One year after getting home and two years after leaving....

December 12th has been a significant date in my life since 1986.  That's when my sister Shari had her first child, Becky.  Becky came into the world 14 weeks early (her mother and others who know her well might be of the opinion that it's the last time she was early for anything!) and weighed just two pounds six ounces and her weight dropped to as low as one pound 14 ounces.  That was in the dark ages of preemie care, and it was a miracle that she survived and has become the beautiful woman she is today, as she celebrates her birthday with her husband Logan. 

12/12 took on additional significance in 2011 and again in 2012.  In 2011, it was the date that we left our suburban lives in Madeira to take our then 11-year old twins on a year-long trip around the world.  The experiences we shared over the subsequent twelve months have been well-documented in the various posts of this blog, and I thank everyone who has read them and everyone who has shared some kind words about them.  The trip was amazing in every sense of the word, and gave the four of us lifetimes worth of memories. 

We didn't necessarily have it planned this way, but our return back to Cincinnati happened on December 12, 2012.  As we tried to figure out when to come home from the South American part of the trip, the one thing we knew was that we wanted to be home in time to enjoy the holidays.  So getting home at least a week before Christmas was a goal.  We wound up deciding to leave La Paz, Bolivia on December 11th, flying through Lima, Peru to Atlanta where we would catch our 44th flight of the trip, a relatively brief one to Cincinnati, landing at CVG on the morning of the 12th day of the 12th month of 2012.  12/12/12.  But you probably figured that out on your own.

Being back home was great, and it was fantastic to see our family and friends again.  We were bombarded by questions about the trip. The most frequent: favorite place and best food.  Answer to both, at least for me:  San Sebastian, Spain.  Annie agreed the best food was San Sebastian, but her favorite place was Cambodia. We never EVER got tired of talking about the trip.  It was fun to run into people who had followed the trip on this blog or through Facebook or both and talk in person about our experiences.  One of my favorite early encounters upon our return was at Kroger in Madeira.  Annie and I went there together one weekday morning and were stopped by a woman wearing a Madeira hat and a Madeira pullover and she said it was great to see us, and what a great time she had following the trip and she went on and on, which was very enjoyable.  That continued for about five or ten minutes and then she said, "well I'll let you two go, great to see you!"  We said "thanks, great to see you too!" and as we turned the corner and walked down another aisle Annie and I looked at each other and each said we had no idea who that was!  But we enjoyed our momentary pseudo-celebrity status.

Over the next few months as we settled back into life in the suburbs, we got to tell our story over and over again.  And now, a year later, it has become this fantastic thing we did.  We are, and (at least to us) forever will be, the Family That Took A Trip Around The World.  It's something of which Annie and I and the kids are pretty proud.  At the same time, we try to be as humble as possible about it, and I still feel very fortunate that we were able to do it.  

December 12th will also always carry some sadness with it.  It was on December 12, 2012 that Annie's step-brother Hank Muehlenkamp died after a battle with cancer that lasted about a year and a half, much longer than anyone expected.  He was only 51 when he died, (the same age as Annie and I at the time) and his diagnosis, which came before we took the trip, is one of the reasons we decided to launch the adventure that we did.  We were glad we got home in time to make it to his funeral and see his family and share so many wonderful memories of Hank. 

But here we are on December 12, 2013.  I find myself with extremely mixed emotions.  It's great to be back in familiar territory, and be able to part of the lives of family and friends and be in our house with our stuff.  A year on the road is an unbelievable adventure filled with so many different once-in-a-lifetime experiences.  But at the same time it wears on you.  We stayed in over one hundred different apartments, hotels, houses, aparthotels, condos etc. and after all that time and changes of location, you get a little weary of trying to find the things you need to get through the day.  No whining here, I would do it again if I could.  However, familiarity is something you really miss when you don't have it for as long as we did.

Once this December 12th is behind us, there will be a little emptiness that I think Annie and I and the kids (to a lesser degree) will feel. For the past year, almost every day we have thought back to what we were doing a year ago.  We have a calendar we  picked up early in the trip in New Zealand where we kept track of what we were doing along the way.  It was fun in April of this year to look at the date in 2012 and say "Oh, this is the day we went to Great Wall of China," or "Look it's that date in May that we took the ferry from Croatia to Italy," or "Hey, it's that day in September that we wound up going to see Bayern Munich play at Allianz Arena!"  That calendar will always be a part of our lives, and we can forever recall that we were in Croatia on my birthday for instance, but there was something really special this year looking back to what was going on 365 days earlier.

One of my (minor) fears about leaving my job on the radio and being gone for that year was that people would forget the name Bill Bangert.  Before we took the trip, when mentioning my name to, say, a stranger at a store or on the phone after being on the radio in Cincinnati for 17 years, I would occasionally get a hint of recognition.  Gotta say, I enjoyed that.  I was afraid that one year away might erase that.  Turns out that hasn't been the case.  In the past twelve months I've come across a lot of people who in some instances think I'm still on either WEBN or WLW.  Others have mentioned hearing some of the reports I phoned in to WLW during our time on the road and saying they enjoyed being able to be part of the experience.  I'm thankful for that, and love hearing that.

The most recent example of that happened today.  I happened to be home when a UPS truck pulled up to the end of our driveway this afternoon.  Our dog Sophie was out, and while she barked away, I opened the door and got her inside.  As the driver stepped from the driveway to the walk leading to the front door he said "Are you THE Bill Bangert?"  I said "I'm not sure there is a "THE" Bill Bangert, but if there is, I guess that's me."  He said, "I loved your trip and hearing your reports on WLW.  You guys were very brave to do what you did."  

Wow.  Hearing that from a total stranger is mind-boggling.  To think that what we did starting two years ago today had an impact on anyone's lives other than our own is difficult to comprehend.  We did what we did because we wanted to do something adventurous with our children while we had the health and money to do it.  Plus the kids, who turned 12 a month into the trip, were at the perfect age.  It makes me so happy and fills me with such wonder to have people say they were inspired by our trip.  That includes a woman who was battling a recurrence of breast cancer in her life early in our trip, as well as a family that is right now doing their own Round The World trip after hearing us talk about it on the radio.  I never ever imagined that sort of thing being something that came out of our trip. 

The envelope that the UPS driver delivered today contained something that would take us on our next adventure:  Tickets to the Bengals/Steelers game Sunday night in Pittsburgh.  Over the years of going to Bengals games in Cincinnati, I envied the hordes of Steelers fans who would invade our town waving those damn Terrible Towels.  This past Sunday I saw the end of the Steelers game in Pittsburgh, (a loss!) and noticed there were plenty of empty seats at Heinz Field, or as my niece Jenni calls it, Ketchup Stadium.  I got curious and checked out ticket prices on StubHub for the Bengals game there this weekend and found more that 4700 tickets being sold for as low as $30.  After talking it over with Annie, we decided to take the plunge and make the trip on Sunday with our son Ben.  Some people have told us that showing up at Ketchup Stadium in Orange and Black might be more dangerous than going around the world, but we feel we're up for the challenge.  It doesn't hurt that the Bengals are 9-4 and the Steelers are 5-8.  Not sure we would be making the trip if those records were reversed.  One thing we've learned is that life is all about timing.

Being willing to take on a challenge is probably the one thing I hope that we come away with as I think back to what began two years ago today and ended 365 days ago.  I'm proud that we were able to make the decision to take a chance with our lives and do something different that all of us would remember and would impact us forever.  We wanted our kids (and ourselves) to see that there are a lot of different ways that people live their lives and that we have so much more than so many other people in other parts of the world.  And we learned (as cheesy as it sounds) that having "stuff" doesn't equate with happiness.  

All four of us are different people than we were on December 12, 2011.  We are certainly different people than we were on December 12, 2012.  What will we be like on December 12, 2014?  Who knows?  Not me.  But I'm looking forward to finding out.

Staying grounded in Thailand

There's a great scene from the movie Best In Show where two of the characters, Hamilton and Meg Swan talk about how they met at Starbucks.  Not at the same Starbucks, different Starbucks across the street from each other.  Thailand is like that but only with 7-11s.

They are everywhere, at least in the two cities that we have spent the most time in while in Thailand, Bangkok and Krabi.  According to Wikipedia, there are about six thousand 7-11s in Thailand, with HALF of those being in Bangkok.  That's a lot of Slurpees.  By comparison, there are about eight thousand 7-11s in all of the US, and Thailand is roughly the size of France and slightly smaller than Texas.  It's such a part of the culture that in almost all of the shops selling t-shirts, you can purchase one with the 7-11 logo on it, and we saw more than one taxi driver sporting such a shirt.

Our world travels up to this point have also educated us on Pringles.  They've been available pretty much everywhere we've been so far, even in the carts of vendors selling drinks and snacks on the streets of Vietnam.  Ben and Marley have discovered that there is more than one variety of Pringle, and I don't mean variety of flavors.  The "real" Pringles are the ones with a red and white logo on the paper cover that you peel back at the top of the can to get into the delicious salty snack.  The imposter Pringles have just a plain white paper cover under the plastic lid at the top.

There is a definite taste difference between the two.  Ben and Marley have further determined (thinking about all this makes me realize how many cans of Pringles we've eaten along the way!) that even the "real" Pringles can fall short of the ones we get back home.  If the top of the can is taut or feels like it's puffed up with air inside, they've probably been sitting on a container ship somewhere for a while and are going to be stale.  Who needs home-schooling when you've got these kinds of thought processes going on?

One of the most enjoyable aspects of our stay in Bangkok was the size of the apartment we rented.  We managed to find a very affordable two-bedroom serviced apartment in the Pantip area of the city.  Our mouths collectively hit the floor as we walked into the place for the first time.  

It featured a large living area with a dining table, plus a big kitchen. Both of the bedrooms were about as big as the entire rooms of several of the places we stayed in Vietnam and Cambodia.  Since late February when we left Australia, almost every single one of the places we rented saw us all sleeping in one room.  The best bed configuration in those instances was one large double and two singles.  We had that in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and in Hoi An in Vietnam.  Other times, when there are three cozy doubles, we usually have Ben and I in our own beds and Marley and Annie snuggled up in the third double. 

 Despite the close quarters, we all got used to sleeping like that and would frequently do the "Good-night Jim-Bob" routine right after turning out the lights each night.

After a few weeks of that, all three of us were really glad to have some room to spread out in Bangkok.  In what has become something of a pattern for us, we laid low our first day in Bangkok following a long travel day the previous day.  In an effort to save money, we booked a bus ticket from Siem Reap to the Cambodian border town of Poipet.  We had made friends through other friends of a Canadian native who had lived in Siem Reap for about 11 years.  He suggested that we take the local bus to Poipet, walk across the border, and buy another set of tickets for the bus ride to Bangkok.  We was going to be going the same way the same day and thought we would enjoy taking the bus ride together and he would help us cross the border into Thailand since he was spending the night in Poipet and leaving for Bangkok the following day to fly back to Canada.

Well, something got lost in translation with our local fixer/tuk-tuk driver Ratana, and the ticket we wound up getting was not on the same bus as our Canadian friend, Roy.  The day started early with a 6am wake up call and we had bought the bus ticket to Poipet through our hotel, which promised free transfer to the bus station.  The transfer vehicle turned out to be a pick up truck with a padded bench seat on each side of the bed. 

The pick up truck took us to a bus that was parked among a couple of buses on some side street.  We've done our best to go into "jellyfish" mode so far on the trip and we rolled with the flow in this instance, asking the men throwing our luggage on the bus if this was going to Poipet, and after being assured that it was, we got on board and figured we would look for Roy when we got to the border.  Once again, Ben and Marley never complained or whined about our transporation arrangements, despite looking like we were on a family outing in West Virginia.

Four hours later, and still a short ways away from the Thailand/Cambodia border, we got off the bus and I managed to track down a ticket handler and, with Roy nowhere in sight, go ahead and secure four tickets to continue on to Bangkok.  We paid more by splitting up the ticket instead of just paying for direct to Bangkok, but it was still only about $18USD per person.  

Fortunately, when we got to the border, Roy was there waiting for us, with his adopted son Sinin.  We lamented over how the ticket buying process didn't work out the way we hoped, but were happy that we still got to where we wanted to go.

That's us with Roy's brother on the right and his son, Sinin, on the left as we get ready to walk our luggage across the border into Thailand, and hopefully get on a luxurious, air-conditioned bus to Bangkok.

After being properly dismissed from Cambodia and going through the necessary documentation to get into Thailand, we met back up with the ticket seller, and the two dozen or so passengers and our luggage were put on pick up trucks and taken to a restaurant/rest stop for lunch.  We were told cheerfully that the bus would be along in a half hour or so, giving us time to eat and enjoy the local restroom facilities.  I'll just say this: at least the food was okay.

While we waited, different groups of people that were on the bus were put on mini-vans that held about a dozen people, and drove off at different times.  I haven't ridden commercially on buses all that much, so I'm not exactly an expert but I started to think that maybe the mini-vans were going to be our mode of transportation to Bangkok.  The four-hour ride to Bangkok.  

Sure enough, after waiting for close to two hours, on a day where we had gotten up at around 6am and already been on a bus for four hours, we found ourselves in the back four seats of a mini-van that would take us to Bangkok.  The van was WAY over-packed, as our feet rested on our backpacks and luggage, and the aisle that went to the doorway was filled with more suitcases.  

Fortunately, none of us has any degree of claustrophobia and so we managed to endure the trip without imitating a psychotic Jet Blue pilot.  There were a few stops along the way for fuel, and at one of those we enjoyed some very tasty chicken prepared by a road side vendor.  It was also just nice to be able to get some fresh air and stretch our legs a bit.

The van/bus arrived in Bangkok after dark in an area where some taxis were parked.  We managed to communicate where we were going and the driver took off into rush hour traffic that just crept along and made a long day even longer.  But the extra forty-five minute wait was worth it as we got to our roomy accommodations, which put a smile in our faces and a song in Marley's heart.  The 16th floor apartment had a roomy balcony with a nice view of Bangkok, providing a nice backdrop for the videos she likes to make of her singing Taylor Swift songs.  Check out her Facebook page, they're actually pretty good, her dad said humbly.

One of the best ways to get around Bangkok is to take a boat along the Chao Phraya River.  They're cheap, roomy and run frequently along the river, providing a good view of some of new and old buildings along the banks.

We took the boat in hopes of seeing the Grand Palace, a massive complex of temples not far from the Tia Thien stop on the river.  Unfortunately, the temple complex was closed to the public for the day to rehearse for the funeral of a cousin of the king, so we had to adjust our plans. 

After a quick lunch at a sidewalk cafe, we went into a smaller but still impressive temple complex called Wat Pho.  It features a reclining Buddha that measures about 46 metres long and is covered in gold leaf.  With Easter Bunny season approaching, I resisted the temptation to attempt to peel back the gold leaf and see if it was a Chocolate Buddha.  Instead, we went along with the local custom and bought a small cup of coins and deposit them in the fifty or so pots that line one side of the long room holding the Buddha.  We weren't sure of the significance of what we were doing, but it was fun to be part of the sounds of the coins dropping into the pots.

The complex was striking, with several temples and many Buddha statues.  Some of the temples were closed to the public, but we still got to get a good look at many of them.  

We couldn't stay too long at Wat Pho because we had a dinner date to get ready for.  A friend of a friend married a man from Thailand and after spending the first 19 years of their marriage in Cincinnati, they decided to take their 14 year old daughter and their jewelry-making business to Bangkok in June of last year.

The timing of their move was impacted by the devastating floods that hit Bangkok late in 2011.  Liz and her husband were forced out of their home for more than a month.  We talked about that and other things, including Skyline Chili and Graeters over dinner at an Italian Restaurant.  The discussion turned to mutual friends in Madeira and it turns out that Kira, their fourteen-year old daughter is best friends with the 14-year old daughter of the woman we are renting one of our houses in Madeira to.  

Our time in Bangkok came to an end as we reluctantly left our spacious quarters to catch the 8:05am train to Surat Thani in Southern Thailand, which is as close as the train could get us to our next destination of Krabi, on the Southwestern Coast on the Andaman Sea.  

The train was scheduled to arrive in Surat Thani at about 4:45 and the last bus out to Krabi from there leaves at 5, and the train station is about a 15 minute drive from the bus station.  So we weren't planning on trying to rush to catch the last bus of the day. Instead, we had been told that we would be able to take a cab from the train station, for the approximately two-hour drive.  

Knowing there was no timetable pressure for leaving Bangkok to get to Surat Thani, we weren't bothered by the fact that the train showed up late and as a result left late.  The train was our chosen travel option strictly because of cost.  We originally planned to take the overnight train, but those were all booked up.  That gave us an extra night in our roomy rooms, plus the cheapest airfare I could find, (which would have taken us directly to Krabi) would have cost us more than 500 dollars US for the four of us.  The train tickets cost less than $80USD for all four, so that became a pretty easy decision.  Plus it came with a yummy free lunch, of some sort of mystery meat that I hadn't seen since Tates Creek Junior High in Lexington, Kentucky.

A long day on the train got even longer when we arrived in Surat Thani.  The train took off about 45 minutes late and arrived about an hour and a half late.  I had imagined a battalion of taxi drivers waiting for us, where I would boldly and shrewdly negotiate a bargain deal for the drive to Krabi.  Instead, there were no taxis around when we arrived, just some guys with cigarettes dangling from their mouths asking us where we wanted to go.  

Of the ten or so people getting off the train who disembarked without having Surat Thani be their final destination, we were the only ones going to Krabi. Surat Thani is also a stopping off point for people traveling to the popular island destinations of Koh Samui and Koh Phangan.  The Marlboro Men herded us into a pick up truck with seats in the back to take us somewhere else in town where we were told we could book a ride to where ever we wanted to go.  

My bargaining power effectively evaporated, we booked a car to Krabi for about twice what I wanted to pay and more than what it cost to get all the way to Surat Thani from Bangkok.  Plus, the driver showed up with a trunk half-filled with cleaning supplies, so once again we enjoyed a ride hugging some of our suitcases and backpacks.  Ahh, the glamour of worldwide travel!  But, just like our long journey from Siem Reap to Bangkok would be worth it thanks to our spacious apartment, our 15+ hour trip to Krabi would be rewarded by an unexpected encounter with a quartet of furry friends.

Kampuchea

The first time I ever heard the term Kampuchea was in the late 70s, when a benefit rock concert was held featuring several prominent artists of the time.  Seeing as how I was in my prog-rock phase at the time, listening mostly to Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Genesis, Yes with a little Pat Metheny thrown in, the content of the concert had little interest for me.  The Who, Paul McCartney, The Clash and Elvis Costello were the biggest names to lend their talent to the event.  I, of course, had no way of knowing that some 32 years later, I would be riding on a bus into Kampuchea from Vietnam with my wife and two kids.

After 19 days in Vietnam, we got on board a bus to take us to Phnom Penh.  The best part about that was the $11 per person cost.  Every seat on the bus was taken, and the passengers were an interesting mix.  Foreign travelers such as ourselves took up several seats, and we tried our best the follow the instructions of the woman who worked for the bus company, the Mekong Express.  The only problem was, she didn't speak into the microphone very loudly, and her accent was so strong, even if we had been able to hear her, chances are we wouldn't have understood her.

The process of crossing the border from Vietnam to Cambodia included two separate stops where we had to take our backpacks with us off the bus, walk through a border station and then get back on the bus.  The workers on the Vietnam side of the border had been well-schooled in a detached surliness, and had indifference bordering on hostility down to a science.  The workers on the Cambodian side of the border were only slightly less unfriendly, but we made it safely into what was once known as Kampuchea, and continued on the six-hour trek to Phnom Penh.

Our arrival in the capital city presented us with our first opportunity to ride in a tuk-tuk.  We knew from research we had done prior to taking the trip that at some point in Indochina we would probably be moving about via tuk-tuk.  Getting off the bus in Phnom Penh we were met by several tuk-tuk operators and settled on one who had a friendly face and knew where our hotel was.   His name was Bao, and after the short ride to the Billabong Hotel, we made arrangements for him to return the next morning and take us out to the Killing Fields.

 

Tuk-tuks are essentially the taxis of Cambodia.   Most have an open-air car that seats four people and they are pulled along by motorbikes.  Both locals and tourists use the services of the many tuk-tuk drivers who question any passerby if they would like a ride.  If that's declined, they always say, "you come back later!"

The tuk-tuks give the streets a very exotic air and are actually very comfortable to ride in. There are more tuk-tuks than passengers to go around, so some drivers try to stand out from the crowd by painting their rides with a theme, such as Batman or Angry Birds. 

I'm fairly certain Ralph Nader has never been to Cambodia because there are no seat belts to be found, but the drivers give each other enough room and even the cars, trucks and busses that share the roads don't feel like much of a threat.

They are an ingrained part of a society that is accustomed to moving about in tuk-tuks and on motorbikes that dart in and out of traffic at varying speeds and directions.  Just like in Vietnam, we saw many families on motorbikes, some with four children (usually without helmets) hanging on to the driver and the handlebars as casually as you could imagine, as if they had been doing it all their lives, which I'm guessing they have.

The main reason for our stop in Phnom Penh was to see the Killing Fields, first made famous by the 1985 film of the same name.  The bloody rampages of the Khmer Rouge in the mid-to-late 70s resulted in mass-murder sites scattered across the country.  The one we visited near Phnom Penh is the one that is the focus of the motion picture and it's the site of a former fruit orchard, called Cheung Ek.  It's about 15 kilometers outside of Phnom Penh, which meant a tuk-tuk ride of about 25 minutes.

The enormity of what happened there hits you gradually.  The small admission fee gets you a headset where you can hear about the 18 stopping points, explaining the history of each spot, with background information on what led to the horror.

Some spots are where mass graves were found, some with as many as 450 bodies, others without heads.  The one that really got to me was one where the skeletons of mothers and their children were found.

The grave there was surrounded by a waist-high bamboo fence where previous visitors had left bracelets around the bamboo, in memory of the suffering and death that happened there to so many innocent people.  Marley added to the memorial by placing a purple and green bracelet that she had gotten earlier in the trip from peasant women in Sapa, Vietnam.

Another sobering aspect of Chueng Ek was the fact that more than thirty years after the killings, some bones and clothing are still working their way to the surface, a process that usually happened following rains.  It was difficult to walk along and not step on the torn clothing and bone fragments and impossible to see the remnants of the living and not imagine the absolute terror their final moments on this earth were.

In the second-to-last stop, the recording on the headset described how the victims would be brought to Chueng Ek during the day, and then at night  generators would be buzzing and Khmer Rouge anthems blaring over the loudspeaker system to drown out the screams of the people being beaten and hacked to death.  That combination of sound was played in the headset at the site of another mass grave under a massive tree.

The final stop is a tall stupa, where the skulls of some of the nearly nine thousand victims are displayed.  They are sorted by age and sex and speak silently yet loudly of one of the worst horrors mankind has ever done to its own.

As has happened more than once on this trip, I was very proud of how Ben and Marley took it all in, never complaining about the heat or trying to get the visit over with.  It was a very hot couple of hours we spent there, and certainly not a topic that most 12-year olds, let alone adults are going to want to discuss over a meal.  But a big part of this trip is to get outside of our suburban lives and learn about places and events that need to be experienced first hand to get a true education.  And for us, Cheung Ek was that.

After one more night in Phnom Penh, we took the mid-day bus to Siem Reap, in northern Cambodia.  This trip went a little more smoothly than the one that brought us to the capital city, mainly because there were no border crossings to navigate.  There was one consistent theme to both rides:  we got to watch a Jackie Chan movie each time!  That now makes two Jackie Chan movies that I've watched/endured, neither voluntarily.

From time to time, I managed to tear myself away from the cinematic genius of a movie with not only Jackie Chan but also Rob Schneider and both Wilson brothers to take in the Cambodian countryside. 
In many cases, it appeared the scenes that flashed by may have been unchanged for decades if not longer.

Such scenes repeated themselves time after time until they faded with the daylight, and we pulled into Siem Reap and met out personal tuk-tuk driver, Ratana.

Anthony Bourdain frequently talks in his show No Reservations about having a local fixer when you get to a strange and unfamiliar land.  Ratana was that for us.  A former co-worker of Annie knew someone who was familiar with Indochina and made several great recommendations for us, including a tuk-tuk driver he had met in Siem Reap.  We exchanged emails with Ratana, told him the kind of hotel we were looking for and price we hoped to pay, and he delivered us by tuk-tuk to a place that met those needs.  It was comforting to know we had a local to help us navigate any tricky situation that might arise.

After a six-hour bus ride, we took it easy the following day, having lunch in the village of Siem Reap.  It's a bit on the touristy side, attracting thousands each year for the nearby ancient temples, but we still enjoyed the feel of the place, much like the feel we got in our favorite stop in Vietnam, Hoi An.  A nice quiet day left us refreshed and recharged to take on the temples the following day.

Few things in life exceed high expectations, but the temples of the Siem Reap area certainly did that for us.  The most iconic is the one in the photo above, Angkor Wat.  It's commonly described as the largest religious building in the world, and is a fascinating trip back in time, going back almost one thousand years.

Inside is an amazing collection of carvings along all four exterior walls of the complex, with fantastic details, showing various battles and conquests of the Angkor kings.

We walked around the complex, reading from the guide I had on my iPhone which explained what each panel was.  Then, we scaled a step set of wooden steps into the main tower in the center.  It supposedly was home once to a statue of Vishnu, but that is long gone.  Still, it was stunning to think of the accomplishment of the workers who built this almost one thousand years ago.

Some areas are in the process of being restored, and the towers have the unique look of years of erosion.  The peaks look like drippings of candle wax, or a sand castle made by letting wet sand drip from your hands at the beach.

As impressive as the temple at Angkor Wat was, we liked the two others we visited even more.  The second one was Angkor Thom , and was built by Suryavarman II.

Annie liked that one the best, but the one the kids and I favored was the temple at Ta Prohm.  It's the one that is the least far along in being reclaimed from the jungle.  Over the years, the jungle almost completely covered the rocks and stones that were built, and some how, huge trees grew out of what seem to be small cracks.  The process produces some stunning sights.

Seeing trees totally engulfing some of the most magnificent structures of their time truly puts things in perspective and left me with the thought that when it comes to man versus nature, I'm putting my money on nature pretty much every time. 

Some people spend three days or as long as seven days seeing the temples and there is plenty to see.  That's not our modus operandi, especially when we are on as long of a trip as we are.  One day and three temples was plenty for us, particularly on a hot day like the one we experienced. 

On our final day in Cambodia, on the suggestion of Rantana, our aforementioned tuk-tuk driver/fixer, we visited a floating village.  It meant a ride of about 25 minutes to a place where several boats that looked abandoned/on the verge of sinking were waiting to take their victims/passengers on a 15 minute boat ride to the rickety buildings that made up the village.

We gingerly stepped on board and I quickly noticed there were no life jackets.  Oh snap!  But I also noticed there were no body bags, so I did my best to appear calm for the ride through the extremely muddy water.  The ride went smoothly and it was fascinating to cruise through the village, where many of the structures had TVs inside, powered by an on board battery. 

It's another example of how differently people in other parts of the world live, something that we really wanted Ben and Marley to see.

Our time in Cambodia was short, but the memories and experiences we had there will last us a very long time.  As will the local definition of "bus" as we found when we headed toward Thailand.