Christmas By The Pool & Transfer To River Orchid

After two long, hot days of temple visits, we were very happy to have Christmas Day as a "down day." The morning was completely free until we had to check out of our hotel around noon. While some of our group ventured out into town for shopping, or chartered a private helicopter for rides over the temples, we sat by the pool, relaxed, and kept the bartender busy. It would be a shame for a beautiful pool like this to go to waste in such hot weather.

After two hours at the pool, we went to our rooms, showered, packed up our bags, and joined the rest of our group in the lobby. After everyone was checked out, we boarded the bus that would take us to the River Orchid. It was about a four-hour ride to Kampong Cham through lots of really interesting country side. Shortly after boarding, we were given a boxed lunch with a sandwich, piece of fruit, and lots of sugary snacks. We always like slightly unfamiliar snacks! We each had a Blasto bar and two Choco-Pies. Everything is a little bit different in SE Asia, so my orange juice included "orange sacs." Mmmmmmm.

You can see the woven box in the last photo. They let us keep them if we wanted. We had plenty of room in our luggage, so we brought them home to use as toiletry holders in our guest bathrooms.

We stopped at a roadside oasis about half-way through, where you could grab a bite to eat/drink or even buy some souveniers. I just enjoyed the scenery (and apparently failed to take a picture).

A bit further along in our drive, we were amongst rubber fields and our guide had the bus stop so he could show us how rubber was harvested from the trees.

Then, traffic started to pick up and we were in Kompong Cham! It's a quickly-growing city along the Mekong, and it was evening rush hour when we arrived. After driving to the city, we got to the place where the River Orchid was docked. We made our way down a very sandy hill and quickly found our rooms. One of the first staff members we met was the man in charge of laundry, and we were incredibly happy to see him! We knew as past Uniworld guests that we would get one complimentary bag of laundry per person, and we were just about out of fresh clothing. We had that order ready to go by the time we went to dinner.

Speaking of dinner, it was Christmas, so we didn't have the planned traditional Cambodian dinner. My entree was a very Western steak. It was good, but I really didn't feel we needed to celebrate the holiday. Particularly because a decent portion of the passengers were on vacation this week because they don't celebrate Christmas. Oh well.

Chicken Soup

steak and potatoes

I didn't take a lot of photos of the boat the first day we were on it, but I'll write a separate post just about our Mekong River accommodations.

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