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Those of us with an itch to travel the world are increasingly at risk for an itch of a different kind: a bedbug bite. And if you’ve got one, chances are you’re going to end up with a lot more. Like boogers and bad habits, bedbugs easy to pick up but hard to get rid of. Which is why, when Whitney and I awoke one morning a couple weeks ago with several new, itchy bites scattered around our bodies, we went into panic mode.

If you’re like me, prior to the past couple years the only reference you ever heard to bedbugs was in a sleep-time rhyme. But recently that’s changed; countless stories in the media have bullhorned the fact that bedbugs are on the rise again. Why, you ask? Well, flashpackers, there are a number of factors contributing to their resurgence, but people like us are owed much of the blame.

Back in the heyday of indiscriminate DDT spraying, bedbugs (and bald eagles and brown pelicans and peregrine falcons and so on…) were begging for mercy; in fact, they were nearly DDT’d into extinction. Unfortunately, due to its similarly deleterious effects on human development and cognition (and bald eagles and brown pelicans and peregrine falcons and so on…), DDT was summarily banned for domestic use by the U.S. government on the last day of 1972, and much of the developed world followed suit. Bird populations thankfully rebounded, but so did those dastardly bedbugs. The increasing ease of international travel seems to be one of the main culprits.

Bedbugs are expert hitchhikers; they travel the world on our dimes, comfortably stashed away inside our luggage until they get hungry and decide to stretch their legs. The ninjas of the insect world, they go completely unnoticed until it’s too late. By the time you’re aware of them, they’re everywhere and they’re peckish and they’re notoriously hard to kill.

The bites bedbugs leave behind are easy to confuse with mosquito bites, so many bedbug victims are tardy in suspecting an infestation. Although they’re not so tiny as to be invisible — about half a centimeter in length full grown, they resemble ticks with stubby legs — bedbugs tend to feed at night, so your best chance of spotting one is by flashlight. During the daytime, while they’re plotting nightly terror raids around your sleeping body, they occupy tough-to-examine nooks and crannies: the narrow crevasses in hardwood floors and furniture frames, the gaps between couch cushions, and the lips and folds of mattresses, box springs, carpeting, and wallpaper. So on and so forth.

Once identified, bedbugs can be astonishingly difficult to eradicate. Various websites we’ve consulted have recommended everything short of salting our floor with plutonium particles to kill them. Pesticide fumigations aren’t always effective; bedbugs have grown resistant to certain chemicals, so a treatment might merely scatter them to new areas, worsening the infestation. You can try to starve them, but adults can survive for up to two months without eating, so staying in a hotel for a few days or weeks will only try their patience.

So we’ve spent the past couple weeks committing acts of lunacy to get rid of them: boiling our clothes, storing our books in the freezer and then stuffing them into plastic bags to bake in the sun, shuttling daily back and forth to the dry cleaners with garbage bags full of garments and luggage, and spraying enough insecticide around the apartment to cause permanently bloodshot eyes and frqeuent and unintetnional misplelings.

The real lingering effects of a bedbug assault are clearly psychological as much as physical. If they’ve spread throughout a dwelling, a successful treatment can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Just the thought of that is enough to keep me awake at night. Since we discovered our bites, I’ve been jolted awake several times by the merest inkling that something is scurrying around on a part of my body, only to comb the area manically by cell-phone light and find nothing at all. As if I needed a new mental disorder, I’m becoming a paranoid insomniac.

On the spectrum of things you want to host in your home, bedbugs are definitely on the undesirable end, somewhere between a Kiss concert and a conflagration.

A few travel tips to avoid picking up pestilential passengers while you’re away:

Inspect hotel rooms before you settle in. Check mattress seams and carpet edges for signs of bedbug activity: the bugs themselves, of course, but also their dried blood-speck droppings or collections of tiny, sticky, white eggs.

Always carry a flashlight with you to examine your room at night if you suspect an infestation.

Try not to leave your luggage or clothes lying around on a hotel bed or floor. Hang up your clothes whenever possible and keep your luggage zipped shut and lifted off the floor, perhaps on a chair or desk.

And tell the hotel staff and fellow travelers about any bedbugs you discover.

By the way, insect repellants are ineffective against them (naturally), so if there are hungry bedbugs where you stay, you’ll only end up itching and smelling funny.

Think you might have an infestation but aren’t sure? Here are a few things to look for:

Orion’s welts? — Creepily enough, bedbugs often leave a trail of three bites arrayed in a line, usually on your lower extremities. Why they do this isn’t clear, but I have a feeling it’s just to mess with your head.

Set a trap — If you think you might have bedbugs but haven’t actually caught sight of one, try setting one of those mouse-miring glue traps near your bed or around the furniture you suspect is harboring them. Then try not to step in it. Laying down a perimeter of double-sided carpet tape around your bed will work, too.

Man’s best friend/bedbugs’ worst enemy? — Some pest control companies employ dogs that are trained to sniff out bedbug infestations, but they’re quite expensive. Come to think of it, if they could train the airport security dogs to sniff for drugs and bedbugs, many a nasty episode might be avoided.

Once you’ve identified it, here are a few suggested courses of action for dealing with an infestation:

Heat — Bedbugs can nest and lay eggs inside your clothes and luggage. The eggs are the real danger, because in only a couple weeks, the number of active bedbugs crashing at your place can explode from a few to a few dozen. Ten to twenty minutes in a medium-high heat (160°F or 71°C) electric dryer or several hours in temperatures above 120°F (49°C) will eliminate them. A surefire way to get rid of the critters is to boil your clothes for several minutes, though if you own a lot of clothes, this is extremely labor intensive and you might, as I did, end up accidentally tie-dying half your wardrobe if you’re not careful.

Cold – Bedbugs cannot survive sustained exposure to subzero temperatures, but the exposure has to be continuous for several days.

Dry cleaning — The chemicals used in dry cleaning processes will kill the bedbugs and their eggs, but keep in mind that the pre-treated, contaminated items might ferry the infestation to the dry cleaning facility.

Pesticide treatment — A recent report on London’s resurgent bedbug population stated that they’re now resistant to most of the insecticides allowed in the UK. If you decide to hire a pest control company, make sure they’ve got plenty of experience dealing with bedbugs, because to kill a bedbug you’ve got to be able to think like a bedbug.

Suck ‘em up — A thorough vacuuming of mattresses, hardwood floors, carpets, and drapes can be effective, but remember to transfer the vacuum bag into another sealed waste bag and get it outside immediately.

Food-grade diatomaceous earth (DE) – A sprinkling of this chalky, pet-safe stuff around potential bedbug hiding places will dehydrate and kill the suckers.

The “Sweep the bed, Johnny!” technique — My personal favorite approach (because it’s the most vengeful) calls for you to wake just before dawn when bedbugs are most active, throw on the lights in your bedroom, sweep the scattering bedbugs into a dustpan, and immediately dump them into a pot of water to drown. Sometimes you’ve just got unleash your inner-Cobra-Kai on them.

Jedi mind tricks — Bedbugs are impervious to them, unless they’re applied in conjunction with any of the above treatments.

Good luck and safe travels! Thanks for reading…

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Ah, Phuket, I had such high hopes for thee. Hearing the word Phuket — at least since I learned it was a place name, pronounced “poo-ket”, and not an expression of frustration with a different pronunciation — has always brought to mind calm, teal waters, crispy sunbathers strewn across bone-colored beaches, and palm crowns shimmying in the salty breeze. And on these fronts Phuket did not disappoint. Unfortunately, on most other fronts it did.

There are three major qualifiers I should mention before I proceed. One, I am not a spread-a-towel-on-the-sand-and-sunbathe kind of guy — in fact, I’m nearly translucent — so I’m looking for more than the kind of experience that can be had in any given desert. Two, my trip to Phuket fell squarely during the low season, so surely I wasn’t catching it in peak form. And three, I spent just two and a half days there, and perhaps with a bit more time my esteem of the island would have improved. It’s telling, though, that after only two and a half days I was ready to kiss the carpet of the plane that carried me off.

Phuket suffers from a mild case of Cruise Ship Syndrome, in that once you’re there, you’re forced to pay inflated prices for things simply because you have no alternative: food, lodging, transport, internet access, and so on. This is a common phenomenon on islands. Easter Island, for instance, is similarly expensive, except that it bears the excuse of being separated from its nearest neighbor by 2,000 kilometers of ocean, and just about everything consumable has to be shipped or flown in. The distance between mainland Thailand and Phuket, on the other hand, is all of 600 meters, and it’s spanned by a four-lane highway. Hmmm.

Then there’s the omnipresent prostitution. Clearly it wouldn’t be so prevalent if tourists didn’t avail themselves of it, but I rather prefer to be able to walk down the street without having to politely decline the catcalls — if not the groping hands — of batteries of sex workers. It’s tragic that, even with so much tourist money pumping into other sectors of the island’s economy, so many young women are funneled into the sex trade. Again, this was the middle of the low season, but the prostitutes seemed to outnumber the tourists. That’s a bad ratio for everyone.

I’d been forewarned about Patong, the rowdy heart of Phuket’s tourist scene that’s chock-full of western restaurants, bars, and nightclubs heralded by neon signs and pulsating speakers — it hosts three Starbucks franchises grouped so closely that, if you neglect to trim your nails for a few weeks, you can almost touch them all simultaneously — so I steered clear. I pre-booked a room in Karon, just a few kilometers and decibels south of Patong.

I generally like to explore new places by bicycle, but Phuket’s size and hilly terrain don’t lend themselves to cycling. And tuk-tuk drivers wanted outlandish amounts to ferry people around — 250 Baht just to make the short trip from Karon to Patong — so I opted for another mode of transportation: a rented motorbike. I think it’s the ideal way to get around Phuket. Renting one for the day costs just 200 Baht, plus whatever fuel you consume, and of course allows you to go wherever you please. The roads are sinuous, the views stunning.

Atop my little, burgundy Honda Dream, I weaved through the mobs in Patong and headed up the west coast, stopping at beach after beach to take in the scenery. Faded red flags were posted all along the backshore to warn visitors about the low season’s dangerously strong currents. The beaches are undoubtedly beautiful, but it was strange to see almost no one in the water.

I rode an arc through northern Phuket and came back down the east coast, stopping for a couple hours at the Bang Pae waterfall (not much to see) and the adjacent Gibbon Rehabilitation Project (200 Baht entrance fee), a non-profit rescue and breeding facility for the adorable and highly intelligent apes. Because gibbons can fetch a lot of money — tourists buy them as pets or pay to have pictures taken with them — poachers seek them in the wild, slaughtering gibbon mothers to capture their young and exploit them on the streets. The project rescues such gibbons and, if possible, rehabilitates and returns them to the protection of a wilderness sanctuary. A very worthy cause.

Next, I checked out the very well organized and informative Butterfly Garden and Insect World near Phuket town (300 Baht, a bit pricey, but worth it if you’re a nerd like me). I was the only visitor there, having arrived near the end of the day, and I got the distinct impression that the employees wanted to shut down a bit early. “There are more butterflies to see this way, sir,” one would urge, motioning me coyly into the next room. As I wandered dumbly into it, another unseen employee would slam and lock the door behind me. In this way, as if by peristalsis, I was cajoled through several exhibits and out the front door in under 30 minutes. These people were good.

The following day I decided to book an all-day, all-inclusive snorkeling trip to Ko Phi Phi, a picturesque island 40 kilometers east of Phuket, about which I’d read nothing but raves prior to the trip. According to Lonely Planet, “Ko Phi Phi is so beautiful it will evoke tears.” All the photos I’d seen of Phi Phi, and I’ll add to them the above two that I took, corroborate that statement. The picture you don’t see, however, is the one below at left, depicting what I was standing in when I took the other two. The island seems to have dived headfirst into tourism’s flush pockets, with a ravenous appetite for its economic benefits but little concern for its environmental consequences. Everywhere I walked on the island, I had to step around discarded building materials, old shoes and clothes, plastic bottles, and other detritus of development. Phi Phi, incidentally, is pronounced “pee-pee”, but it’s turning into number two.

The “all-day” snorkeling trip was similarly deceptive, breaking down like this: two hours of shuttling back and forth to the Phuket harbor in a minivan, seven hours of transit and waiting around on two different boats, one hour exploring Phi Phi on foot, a thirty-minute lunch, and ten minutes of snorkeling. The snorkeling was amazing, if criminally brief, but I was put in a sour mood when the tour operator doled out our masks and snorkels but tried to extort another 100 Baht out of us for the use of flippers.

My flight the next morning was scheduled to depart at eight a.m., which meant that I’d have to leave for the airport around six. No minibus shuttles operate that early, and the cheapest taxi I could find would cost 700 Baht — more than twice the amount I’d paid to go the same distance in Bangkok — which seemed a fitting, wallet-cleansing way to end my stay in Phuket.

I don’t know to what extent prices have inflated since the devastating tsunami struck in December 2004 — and I am more than happy to subsidize the rebuilding effort by paying a premium for food, lodging, etc. — but I can’t help feeling that, given plenty of other gorgeous, affordable, and less trafficked beach destinations sprinkled through Thailand and Malaysia, Phuket’s just not worth it.

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After three straight days of being roused from sleep when only bats and meth addicts remain awake, it felt indulgent to wake up Thursday to my cell phone’s jingle at 7:30 a.m. I showered merrily, prepared a daypack, and found Cico waiting in his tuk-tuk outside my guesthouse at 8 a.m. as planned.

We were headed to Kompong Phhluk, a floating village about 90 minutes from the town of Siem Reap, at the northern end of Tonlé Sap, the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia. To get there, we’d take a tuk-tuk as far as the boggy dirt road would allow, then hop on a longboat to make the rest of the way by canal.

Our boat captain couldn’t have been much older than sixteen, but he wore the look of ease and experience, as if he’d been born in the boat and never crawled out. He nonchalantly steered us down the canal, turning the wheel with his left forearm, maneuvering the stickshift right-handed without glancing down, and controlling the throttle with his bare left foot on the pedal below. Every now and then he would switch feet, letting the unoccupied one rest on the steering panel so the wind could tickle his toes.

For most of the year, the waters of Tonlé Sap Lake funnel down and join the Mekong River in eastern Cambodia before spilling into the South China Sea in southern Vietnam. During the dry season the lake covers an area of about 2,700 square kilometers and is just one meter deep. But during the rainy season, from June to September, the water level of the Mekong rises so dramatically that the flow of water actually reverses back into Tonlé Sap. Its area nearly sextuples, to 16,000 square kilometers, and it reaches depths of eight or nine meters. Outlying villages whose abodes spend the dry season towering above the ground on seven-meter stilts are brought within a toe-dip of the water at the lake’s midsummer peak.

These unique seasonal flows drag sediments up from the Mekong and enrich the floodplain with nutrients, so that during the rainy season the fish stock goes bonkers, making Tonlé Sap one of the most fertile lakes in the world. More than 3 million Cambodians live in countless tiny fishing villages like Kompong Phhluk and are sustained by their catch. And the nation as a whole gets 60% of its protein intake from Tonlé Sap. If the lake weren’t there, Cambodians would all be two-and-a-half feet tall and Angkor Wat would be in miniature. Tonlé Sap’s important, is what I’m saying.

Twenty minutes after our longboat hove into the narrow canal, the dense mangroves lining either side of the waterway finally receded, opening up into the heart of Kompong Phhluk. We were suddenly loomed over by stilt houses, where whole families sat on their front porches, weaving baskets, their infant children clinging to the railing and staring out at us as we passed. One or two boats were tethered to the ladder of each house and filled with reels of fishing line and stacks of handmade, bamboo fish traps.

To our left a woman crouched to slide a tray of rotten vegetables into a floating pen, stirring the lolling pigs inside it to attention. To our right a fence of vertical, tightly bound bamboo rose two meters out of the water, inside which the villagers raised their own fish.

A woman and her child rowed out in a flat boat with a cooler full of cold water and soft drinks for sale. Kompong Phhluk, because of its relative inaccessibility and distance from Siem Reap, is less frequented by tourists than Chong Kneas, but tourism is still an important source of income for the villagers. Although I was the lone tourist in our boat, I got plenty of attention from paddling peddlers. Several boats zoomed alongside ours, the women and children laying down their oars to latch onto our rails, offering me refreshments, colorful children’s books, and even pencils and pens.

The village itself is fairly small, perhaps thirty stilt houses altogether, and in a couple minutes we passed beyond it and into the flooded forest. The forest was too dense for the longboat to pass through, so Cico and I climbed onto a smaller flatboat piloted by a local mother and her son. She sat at the bow, pulling us deftly between gaps in the trees only an arm’s length across with strokes of her thin oar, while her little boy manned the rudder in the back of the boat, dragging his oar on either side during particularly tricky maneuvers.

The only sounds in the forest were the burble of the long, thin oars agitating the water, the chirping of birds and crickets, and the plopping of frogs into the lake. Fist-sized tree frogs leapt constantly from positions of concealment on limbs, alarmed by our passing. The little boy pointed out several camouflaged ones that crouched in wait only a short distance from our boat, but I was hopeless at spotting them unless they jumped. Luckily I was equally hopeless at spying snakes. The mother said that there were plenty of them in the area, and that it wasn’t uncommon to pass beneath one coiled on a branch or to have one swim right up to the boat. It’s better not to think about what might have happened had we been approached by a snake, though it probably would have involved my “accidentally” falling into the water later on to hide the wet spot.

We piled back into the longboat and reversed back down the route we’d come, through Kompong Phhluk and down the tight canal to the waiting tuk-tuk.

Cico dropped me off at the guesthouse in mid-afternoon, and I spent that evening walking around Siem Reap. After a fantastic dinner of amok fish at Khmer Kitchen, I got an iced coffee from Joe-to-Go — 100% of whose profits go to the Global Child, an organization that sets up schools and safe houses for Cambodian street children — and buzzedly perused the night market and a few nearby handicraft shops before retiring to my room to pack. I was sad to be leaving Siem Reap after an unforgettable week, but the next day Whitney and I would reunite in Malaysia to begin a new adventure together.

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Sorry for the infrequent posting. Angkor Wat Week is turning into Angkor Wat Fortnight due a lack of internet access. Without further ado…

Finding myself to be pretty worthless after a thorough sun-soaking and a stomach full of lunch on my first full day in Siem Reap, I planned an ambitious itinerary for day two, fittingly called Tuesday. I was going to bike what’s known as the Big Circuit, a 26-km loop that starts at the south end of Angkor Wat and connects a dozen or so other major places of interest before returning to the same spot. The last stop on the circuit, and the one I was most excited to see, would be Ta Prohm, a setting so remarkable it was featured prominently in the movie Tomb Raider. Alas, neither the brilliant set location nor Angelina Jolie could redeem the film, which offered less mental nourishment than your average coma.

I won’t bore you by describing all the temples I visited. Seeing temples, even those as astonishing and varied as those around Siem Reap, illustrates a classic Econ-101 concept: diminishing marginal utility. The first temple you see (particularly if, like most people, you begin at Angkor Wat) is revelatory. You are wowed by its vastness, its detail, and the fact that it predates John McCain. You want to spend hours examining every nook and cranny, appreciating its miles of carvings, photographing it from every angle and in every possible light. (These temples give amateur photographers, myself included, a false sense of confidence in their abilities.) But after absorbing the first one, each additional temple you visit, though impressive for all the aforementioned reasons, drops your jaw a little less. Your utility gradually slopes downward, until you’ve reached temple number eight or fifteen or twenty-three and you’re content to give a perfunctory “Wow, that’s really old… and quite ruined,” and simply snap an off-kilter and blurry photo from the seat of your tuk-tuk as you rumble by.

Reading about them one after another, I would imagine, descends a much steeper slope.

[But if you’re going to be in the area, check out Preah Khan (pictured above: look for carved images changed from Buddhist to Hindu when a Hindu devotee became king, and the inscription carved by North Vietnamese soldiers, who hid out here in the early 1970’s), Neak Khan (left: formerly pools where purification rites were performed, check out the ornamental spouts in the shape of an elephant, lion, human, and rhino(?)), Tam So (below left: the tree enveloping the eastern entrance is amazing), and Pre Rup (below right: fabulous complex of stupas that looks stunning in the late afternoon).]

I’d nearly managed to complete the circuit by 2 pm, leaving only the famous Ta Prohm left to see. That’s when I made the regrettable decision to save Ta Prohm for sunset and instead head over to Bakong, a ninth-century temple that’s one of the earliest Khmer constructions, which lay a full twenty kilometers away. It was a decision at which only a drunk or a sunstroke victim would have arrived. I won’t say which I was, but off I went.

Halfway to Bakong a noncommittal shower blew over the area, and I took the meager sprinkle as a sign to stop to fuel up. I hadn’t eaten all day and was dead tired. I bought a pack of imitation-Oreos and a Fanta Orange from a pharmacy – easily the best part of traveling by bicycle is the guiltless justification to eat like a loosed three-year old during the ride and for a few meals afterward – and downed them both in a flash, expecting a reaction in my stomach that would send out a fizzy cataract whence they came in. Disappointingly, one never came.

The rain ceased and I started again toward Bakong, which the pharmacy cashier had told me was a mere five kilometers to the east. In fact it was probably twice that distance. The energy spike from the carbonated-drink-and-cookie porridge didn’t last very long, as it turned out. The kilometers piled up grudgingly on my churning legs, and I began to entertain those thoughts that sprout in your brain when you’re exhausted and not at all sure where you are. Had I missed a sign somewhere? Surely I’ve gone more than five kilometers by now, right? These people don’t even look Cambodian anymore. I must look ready to collapse; these ribby stray dogs keep licking their lips as I pass. Why do these dogs have lips?

At last I saw a sign for Bakong and turned down a narrow, paved road that soon gave way to a smooth, dirt path. I rounded a bend and the tiered figure of Bakong mercifully came into view. In a few moments I was staggering up its steps like Rocky Balboa gone to seed. Unfortunately there was little time for a victory dance upon reaching the top; ominous, charcoal-hued clouds were collecting to the east, and they looked ready to spill their contents as they drifted westward.

After a bit of exploring I abridged my visit to Bakong and got back on the bike, but I was beginning to dread the 20-km ride back to Ta Prohm, especially with a succession of lightning bolts slashing the sky in the distance, when I had the good fortune to meet a couple backpackers willing to let me hop in their tuk-tuk to hitch a ride back to Siem Reap. We made it back to town at about 4:45 p.m.

It appeared that the rain would hold off after all, so, ignoring the discomfort in my haunches, I mounted my metal steed to pedal to Ta Prohm for sunset. Again the rain came; though not sufficiently strong to make me turn back, it was dampening enough to make me doubt my judgment. I should have doubted harder.

I pulled up to Ta Prohm’s gate shortly after 5:30 p.m., which left me about 45 minutes to wander the ruins until sunset. Or so I thought.

Lonely Planet neglects to mention the rather important fact that visitors are not admitted entry into Ta Prohm (et al) after 5:30 p.m., which I found, after unsuccessfully lobbying the security guard to please bend the rule for someone who’d cycled 14 km only to arrive a few minutes late, to be non-negotiable. I had no choice but to climb back on the bike and ride, dispirited and suddenly doubly exhausted, back to town.

On a positive note, being rebuffed at Ta Prohm meant that I was passing by the southern end of Angkor Wat’s lovely moat as the sun sank into the horizon. I stopped for a few moments to take let the scene replenish my spirits – it was nearly as remarkable as the previous day’s sunrise had been – before returning to the road.

Arriving at the guesthouse at dark, I went upstairs and sprawled across the bed, taking stock of the day. My body was completely drained and aching from 80 km of pedaling in Cambodian heat, the last 28 of which were maddeningly for naught. I decided that wherever I was headed the next day, I’d be traveling on a well-padded seat.

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Hey there, flashpackers! It’s Angkor Wat Week here on theflashpacker.com, for no other reason than that’s where I just spent four wonderful days. And since Angkor Wat is also one of the most consistently astonishing places on this glorious planet, it gets its own week. Whit and I are in transit today through Malaysia, so we’ll start small with a short post on some of the area’s less imposing sights: its monkeys.

Nearing noon on my first day of exploring, the sun was withering, and I, having been up and at ‘em since 4:30 that morning, decided to head back to Siem Reap for lunch. Returning through the enormous southern gate of Angkor Thom, I noticed a few tourists shuttling around to take photos in earnest. The gate is pretty photogenic, but not that photogenic, so I stopped and to see what the spectacle was. Turns out a huge group of monkeys were camped out around the gate, playing together and scrambling up rocks, logs, and, as it turned out, the limbs of tourists.

As I wandered over to a triangle of downed trees, I was greeted by a bemused-looking European couple under siege. The gentleman had a monkey perched on his right shoulder, tugging absent-mindedly at the skin of his cheek like a massage therapist with an attention deficit. Another one dangled from his upper arm, slapping his string-suspended lens cap around like a piñata. I thought the young lady with him had managed to avoid his fate, when a third monkey emerged mischievously from the cascade of her red curls. She gave a shout as the little guy grabbed a handful of locks and yanked.

Sensing my amusement, the gentleman-cum-jungle-gym offered to transfer one or both of the scoundrels to me, but I politely declined. I’m told I share more than nine-tenths of my DNA with the little guys, but that’s all I want to share with them.

Frankly, monkeys are just about all I need to see to make a trip worthwhile. But I promise, there’s a bit more to Angkor Wat than monkeys. Tomorrow I’ll share some of it with you… Thanks for reading!

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