We left Phnom Penh in the early morning hours and drove 5 hours north to Siem Reap, the town where Matthew and Melissa lived for 5 years. We were excited to see where their lives in Cambodia began. The drive was beautiful. We saw lots of rice fields and lotus flowers, lots of open countryside and even some skinny cows. We arrived at our hotel and settled in before getting out on the town with our amazing Tuk Tuk driver Meng Meng. She is apart of a group of Female Tuk Tuk drivers in Siem Reap, pink Tuk Tuk and helmet included! Our first stop was to an amazing coffee shop – Brother Bong, we visited his shop many times while in Siem Reap.

Once caffeinated we began the day at Kingdom of Wow. They create ethically made footwear, handmade by local Cambodian women. The shoes are pretty incredible, several styles of crochet slippers as well as espadrilles. The attention to detail is phenomenal. The slippers take about 4 hours to create from start to finish. We were able to meet some of the women and see their workspace. It was fascinating to watch them work and see the amazing level of talent and skill. While talking to Tracey, the marketing director, she mentioned that they try to hire woman who don’t have any crochet experience, which really surprised me. But her reason totally makes sense, people who have some experience come to her shop with some learned bad habits, so it’s easier to teach someone from square one than help someone unlearn bad habits. If anyone wants some incredibly comfortable slippers, check out KOW!

Our next stop was Apopo. Working in collaboration with the Cambodian Mine Action Center, Apopo works with mine detection rats to detect landmines. The giant African rats train for 9 months to detect TNT. The Hero Rat can search the size of two tennis courts in one hour, which would take 4 days to search with a metal detector and they do this without risk of setting off a charge because they are so light.

There are still hundreds of thousands of landmines across the countryside today. The goal of Apopo is to return the land to the people as quickly as possible to enable them to again use the land for farming and agriculture, without fear of injury. We were able to see a demonstration of Ratana, one of the Hero Rats, finding TNT and alerting the handler. His reward was some banana! At the end of the tour we had the opportunity to hold a Hero Rat. At first I thought I didn’t want to, but how can you say no to a trained rat who has saved countless lives!? I will admit, Nina was pretty cute.

A second program that Apopo has, one that we didn’t see but only learned about, was some rats are trained to detect tuberculosis. One rat can inspect 100 sputum samples and can give a 100% accurate result in 20 minutes. The same sample size with a laboratory would take 5-7 days. It’s pretty remarkable to things they are able to accomplish.

Matthew has a tailor in Siem Reap that makes really nice shirts and even suits for him, Raeksmey Tailor. We stopped by his shop and Rob was able to get measured and have a few shirts made for him. It’s pretty remarkable that in 3 days the shop was able to measure, cut and sew several shirts and a suit for Rob. He’s going to be very well dressed after this trip.

Our first day in Siem Reap was full but so fun!