The King was not at home

Saturday Jan 21: We left the beach and took a four hour drive back to the Anise Hotel in the city. Along the way we passed many signs of people preparing for Chinese New Year which runs Jan 22 to 25. Also many textile and garment factories.  It took a long time to get in to the city...the traffic was very heavy. We dropped Porum off to catch a very crowded shared mini van back to Takeo.  For the first hour he had to ride standing up on the back bumper! There were several people riding on the roof. After a lovely lunch at our hotel oasis resto, many of us boarded the bus to visit the Royal Palace.  It was very hot 35 degrees and crowded. We heard from the guide that the king was in Beijing visiting his ailing father, the previous king. The current king is 59 years old and unmarried with no heirs. He spent 20 years in a ballet troupe in Paris before becoming king. But never fear, his father had 4 wives and has another 17 children to choose the next king from! We toured the very opulent Coronation Temple which had a lot of gold, crystal and jewels, the Silver Pagoda where the floor was covered in silver tiles and there were thousands of buddhas on display. One was made totally of emerald which was mined in Cambodia. Another was made of 90 kg of pure gold and had very large diamonds and rubies encrusted in it. Then on to the White Elephant stable...the Khmer rouge killed all these rare beasts during their reign of terror so there is only a concrete replica on display. For dinner, 9 of us went to a very good italian restaurant where Steve said he had the best lasagna ever and Socheat had her first visit to an Italian themed restaurant. Tomorrow, we will do a distribution of 97 bicycles for the students at the school near the dump here in the city.   We are all looking forward to being "back to work"! Posted by Linda