Spent most of the day cruising but we did stop at a village that has a lot of cottage weaving. The families mainly do cotton and silk weaving. We also peaked into the classrooms at a primary school. The house featured in this blog is a typical Cambodian home built on stilts. I had always assumed this was to keep the home above the water during the monsoon floods. While that is a bit of a benefit, most homes are not that close to the river. The real reason f...

Tour out of Phnom Penh this morning to Udon Buddhist Monastery, one of 14 major monastery complexes in Cambodia. The boat took us upriver where we disembarked and got on water buffalo carts for about a 20 minute ride to where our buses waited. The Udon Monastery is huge. It is a place for hundreds of monks to live, learn and pray, serves as a school and also is a place where old people who have no family are cared for. This afternoon we are back in Phom Penh ...

Arrived in Cambodia. Morning spent at the Silver Pagoda, part of the Royal Palace complex. We could not tour the Royal Palace because the former King, Sihanouk, was lying in state. He died in China last month and lies in state for 100 days before being cremated. Afternoon went to the site of the killing fields. This is one of the sites where the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime executed and buried thousands of people. There were several hundreds of these mass burial ...

Visited towns and villages today on the Vietnam/Cambodia border. Did a rickshaw ride through the town of Chau Doc. Then stopped at a fish farm. The surface area is a house built on a 10 metre subsurface structure that contains all the nets for the fish farm. Mainly catfish and tilapia. They have renamed catfish as basa, which is a better marketing term. So when you buy basa back home, you are actually buying catfish. Stopped at a Cham village. The Cham ar...

Spent most of the day visiting villages along the Mekong River. Started at a factory producing bricks and floor tiles. The firm has been in the family for seven generations. After the Vietnam War the land was confiscated by the Communists, but it was returned to the family in 1992 and they built new kilns. We then visited a big village market that serves the region. Every type of vegetables, fruits, meat, fish and seafood was sold, all fresh. Ended the day ...