Life as a Local in Syros, Greece

I had to go to Manila to get good enough wifi to post photos.  Sorry about the photos being a bit out of order.

Our last morning in Phnom Penh did help to redeem my view of the city.  Karen and Joe took us on a bike tour along the river, and we got to see all of the green that we had missed the previous 5 days in the city.  It will still probably rank pretty low among the cities that we visited, but it was not as bad as my original post made it out to be.

We caught a van (bus) to Mondulkiri (near the Vietnam border) that afternoon.  We were not happy with the driver – they all seem to drive as if they have a death wish.  We found Mondulkiri to be a very pretty place with rolling hills of farmland meeting jungle.  We spent 4 nights there, and the prices were cheap again – a room for the night with a hot shower was $6-7, and you could easily eat a meal for $2 per person.

Our main purpose for going to Mondulkiri was for the Mondulkiri Project, which included feeding and washing elephants, an overnight stay in a hammock, and an 18 km hike to a mountain village.  The Mondulkiri Project owned 3 elephants and allow the elephants to do whatever they want – there is no riding of the elephants. They use bananas to get the elephants to come to the tourists.

The first day we fed and washed the elephants.  Washing the elephants was fun, but the water was really cold.   Mondulkiri is much cooler than everywhere else that we have been with tempertures ranging between 68 and 86 degrees.  That night, I was very confortable in my hammock, but Jeanette only got a couple of hours of sleep.  I am glad she had her ear plugs in; otherwise, she would have heard the rats squeaking and scurrying under us – our guides pack even had a hole chewed through it.  

On day 2, we did the 18 km hike.  A good chunk of it was going up and down hills, but it was not as bad as it sounds (we had lots of breaks).  You definitely felt like you were in the jungle during the hike – there were leeches all over the trail and it rained for probably 3 hours of the 8 hour hike.  We saw 3 water falls and rested in a cave during one of the heavier rains.  

The village at the end of the hike was really pretty; it kind of reminded me of the Elwyn (peck) village in Willow.  There were all sorts of animals wandering around the place, including pigs, buffalo, cows, and chickens.  

We stayed one more night in Mondulkiri before making the mad dash back to Phnom Penh for our flight to Kuala Lumpur.  

Oh yeah… And I almost forgot.  When we got back to the Tree Lodge after the jungle trek, Jeanette found a leech on her stomach that judging by the size of it had been there for a few hours.  After we both screamed like girls, I scratched it off.  I was so quick to get it off of her that I lost it in the room.  After the fact, Jeanette was a little disappointed that we did not get a picture of it.  That was the only leech that made it back to the lodge with us.