Where am I? – Cambodia blog entry #1

           I opened my eyes and looked across the dark room. A dim light was streaming outside the open door from a source to the right. Where was the bathroom? It had to be out there somewhere.

          My travel partner, D, snored very close behind me. We’d been sleeping in separate beds for the past sixteen nights; why was she in bed with me now?

          Then it dawned on me. It was my husband snoring, and I was home in my own bed.

          I rolled over and read the clock. The red number 12:15 screamed at me. Totally exhausted, I’d crawled into this perfectly comfy bed only four hours ago. Why was I wide awake?

          Darned jet lag.

          My left brain wondered from the beginning how I’d be affected by this phenomenon this trip. Previously, I’d only ever flown to Kenya, eight time zones to the east, and jet lag never bothered me when I got there, but always messed me up when I got home.

This trip took me twelve time zones to the west. So my left brain reasoned that the jet lag would be worse going to Cambodia and not as bad when I got home.

Left Brain has definitely got it wrong. Right Brain believes that when I go somewhere, I am so excited about the trip that my body and my brain adjust quickly so as not to miss out on anything. When I get home, all the hormones let loose, and my internal clock doesn’t want to switch back to Central Standard Time; it just wants to sleep.

And Stomach Clock grumbles because it thinks it’s just past noon and we should be eating.

Then Writer’s Brain pulls me by the arm to get me out of bed to write down all these peculiar thoughts because it knows that, just like when we dream, if I go back to sleep, all of this will be gone.

So here I am, at 1:40 am, trying to keep my eyes open while the rest of me feels crazy-energized. But I am going to follow the lead of my eyes and wander back to bed. Whether I go back to sleep or not, who knows? Will my hypothalamus figure this out and allow me to drift peacefully off, or will the rest of my brain continue bouncing around neurons?

In any case, I’ve been home from Cambodia for just over thirteen hours. It’s been forty-eight hours since I left, I think, because I still can’t put any part of my brain around the whole time travel thing about these trips.

It was a short flight from Phnom Penh to Taiwan with a brief layover at Taipei Airport. The ticket on the second flight read that we were leaving there at 8:00 pm and arriving at our destination in Chicago at 8:45 pm. So, I’m supposed to convince my body that it took 45 minutes to fly halfway around the world when I know it really took thirteen hours.

Oh, well, I’ll come around. I promise that on Friday, I will start posting about my once-in-a-lifetime, fifty-years-in-the-making trip.    

Good night – or good morning. And the first and last pictures - with over 2,000 taken in between.  

Sunset over Chicago before our flight out

Sunrise over Chicago before our drive home from the hotel