Camp Champions Blog

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”.

Today, we had an odd deja vu this moment.  While in Northern Thailand, I was brought back to Copenhagen.   This is an truly odd combination.  Few places are more modern than Copenhagen and Chiang Mai still feels like a poor community that is trying to be a real city.

The tying idea is the Elephant Parade.  This is a non-profit that raises funds for the Asia elephant in a post teak forest world.

Before I tell you about our culinary education today, I feel a need to add an addendum to yesterday's blog.  As you may recall, we spent the day with tigers following a day with elephants.  But there is more.

I feel like I have put my son in harm’s way.

We had a very eventful day, and it is only half over.  Susie and the girls are dying to return to the carnivorous feet fish and we all want to return to the blues bar.

Luckily, for the second day in a row, the story is better told with photos than words.

I have a lot of pictures to share, so you will get fewer words.