Angkor Wat. Cambodia

Angkor Wat is humungus and impressive, and it has been around for a thousand years. We assumed while looking at it that we'll all be around a thousand years from now to check on the buildings in Sarasota, and we wonder how they will be.

Orchids in Bangkok

No problem with the compouter this time. It was our miscalculation and we lost the picture. We'll try again tomorrow from Cambodia.

Bangkok

People in Bangkok assure us that our new friend standing behind us had a sweet, cherubic smile before he spotted the essentials of modern living in the other picture. Either he didn't like them, or he is upset that he can't enjoy them. Who knows which.

From Athens

Once again, our beloved computer has developed problems and problems. So no picture from Athens. Everybody has seen pictures of the Acropolis and the Parthenon where we spent the last two days, so no great loss. It's on to Bangkok tomorrow with a nine hour overnight flight. We will write (and maybe have a picture) from Bangkok.

The Island of Delos

The ruins on Delos are older than those of Pompeii. After reaching this point at the top, we felt older ourselves than either. Back to Athens tomorrow.

Mykonos

Mykonos is beautiful, but it is primarily a resort area, which is not quite our style. We are going to Delos tomorrow by boat to see the ruins. We have asked the cruise company to ship us back to Athens for the rest of the week, which ought to be interesting, assuming they will go along with the idea.

Cruise Ship

“The best laid plans of mice and men oft gang somewhere else.” We flew from Naples to Athens to catch our boat for the weeklong cruise. A traffic jam held us up on the way from the airport to the port. We eventually got there, but with less than two hours to spare before the boat left. However, we couldn’t find the dock for the boat. We asked numerous people, got many suggestions for finding the correct dock, but no boat. Finally, after an hour of searching, and getting perilously close to departure time, we went to the port authority. They had never heard of the boat! Oh, my gosh! We were in Athens, Greece, and had been scammed.

After the authorities searched through their records at greater length, they finally found the boat’s name but said it obviously wasn’t there. They searched further and managed to come up with a phone number. With pity upon two despairing, bedraggled and exhausted foreigners, they called the company and there was an English speaker who gave us another phone number of someone in Athens. After another call or two, we found the boat trip had been cancelled because of mechanical problems. They had tried to contact us, but we had already left on this trip. The boat company seemed apologetic and offered us a compromise: they would refund what we had paid for the cruise, would give us a free ticket for a future cruise, would pay the cost of our trip from Naples to Athens and would give us plane tickets to Mykanos and pay our hotel there for a week. So here we are.