UncleEbeneezer
Our final day in Saigon we decided to simply laze about by the pool, since we had an afternoon/evening flight to Siem Reap, Cambodia. As much as Vietnam felt like another world, it was when we reached the airport in Siem Reap when we really felt like we had left the developed world. The airport is tiny and in the middle of nowhere. When we exited the airport we saw a couple charming tuk-tuks waiting out front. We had no idea that one of them was actually our ride to Palm Village Resort, where we would be staying for 3 nights. To give you an idea of how remote this area is, I looked at the Google Map to find some street names and realized that the vast majority of the streets around Siem Reap don’t have any names.
After about a mile or two of tuk-tuking along Charles Degualle Highway (a simple 2-lane road) we turned down this dirt road that led to our Hotel. There were stray dogs, water buffalo and local Khmer families here and there. The sky was hazy from the early evening, nightly spraying of pesticides to help control the mosquito population. This was also the time when many people burn their trash. Our immediate thought was “what have we gotten ourselves into?” Fortunately the pesticides and smoke both clear fairly fast.