April 19, 2015

Well, it has been an amazing 3 days so far in Siem Reap, Cam.  Although we had to cut our time short here (due to the Visa incident stranding us in Hanoi, Vietnam), we still got to do just about everything that we had planned and tomorrow we will explore the Angkor complex.  We did miss out on Phnom Phen where we wanted to visit the Killing Fields, but we decided to spend more our time in Siem Reap instead.  We had also already done quite a bit of learning about wars in Vietnam, so Hayden would probably be a little overloaded learning about more fighting/killing.  After a 14 hour bus ride (yes, 14 HOURS!) from Ho Chi Minh, we made it to our hotel at about 9:00 pm on Friday night (4/17).  We spent Saturday hanging out by the pool and Hayden made a few friends while we were down there.

While we were checking into the hotel, we saw a brochure for “Flight of the Gibbon” and told Hayden about zip lining.  He’s not normally a super adventurous kid (never been a fan of rollercoasters or scary stuff), but for some reason he was super excited about the idea of zip lining.  We have been working to get him to try new things, so we jumped on the opportunity to try something new that he was excited about.  We went first thing the next morning.  The facility is inside of the Angkor park, surrounded by jungle.  We got there first thing because we knew it would be hot later in the day.

They started by suiting us up and getting ready to go!

The Flying Vijils

Ready to zipline

I kept thinking that Hayden may get a little nervous, but he never even flinched!  We went through the first few lines and he went all by himself!  Here is a video of him going:  (for anyone that is not a fan of Back to the Future”, the “they found me” reference is from the first movie…lol

There were a total of 10 zip lines and 4 suspension bridges that were all a ton of fun.  We had a blast and Hayden is already pumped for another zipline trip!

Ready to go!!

We were able to get some really cool videos with the Go Pro camera…here is Adam on the longest zip line (about 900 feet)

At the highest point (where the video above started,), there is a treehouse that had awesome views of the jungle.  We stayed up there for a while to cool off and relax before we went down the last three zip lines.

Up in the treehouse

View from the treehouse

Checking out the treehouse view

At the end, we repelled down to the bottom and took a group picture before heading back to the hotel

Group picture

Tomorrow  will be a full day of visiting the Angkor complex to see all of the temples.