Our third day in Phnom Penh will be largely free to roam around and explore on our own, but in the afternoon, we will depart PP for a three-day guided tour of Siem Reap, Angkor Wat, and surrounding areas.  We'll fly from PP (less than an hour) and arrive on Wednesday evening to meet our guide and have dinner.  We'll be traveling with Intrepid Travel -- the same company that I used for an earlier USAFA-sponsored cadet cultural immersion trip--our epic train adventure across Asia (St Petersburg to Beijing) by train in 2011 with four cadets.  (You can find 32 albums containing well over 5K photos here from that trip).

Intrepid specializes in small group independent, experiential travel.  You get out of the touristy areas, meet people, take the slow trains, stay in the 2-star places, eat the local food, and have a blast.  Our guide for the train trip, Masha Rogozhina, is still a friend and we look forward to traveling with her again someday. 

Anyway, Intrepid also books private groups, which is how we're traveling (with our own dedicated guide) and how we did the train trip in 2011.  Our trip is very close to their regularly scheduled "Secrets of Angkor" Trip, actually.  We're just adding flights from PP.

tkas_2014

We're really looking forward to this part of the trip as Angkor Wat is a bucket list item for almost everyone.