Where have you travelled (going to travel) open thread

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Jealous....

[msj]

Trying to stay up to 9pm to adjust back to the Pacific Standard time zone. Left Bangkok Saturday morning (there time - 15 hours ahead) and arrived in Hong Kong to take the flight to Vancouver and then take the final flight to Vancouver Island. Slept a few hours on the plane but am bagged. 

Anyway, the tours we did were these two:  

1) https://www.gadventures.com/trips/mekong-river-encompassed-ho-chi-minh-city-to-siem-reap/4705/

2) https://www.gadventures.com/trips/ultimate-cambodian-adventure/4418/

They do not natually fit together: we left early to spend an extra few days in Saigon before boarding the ship that took us up river to Siem Reap.  

Of course, being the dry season, we were not able to take the boat all the way to Siem Reap so had to endure a bus trip for that final stage; such is the way of things in developing countries with interesting wet and dry seasons (the Mekong river/ Tonle Sap River/Lake system have a cool reversal thingy happening https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonlé_Sap ). 

Ended up staying in Siem Reap rather than join tour #2 in Bangkok and then travel to Battambang and then back to Siem Reap. This allowed us to spend four days in a row at Angkor Wat and then travel to Tonle Sap lake/river etc etc at the cost of missing Battambang. 

The first tour was an upgraded style whereas the second was a lower "classic" style. It was hard spending extra days at the Royal Angkor Resort and then leave it to join tour #2 at the considerably lesser Mekong Palace. 

But we suffer for travel. 

Really glad we spent this much time in this region. Felt like we got a real sense for the different parts of Cambodia and even enjoyed an extra day in Bangkok on our way home. 

Apart from a minor incidence of food poisoning and another of heat sickness, the trip was awesome.  

Now have enough Kampot pepper and amok spice to keep the memories going for months and months. 

Also got to meet some interesting people: a few Americans who swear they did not vote for Trump (I believe them, especially the gay guy from St. Louis on tour 1 and even the father/daughter from Texas on tour 2, a Russian who probably did vote for Trump (kidding), and many interesting Canadians despite being from eastern Canada. 

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Forgot to mention the part of Tour 1 (and Tour 2 - which we skipped) where we visited the killing fields and a prison under the Khmer Rouge during the bad days of '75 to '79. 

Disturbing!

To walk across a field with bone fragments from the killings and to see the building housing hundreds (thousands?) of skulls only to them go to the prison where people were tortured....

As a guy who has soft hands, wears glasses, and is educated, it makes me shiver.

Then the next day we talk to a mathmatics teacher who survived because he conviced the Pol Pot idiots that he was a construction worker rather than a teacher. Fortunately construction was a hobby so he did have sruffy hands. 

He also had to pretend to be unable to read and write among other lies he lived with for four years.  

The guy from NY and the other guy from St Louis had also been to Auschwitz but they both found this more troubling - probably because Pol Pot occurred during our lifetime....  

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That looks great, although a long way out of my price range.