Swimming

We took the kids swimming at a local hotel which allowed us to come in for an hour. It was a fun day for everyone. We first all climbed on to the back of a truck. The kids brought some plastic chairs for the adults to sit on.

It started raining as we took off and we were all worried we were going to have a rainy afternoon.

Thankfully the weather improved once we got to the pool and we all had a good time. Only about eight of the kids could swim. So most initially stayed in the shallow end and the braver ones asked to go for a swim on our backs in the deeper part. The pool was about eight feet deep. At one stage Stan was swimming across the pool with one child on his back (very hard to do by the way), when two more who couldn't swim decided to jump in as well and share the ride. It was a frantic time with kids all climbing over each other to get out and Stan underwater holding them all up and trying to get them all to the side where they could hold on.

Eventually many kids who couldn't swim made a circuit around the pool by hanging on to the sides. This meant that we had to check all the time for any one who may have slipped off the side. Thankfully there were a number of us keeping an eye out and no mishaps occurred. The hotel guests also seemed to have fun meeting the kids and helping them get around the pool. They all made their way back to the shallow end of the pool where they all wanted photos of them posing with the "waterfall" behind them. The boys all wanted to pose as frogs though.

The noise of twenty-seven kids who don't often get to visit the pool was deafening. But after we bought everyone a can of drink, it was silent for about five minutes as the kids drank it all up. The hotel guests must have breathed a sigh of relief for those five minutes.

After a fun filled hour (which was really closer to two hours given we had bought 35 drinks and the hotel was hoping we'd buy more), we all had to leave. Khamouri raced out to the truck and saved a chair for Stan, yelling and arguing with any other kids who wanted to sit there. When Stan got to the truck she was calling out, "Stan, Stan, you sit here". Once Stan sat down she jumped into his lap for the ride home.

We got back to Siem Reap and jumped out of the truck in the central market area, saving us two kilometre walk back to the hotel.