Siam Reap, Cambodia

Weather: high of about 90ºF, low of about 80ºF and humid.


After two days of tramping through temples in sweltering heat, we are ready for a little break.  We take a leisurely ride through the country in a tuktuk to a silk farm and a land mine museum.

These are silk worm coccoons.  On the paper are silk moths.  They raise three breeds of silk worm here: Thai, Cambodian, and a hybrid of the two.  These are Cambodian because they are yellow.
Here, one long silk thread is being dyed for weaving.
They use chemical dyes in this operation.  Our guide said that vegetable dyes aren't colorfast enough.  Julie was highly skeptical, but she didn't make a scene.
After buying lots of silk products, we visited a land mine museum run by a man who placed and defused a lot of mines in his day.
Here, he's keeping a pet snake on some of his landmines.  Mines still kill about 100 people a month in Cambodia.
We take a boat from Siam Reap to Phnom Penh which takes us past floating houses and lots of fishermen working the Tonle Sap lake.










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