremely well done, but if you watch it you will get reliable factual information (not that I would make up anything.  The walls are covered with carvings depicting historical battles, Hindu epics, and Apsara dancers. There are various le...