Several of us gathered in the bar at the hotel bar in Siem Reap, Cambodia at the end of the Road Scholar tour. I think it’s called destressing, but one person drank a wee bit too much, like a double martini or more too much, although she was having some trouble finding her mouth, so I was kind of aware she had had too much. There was also a bit of slurring.

When the last three of us left, she walked into a glass door, but only the edge, and got around it with a little difficulty. I had my camera and a drink to take back to the room while we packed for an early flight to Bangkok, but as we went down the three steps to the main level, she crumpled. The two of us kind of stood there watching it in shock. One had offered her hand to the drinker, but it was ignored. Both of us were carrying a drink, of course.

Two Australian men ran over to pick her up before we had shed our junk to help and got her standing with some very careful lifting. Some jokes were exchanged about Minnesota, but the woman’s white pants were turning red on one leg.

The Australians helped her into a chair, and a cloud of hotel staff appeared. They lifted the pant leg and displayed the 2-3″ of skinned shin that was bleeding. They started trying to clean it a bit, and then a kit arrived with gloves and bandages and cleaning materials. After cleaning it, they carefully covered and wrapped it.

After the bandage, two of them, one to each side stood her up and we navigated to the elevator. I think an additional one or two of the hotel staff went up with us, but in the elevator, I noticed that the other pant leg had some red on it as well. While it was possible it was from the skinned shin, I suspected another skinned shin on the other leg that we’d missed outside the bar.

The hotel staff often suggested the emergency room or a doctor. Let’s just say that the injured person was not in a state to make a decision, and while I ain’t a doctor nor do I play one on TV, I’ve taken enough cooks in for stitches to know that they can’t stitch a skinned shin. The woman’s slacks had also not ripped.

After we’d gotten her into her room and sitting on the bed, I said we had to check the other leg while we still hand bandages. So, they rolled up the other pant leg to display a 1-2″ skinned shin on the other leg. The called down to have the medkit sent up, and they repeated the process on the other leg.

We had the hotel staff, after the bandaging was complete, call the front desk for a wake-up call. Most of the group had an early bus ride to the airport for a Singapore flight, and we wanted to make sure she was on it. When the call and the bandaging was done, we left to walk from one end of the hotel to the other.

The corridor stroll ran past the tour group leader’s room, but it was starting to get late. Fortunately, there was music coming from the room, so we knocked. I still had ma drink in ma hand, of course, to explain that there’d been an accident and that he’d have to take a bit of special care with the woman and her bandaged legs to make sure she was on the bus to the airport. I figured she would be sore as hell and maybe a little hungover when the anesthetic effect of the alcohol wore off.

Anyway, we packed, slept for what seemed like ten minutes, and checked out of the hotel around 5 or 5:30 am. We’d asked for a box breakfast, but the front desk offered us a real one — which we declined to head out to the airport. (There’s a custom thereabouts of watching the sunrise over some old ruins outside the city which requires tourists to get up really, really, really early, eat a brief snack, bus the Angkor Wat, explore the grounds and temple, and then come back to the hotel for a ‘real’ breakfast, which we had just done the day before.)

As we exited the hotel, or at least hovered near the door with luggage, the doorman asked if we had a taxi. I was going to call a Grab, but he ran out and got a tuk tuk before I got it ordered. They piled our luggage between the motorcycle and the fifth wheel, we got in, and were off for the airport in the morning dark. (I don’t think I saw any fifth wheel tuk tuks outside of Cambodia. Most of the tuk tuks are either three or four wheel open vehicles, but in Cambodia I had noticed the ones that just attached to the back of the seat of a motorcycle.)

All in all, we were incredibly impressed with the hotel staff.