Time in another favorite place (part 2)

Mondolkiri

 About a 7hr (if you go fast) drive northeast of Phnom Penh, Mondolkiri was our final destination for our time in Cambodia. It is up in the hills, beautifully cool and breezy. The girls took lots of landscape pictures - inspiration for their book worlds.

We stayed in this lovely house with one of our translator friends.  He showed us around Sen Monorom - totally unrecognizable from what we saw on our last visit!- and introduced us to some of the Bunong translation team.

  One place he showed us was this house tucked away in the forest that holds a video recording studio! Dad was unexpectedly able to help them fix the aircon so the small padded space wouldn't get so stifling during recording. 

We got to visit a Bunong village and meet the leader of the church there with our friend doing sometimes double interpretation duty from Bunong and Khmer.

  We stopped to visit with this grandma weaving a traditional skirt. The more intricate the pattern, the more sticks required - the process looked quite complicated!  We were offered one for sale, but we didn't have enough money on us, nor the luggage space to mom's disappointment.

This is the new church building being built in the village as they can put together the funds and have
the time to work on it.  it has an interesting design as part way through they worried the roof might be too heavy and needed extra support columns inside...

 

Of course, throughout the day there was plenty of hanging around time while mom and dad talked....

There was still time for some green and blue therapy in the afternoon too: a visit to one of the many waterfalls...

walking across the top of the waterfall

 

And some other fun: the kids were introduced to pool at one of the restaurants! This one was extra fun as the resident cat insisted on joining the game...

A final few from our long journey there and back again:

Quality Krud is what this sign proclaims! 

A bird in a cage on a car roof Jasmin saw along the way

 Our journey back to Malaysia was rather ragged as we had a few short hours of sleep in KL airport. This photo is after we woke the kids up to catch the 5am bus only to be told it was at 5:30... Aiden continued to sleep wherever he could until we got home: bus, train station, train, ferry terminal, ferry, taxi!

too early for being awake

Despite the hiccups, long layovers, missing meals and sleep, everyone did really well with all our adventurous travels.  We're sure glad to be home though - on our way down from Mondolkiri mom started to feel sick and by the time we got home she barely had a voice. And the next day Jasmin came down with it too... Glad it didn't spoil any of our time away.