For Vera and the boys

Bulldog in Georgia

For Vera and the boys

I usually take the pictures, so there aren't many of me. This time, I travel with other teachers and/or students. Thanks especially to Bethe - she took most of them.

On our big trip to Ratanakiri Province, we stopped in the region where roast tarantulas are considered a treat. They roast them with onions and they don't taste bad at all. You can tell by my expression that I loved this tasty treat with the first bite.

This was our first major scenic stop - Cha Ung Waterfall (I think I have it right). It was a beautiful place.

This is my friend LTC Yan Youen. He was in an instructor course I taught in San Antonio. He also invited me to his house so we could get a local teenager to pick me some mangoes from the tree in his yard. Twenty mangoes - absolutely delicious and I managed to eat them all in about 10 days.

This is at a rubber plantation. We stopped to see how the sap is collected in baggies - the rubber plantations in Ratanakiri Province are huge and profitable.

Here I am at the Big Face Temple complex. Yeah, Bethe knows the names for all these different temple areas. My brain just can't process them. It's such an awesome place, though.

Another temple. We really did lose track after a while. Notice how wet my shirt is. Imagine going on a hike in a sauna - that's pretty much what it's like to tour Angkor Wat in April.

OK, this takes some 'splainin'. We took a boat tour on the Tonle Sap (Great Lake). We passed through a narrow, shallow canal from the tourist boat dock to the lake. On the way back, a barge had gotten stuck and we could go no further. So the boat tour guide, the driver, and Kangaroo decided Bethe and I were NOT allowed to wade to the shore. Instead, they leap-frogged deck chairs from the boat to the shore. I took pictures of Bethe doing this, too, but since she went first, her pictures are from a less-flattering perspective. Sorry!

When we were at Yeak Loam Lake (a beautiful volcanic crater lake), one of the staff dressed up as a chief of one of the local tribes. We all just had to have a picture.

Bethe and I on the Sekong Bridge, just about our last stop on the way back to Phnom Penh.

The monkeys of Angkor Wat. They absolutely love you if you feed them.

I didn't only eat spiders and crickets (yeah, we ate crickets, too). One roadside area was close to a pineapple plantation. It cost less than a buck for fresh, very sweet, very juicy sliced pineapple.

Preparing for departure from National Defense University in Phnom Penh. In the left of the picture is my boss, MG Dok Sopha. Bethe is on the right.

60 students, staff and faculty, including MG Dok Sopha, Bethe, Sue, and I. We all boarded a very nice bus and spent 4 days exploring Ratanakiri, Stung Treng, and Kratie Provinces. IT WAS INCREDIBLE!

One of the great things about going overseas is meeting interesting people and making new friends. Sue is from Manchester and is one of the funniest people I know.

Here I am ordering lunch at a very nice restaurant at the Angkor Wat temple complex. This lovely young lady was very patient with two picky American tourists.

Here's our tuk tuk and driver, Kangaroo. Aussies seem to love this place, so a lot of drivers adopt Australia-related nicknames. Kangaroo was really nice and took us to some great places.

I'm smiling here because I'm riding an elephant! He's taking us up a hill so we can go to the top of another temple to watch the sunset over Angkor Wat.

Almost there!

Family portrait, right? Actually, we made a nice friend at the Lake Side Hotel in Ban Lung. The boy's name is Mean (pronounced "may-uhn"). He liked us and our cameras - he used mine to take a picture of my bathroom and a guy on TV. If we came out of our rooms, he seemed to be waiting to join us. Sue speaks Khmer like a native, but if she wasn't there, he would still just talk nonstop. I would nod and say, "Uh huh." He's a pretty cool little kid, though.

We have some very kind female students. They took care of us at most of the evening meals, sometimes serving us or making sure waiters brought us what we needed. They are such sweeties!

Sue was just plain old happy for the whole trip. That's cool, because she, Bethe, and I are going on another road trip on the 18th to Kirirom National Park.

You'd think he could have at least met me half way like the other monkey did.

This was a nice little resident on one of the boats at the floating village on Tonle Sap.

This is on the way home. Nara and I finally succumbed to the miles, the drone of the bus engine, and all the energy we all spent on a great trip.