Recently in Travel Category

Today was our last day in Cambodia; Craig & the kids wanted to stay and swim at the hotel and I wanted to see just a bit more of Phnom Penh so we decided to meet up for lunch in town before we left for the airport.

The van our guide arranged for us from Kratie to Phnom Penh was nice (on par with the first day's van; to be fair, he had had a friend in Siem Reap arrange that lame van for us so I don't blame our guide!). The route from Kratie to Phnom Penh had been advertised as another 7 hour drive but it was only 5 hours (apparently a new road was put in: it was very smooth, too!). We were able to eat in Phnom Penh for lunch.

Riding in the tuk-tuk at night is always fun!

Today we had a tour guide that I booked specifically so we could see the Irawaddy River Dolphins in the Mekong River. Our day included some other stops and I'm really glad we booked this tour. We rode in a tuk-tuk through some rural areas and made some interesting stops that we never would have done on our own. (Our guide followed us in his motorcycle.)

Our view of the market at breakfast. We ate at a restaurant run by a European expat and it was a good start to our day.

This is the part of our trip with things got a little sketchy. Back in Singapore planning the trip, it wasn't clear how we could get to Kratie from Siem Reap without going back through Phnom Penh and taking multiple buses. So, I arranged with our tour guide in Kratie to get us a driver from Siem Reap to Kratie. In hindsight we could have just asked the hotel in Siem Reap to arrange one for us and that would have been better. The tour guide in Kratie seemed to be a genuinely nice guy online (and he was in person). He was disappointed in the van we ended up with (as were we: it was old, not clean, it didn't have seat belts, and the driver was less professional than the one we had from Phnom Penh. BUT we got there safe & sound so in the end that's all that matters!). This was another 7-hour drive on bumpy roads with similar sights as the first drive.

A shoe-flower to start our morning.

We got up early to get our day started at the temples. I didn't feel like I "had" to go super early for the sunrise. For us, one day was enough; I can see how with older kids or just adults it would be nice to break it up over several days and do the sunrise/sunset stuff, but this was good. We thought we were getting a guide but didn't realise we had to pre-book that through the front desk so we went with our the tuk-tuk guy provided from the hotel. In a way this might have been better since we moved at our own pace more but Craig & I missed out on some of the stories (later we saw we could have downloaded an app for a self-guided tour). Anyway, I had already decided which temples were my must-sees so that is how we went about our day. Again, Anna & Sarah were much more interested in everything because they were taking pictures, too. Henry is great and just goes with the flow (for the most part!).

Time to wake up! See that Henry is sleeping upside down on the bed and somehow his panda is in the bed with Sarah.

Today we drove from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. It is a seven-hour drive or a one-hour flight but the drive was much less expensive. There were also some bus options we could have taken but we felt like we'd be happier with a private van which the hotel in Phnom Penh easily arranged for us. I think we were able to see the countryside better and we were able to stop at a local/small restaurant on the way for lunch instead of the one the tour buses stop at. The driving time was probably similar but I'm sure our smaller van was able to drive faster (crazier) than the large bus was able to.

One of the things I noticed was that there are a few gorgeous temples (they look beautiful, new, & well-kept) and a lot of really run-down housing. We saw some kids biking to school, water buffalo, beautiful landscapes, interesting driving techniques (and vehicles!).

Cambodia is the craziest place I've been driving-wise. There is very little rule-following and "space makes lanes" is definitely the motto. I'm glad I was just a passenger!

Our hotel breakfast was good (dinner was good last night, too); we'll stay here again when we return to Phnom Penh at the end of our trip. We really liked this hotel!

Anna made a video of riding in the tuk-tuk at night.

Views from the tuk-tuk.

Our lovely hotel gave us watermelon juice when we arrived: the kids were excited because Grandpa is always talking about watermelons. The fact that it was cool & refreshing was also really nice.

We got our campervan and we went to the Antarctic Center and we got to have coffee at a NZ coffee shop in Christchurch. We got to go to Hokitika and we went to the gorge and it was so pretty. The waters were so turquoise.

We got to go skiing and skiing was my favorite part of New Zealand! I liked the skiing because we got to go on the big magic carpet but at the end my feet felt so cold. At the ski resort we got to eat pasta and the pasta was some of the best pasta ever but the pasta that we got in Wanaka [insert name of restaurant] was so much better.

We did the gondola and we got to see the kiwis but it was dark and I couldn't see the kiwis very well because the kiwis like it dark and it was dark there when it was actually day. It was weird that there were red lights in the kiwi place, I wonder why they weren't orangey-red lights because the sun is orangey-red.

We got to do the Akaroa Dolphin cruise and I played "fall-over" with Henry. How you play fall over is you stand up on the boat and when the wave comes, you fall over on the bench and sit down.

We went on a glowworm cruise and the glowworms they looked liked stars and Sarah said that one of them looked like a constellation of a smiley face.

We went to a beach where there was a lighthouse but we didn't get to go in the lighthouse but we did get to hop from rock to rock in the ocean and it was so so so so so so fun.

We went to the Moreaki Boulders and I climbed on one and I got to jump down and I climbed on to one of the rocks and onto one of the boulders but there was water on one side so I had to jump over the water when I jumped down.

The litle blue penguins was so windy and so dark and it was very very cold. But we did get to see the Little Blue Penguins but it wasn't very fun because it was so windy and cold and so rainy.

We went to the Sir Edmund Hillary museum. He was the person who climbed Mt. Everest and there was a life-sized picture of him and Daddy is the same size as Sir Edmund Hillary. We got to see a Black Holes movie and it was so cool. And it's so weird how people don't know how there is a black hole in the middle of the milky way. But I think it was because a star exploded and turned into a big black hole and all the stars around it got to go into it and that was how it gets so big. It was so weird that in the middle of the black hole that there is a teeny tiny space in the middle of it and I wonder how the black hole can fit so many stars into that teeny tiny space.

We got our campervan. The campervan's bathroom was really tiny. We got to play at the table on the drive. The single bed was my favorite bed to sleep in because I had nobody rolling around at my side and also that when it rained I couldn't hear the rain.

When we went on the Akaroa Dolphin tour we got to see the smallest and rarest dolphins in the whole wide world. It was windy and cold. We saw lots of dolphins. We saw two at one time. And we saw one at one time. And the waves got really big. And I decided to go inside because it was too cold.

When we went to the big magic carpet when we were skiing it was really fun when I went down the hill really fast. Skiing was like almost the best thing in the whole New Zealand.

In the glow-worm cave it was really wet and I felt like the cave was going to explode because there was so much water in the cave. That night when I went to bed, when I looked up, when I was sleeping at the top of the campervan, I thought I saw glowworms on the ceiling. And when we were at the glowworms, some of the glowworms made a shape like a smiley face.

At the LIttle Blue Penguins, it was cold and windy just like the Akaroa dolphin cruise. It was so windy my eyes were watering. The Little Blue Penguins were really small and cute. They waddled a lot and mommy got really bad pictures. They were really cute but I wish I could have stayed longer if it wasn't too windy and cold. And when the LBP were in the water, they looked like Little Blue Ducks instead of LBPs. I couldn't imagine what the LBP's feathers would feel like.