Camp Champions Blog

Note: we are back in cell range for at least a couple of days, so I am posting at least 2 blogs per day to catch up on the ones I wrote over the past 4-5 days.  Please read this one and the one that follows.

Yesterday, we left Hanoi for the mountains.  A friend recommended a travel company to us that provides encounters with authentic Vietnamese people.  We started in Hanoi with Hien, our guide.  The first day is designed to orient us to the people and the country, thus visits to Ho Chi Minh’s mauseleum and the Museum of Ethnology, where we learn about all the indigenous people.

We are all enjoying our guide Hien, our guide for this trip. I think she is enjoying us.

Note: I did not realize that we would be without Internet for multiple days during our tour of Vietnam.  As a result, I have combined multiple blogs into one and asked our guide to drop us by an internet café.   Since we are pressed for time, I have only one picture to accompany these articles.  They are forthcoming in 2 or 3 days.  Also, Susie did not get a chance to proof this, so it might have a few errors.  It makes me appreciate both the remoteness of our travel, but also a good internet connection.

Children learn in interesting ways.

We are in Vietnam now.

I have much to report, but I must start with news of a loss, a loss that Susie feels deeply.

This will be a short blog.  We have a travel day tomorrow and I am beaten like a rented mule.

Cambodia has been like Nepal, except with 95 degree heat - the days are long, we exercise a lot and we pour ourselves into our beds.

We are in Cambodia, a country of great variety.   It features magnificent temples (from Angkor Wat the complexes of King Jayavarman VII) and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge.  In some ways, it is as foreign as any place we have been.

Yet in others, it is very familiar.  Everything is delineated in dollars.  Sure, they have a currency (Riel), but simply everything is in dollars.  In fact, the only way you end up with Riel is when you need change.  They have US bills, but no coins, so $0.50 would come back as 2000 Riel.  Heck, the ATMs kick out dollars.  The one annoyance is their obsession with perfect bills – no folds or tears.  We handed the government workers a $100 dollar bill for our entry visa and they would not take it because it had an eighth inch tear in the side.

I have so much I would like to share, but this should be a short blog.  I plan to share the early morning part of the day and add the latter part tomorrow as we watch the NCAA Championship game.  We might be in a third world nation, but the great games are still available.

I also must face the fact that I woke at 5 AM to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat (the largest religious facility in the world). I can report that the sun rises just the same way in Cambodia as it does in Texas, with one notable exception - we generally do not have this many people chronicling the event:

Please allow me to start this blog with an apology.  Last night, I attempted to blog very late at night.  I did this frequently in Europe (writing at midnight or later), but I always reviewed and published them the next day, since I often made mistakes.  Heck, I fell asleep writing on at least 3 occasions.

Last night was the second fall-asleep-while-typing nights I have had in Asia.  Susie woke me with my hands on my laptop when she got up in the night and saw me not there.  I then hit “Publish” rather than “Save”, so a garbled mess hit the blog.  My favorite mistake was the result of the computer’s auto-correct.  I was writing “yesterday, we had a déjà vu moment” and it got corrected to “yesterday, we had a dave moment”.