Srong Rokavorn: Part 1

We toured a man-made lake near the Srong Rokavorn Community Forest in hopes of seeing more birds. The lake had an eerie feel because of the dead trees and imminent storm.

This is a giant spider with an egg sack that was sitting just to the right of my hammock in the house we were staying in. It was as large as a hand.

Here is one of the many sunsets we have witnessed here in Cambodia. Every day we get up by 4:30am in order to hike into the forests and be ready for birding by sunrise.

Bon Saluth, the monk on the right, is explaining the uses of the root which we were unable to find in our books. Pok and Visatha (center)are translating for us.

Angkor Wat

Siem Riep is a city in Cambodia with the most tourists per year in large part because this is where Angkor Wat, a massive temple complex, is located. Enjoy the photos!

Kampong Thom

In Kampong Thom, Deb worked with the Teacher’s Across Boarders program by instructing Cambodian teachers on how to teach Biology. Here the teachers are looking through microscopes to examine cell structure, for some of them, it is their first time doing so.

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If you look all the way in the back row you can see a few barang (foreigners) mixed in with the Cambodian teachers during the opening ceremonies.

We also rented a boat for a tour of the Stung Sen River in Kamong Thom.  

While in Siem Riep, took one afternoon to visit a nearby temple called Phnom Sen Tuk. This temple was situated on top of a mountain the locals informed us that it was a thousand steps up to the top. :) There were many Buddha carvings etched into the rock that we found as we explored the grounds.

Still More From Phnom Penh :)

Here are a few more photos from our time in Phnom Penh. :)

Here, Joe and I are releasing birds to gain good karma in hopes it will help us with our research.

Inside the National Museum, we fed the fish in the ponds of the courtyard.

More animals we saw at the Wildlife Refuge.

Here is a glimpse at the crazy traffic on one of the national highways of Cambodia.  I was told that all the people in the truck are going home from work

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Kampong Thom: First Glance

Joe here, yesterday after a long bus ride, we arrived in the city of Kampong Thom. It is a few hours north of the capital,  but a slow few hours because there is a large difference in infrastructure here versus the US. Kampong Thom has a rural feel, with little to no commercial shops or food chains. There is a large central market where you can buy anything from baked goods to dried fish and spices. You can even buy fried crickets and spiders to eat! Maybe we will try some ;-).

There is also visible countryside just beyond the border of the town. The countryside is a lot like central Wisconsin except substitute the corn fields with rice paddies and pine trees with palm trees. We are here in Kampong Thom while our mentoring professor, Deb, attends Teachers Across Borders (TAB). Deborah is the only teacher from the United States, the rest are Australian and they are very funny and charming. We volunteered to help in anyway we can, and today we edited and corrected English exams from last years national English exam while Deb taught about the environment and global climate change. Deb has other topics lined up for lectures later this week like genetics and human sexual biology, hubba hubba!

In the afternoon Joel and Breana visited a local impoverished school while Kelsey and I taught students how to use the Internet and google as a tool. It seems pretty intuitive, but only because we have had computer access for most of our lives. Try explaining what the Internet is to a person who is using a computer for maybe the 5th or 6th time! Tomorrow we are going to create Gmail accounts for them, we are excited to blow some minds! That's all for now, over and out.

- JW, KP, JS and BM

Phnom Penh: Markets

Hello again!
Sunday we got up early to go and have breakfast with the monks. We went to another Wat and bought food from a couple street vendors. It was cheap and delicious! For the five of us, breakfast was only $3.50 all together. The monks also invited us inside to eat at a small table so we sat on the ground and ate our noodles with chopsticks. After this adventure, we met up with our translators that we had met the day before. Pok and Vissatha met us at the Olympic Market which is a market that foreigners very rarely go to. There we bought supplies such as pots, water filters, hammocks, and sarongs (a sheet-like thing used for privacy when bathing) for when we are camping in forests of Oddar Meanchey working on our research. We said goodbye to Pok and Vissatha after working out the logistics on where we would meet up with them as that was the last time we would see them before we begin our research. We then traveled by tuk-tuk to another market, the Russian Market.  We did see a few other foreigners there and we bought some souvenirs. Breana and I (Kelsey) also bought fans. That $0.75 may be the best $0.75 we have spent here. :P

Around 2pm we hopped on a bus with all of our equipment and headed to Kampong Thom where we will stay for a week while Deb helps teach the teachers through the Teachers Across Boarders (TAB) program. We are looking forward to helping out in the school in every way that we can! :)

Phnom Penh: Wildlife Refuge

Saturday we spent the day at a wildlife refuge about an hour outside of Phnom Penh. Until 2002, this place was a zoo but now they have upgraded many of the enclosures and they only keep animals that have been raised in captivity and therefore cannot be released back into the wild. They also have breeding programs for endangered or threatened animals. This was a very useful excursion for us because we will be looking for many of these animals in the forests for our research. It was a great opportunity to see these formerly foreign animals up close.

Pok and Vissatha also joined us at the wildlife refuge. they are both from Cambodia and they will be are our translators while we are in the forests of Oddar Menchaey working on our research. They are very kind and they have already done a great job answering all of our questions about the culture and country of Cambodia. We are very excited to work with them further. :)

Our guide, Aram from the Netherlands, was fantastic. He just got married to a spunky Cambodian woman last year and so we spent a lot of time talking with them about all the customs that he has found out about. Apparently you are not supposed to touch other people on the head or step over people. These things are considered very rude and have gotten him into some rather humorous trouble occasionally. He was also very knowledgable about the animals. It seemed like he knew them each individually by name!

Hope you enjoy the photos from the wildlife refugee!