Erected in Phnom Penh to commemorate Cambodia’s 1953 independence from France.
Archive | February, 2015
Four Finds for (Female) Travelers
Refining the contents of my backpack is a process that will last as long as I’m on the road. With space at a premium, every item that goes into the bag has to be well thought out. I’ve downsized and streamlined, but I’m always on the lookout for resourceful products that make packing easier and take up less room.
Here are a few of my favorite finds:
Things I Miss About the U.S.
Like our second-to-none national parks
It’s been nearly a full year since we last set foot inside our home country. And while I can’t remember experiencing a single bout of homesickness during the past 342 days that we’ve been overseas, there are definitely things I miss about traveling in the U.S.
Wrapping My Head Around Cambodia’s Killing Fields
Some things in life are just too awesome to fully comprehend. And at Choeung Ek, an otherwise nondescript orchard a dusty 17 kilometer tuk-tuk drive outside of the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, that statement holds true in the worst possible way imaginable.
Between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot killed roughly two million people. The truth is, nobody really knows how many men, women, and children fill the roughly 20,000 mass graves that dot Cambodia’s landscape. Estimates range from a low of about 700,000 to over three million.
Words like atrocity and genocide are powerless to adequately describe the madness that is Cambodia’s Killing Fields.
The ground ripples with excavated mass graves
Even touring a place like Choeung Ek, one of Cambodia’s most notorious execution camps, only offers the slightest glimpse of what transpired during those four unimaginable years of Khmer Rouge rule. And yet the magnitude of the horror at that single site is still impossible to behold.
A Day in Our Life
And on travel blogs nobody knows your life isn’t an endless string of vacation days. Sometimes everyday life does intrude, even if we don’t share those aspects of our travels every single day.
Eventually someone will ask us, “What did you do in Cambodia?” I’m posting this by way of reply.
Meet Brian and Shannon
Fulltime wanderers since 2010, Brian & Shannon are traveling the world on a quest to see everything there is to see . . . at least once.
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