Hi All… we just returned a couple hours ago after a 22 hour flight ( two change of planes ) from our almost three week Southeast Asia trip. It was an extraordinary learning experience about the cultural and historic background of the region. Highlights include seeing how Bangkok has grown since I was last there 40 years ago, into a major economic city … with the worst traffic jams. In the Peoples Democratic Republic of Lao, we spent a day in a Hmong tribe village visiting an elementary school classroom where English was being taught followed by lunch with a local family celebrating their New Year. Saigon, a.k.a. Ho Chi Minh City, has the scariest drivers on motorbikes . Forty miles North of the city, I crawled through the very narrow Cuchi Tunnels dug by the Viet Cong during the war and days later boated up the Mekong Delta to Phnom Penh, capitol of Cambodia. The hardest part of the trip was seeing a concentration camp where thousands of skeletal remains of some of the 2-3 million Cambodian people murdered by the Khmer Rouge during the “Killing Fields” of 1975-79 . This was every bit as horrible as Poland’s Nazi’s Ashwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp.

Not exactly like a restful, tropical resort vacation… but one that I will never forget ! Now, to catch-up on my sleep system which is still somewhere over mid-Pacific … Dave McIntyre