Vietnam/Cambodia Day 0: Departure

Tuesday/Wednesday, February 3/4, 2026

As I have done several times in the past, I am again blogging a summary of our recent vacation trip. I will post daily installments offset by five weeks to allow time for editing and review after we return home.

Our next adventure is a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia that we planned during last year’s Adriatic trip. Our friends Jan and Dave will be joining us for this trip as well. The tour begins in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), following which we board a small ship to travel up the Mekong River into Cambodia. After several days, we disembark and travel to Siem Reap, near the famed Angkor Wat temple. After the organized part of the tour, Kenna and I will fly to Hanoi for three days to explore northern Vietnam.

Our flight itinerary takes us to Taipei, Taiwan, for a short layover before continuing to Ho Chi Minh City. Our departing flight from San Francisco leaves late in the evening (11:20 pm), so we will arrive in Taipei two days later due to crossing the International Date Line. Our 14-hour United Airlines flight to Taipei was pleasant and uneventful, and we got a few hours of sleep. We then had a good chance to stretch our legs in Taipei as we moved from our arrival gate to the departure area, stopping at a transit counter to get checked in again and passing through security. We settled into an EVA Air lounge for our short wait until departure. The onward flight on EVA Air was about 3 hours long and gave us opportunities to doze a bit more.