Temples, Rats, and Bears (Cambodia!)

Hello everyone! We have just arrived in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, after a nice week in Cambodia. We started our Cambodian adventure in Siem Reap, a beautiful temple-filled city. Our first day was all about the temples. We started with Bayon, a huge Buddhist temple covered with 216 smiling stone faces. The kids ran around finding the smiles, while Ryan and I tried to understand the complicated history between Buddhist and Hindu people in Cambodia. (I still don’t get it.)

Next we ventured to the Lost Tree temple, which I guess was famously featured in Tomb Raider a couple decades ago. Does it look familiar to anyone?

Finally we went to Angkor Wat. (By then the kids were over it, so maybe we should have stopped by this one first.)

Despite the complaints and sweaty foreheads wiped on my t-shirt, I was blown away by the sheer size of the temple. It took me back to Machu Picchu and just marveling at the effort it took to place each massive rock.

The following day we met hero rats with the organization Apopo. It was super cool. I knew about the land mine crisis in Cambodia and Vietnam, but I had no idea that big African pouched rats were being trained to sniff them out.

The rats are trained specifically to alert their handlers to the presence of TNT, not the presence of metal. So they are far more effective than metal detectors, which pick up any kind of metal. The hero rats can clear an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes, whereas a metal detector could take up to 4 days. AND their small size (3 lbs) gives them an advantage over the trained dogs, which are big enough to set off active mines.

We watched a rat sniff out a small amount of TNT in a large sand pit, it then scratched at the ground and was rewarded with a banana bite.

After the rat scratched the same place twice, it was marked as a mine to be excavated. I mean, it was awesome. Go rats go!!

Then we said goodbye to sweet Siem Reap and flew to Phnom Penh. It is said that Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia, but Siem Reap is its heart. And yes, that’s true. Phnom Penh is a huge, busy, crowded polluted city. But we were there for two reasons, both of which were far outside the city. Mission one: Free the Bears. Mission two: meet Lucky and Chhouk.

Free the Bears is an organization founded by an Australian woman after she learned about the horrible practice of farming bile from sun bears and moon bears. The organization has evolved and now rescues sun and moon bears from a number of awful situations. There are over a hundred bears currently at the Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center, where Free the Bears has its Cambodian HQ.

We toured the facility and met many of these sweet bears, and then we made their enrichment snacks. The kids had so much fun chopping fruit and veg and then cramming them into hollow bamboo shoots.

The real highlight though was giving the treats to the bears and watching them just shred the bamboo to get to their snack. Before leaving, we were tasked with hiding the bears’ dinner in their enclosure while they were in their dens. The kids were tricky, but those bears would not be fooled! Lulu was especially happy when a bear found her secret stash of guavas.

Then onto mission two. We have a beloved book in our house about Chhouk the elephant. His foot was severed by a trap when he was young. He was rescued and brought to a center where the Cambodian School of Prosthetics fit him with a shoe to make each leg the same length. A sweet resident elephant named Lucky took Chhouk in when he was missing his family. It’s a good story. Anyway, Chhouk and Lucky are at the same center as the bears! We went out to the elephant sanctuary, and absolutely fan-girled all over Lucky the moment we saw her.

She was going out for her afternoon walk through the forest, so we got to say hi. It was amazing.

Then we saw Chhouk, who apparently has become quite an unruly teenage bull elephant.

He’s not even nice to Lucky! (Never meet your heroes, right?) Lu was pretty bummed that he was no longer a baby like he was in the book, but she was still excited. And the shoe is just so cool.

We spent the next day hunkered down in our hotel because the city just wasn’t calling to us. We left in the evening to walk by the Grand Palace and grab some pizza, but that was it!

We are happy to be in Vietnam. We will be here for just over two weeks, and we are super excited to see our friend Kristina here!!

We miss you all. We miss home!

All my love,

Madeline