Earlier this month we attended regional meetings in Indonesia and decided to take a few additional days afterwards to fly to Flores island to visit Komodo National Park. It was an experience we never thought we’d be able to have and we decided to go for it when we realized we’d be a little over…
Tag: Nature
Flowers of Nepal 2023
We have Asia regional meetings in Nepal this week so we decided to come early and have a short family vacation here. I’ll write more about our explorations later but I’ll start with another entry in my flower series. This week is the Dashain festival so there have been marigold garlands everywhere and most Nepalis…
ផ្កាម្លិះ | Jasmine
Phnom Penh has no shortage of olfactory stimulation. Most of which might most charitably be described as pungent. Fermented fish, durian, open sewage systems, and garbage sitting out in the tropical heat are smells that were uncomfortable when I first came. Of course there are also many delightful smells – the scent of rain in…
Bangkok’s Sanam Rat park
After our visit to the Cambodian Embassy to submit Caleb’s Visa application we visited the Sanam Rat park in Bangkok, Thailand. It’s a large park with a lot to see including ponds and a small lake, fountains, a beautiful conference pavilion, botanical gardens, and water monitor lizards. Charlotte was – as aways – thrilled just…
Visiting Oudong in 2008 and 2023
Oudong was the capital of Cambodia for almost 250 years until it was moved to Phnom Penh by King Norodom in 1866. Oudong was largely abandoned after the capital was moved but the monasteries, pagodas, and stupas remained in use. Only some 21 miles northwest of Phnom Penh, Oudong with it’s ancient structures and beautiful…
Flowers of Bangkok 2023
This week we had to make a ‘visa run’ to the Cambodian Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand to get Caleb’s visa. The bright side of having to wait for three days for the Embassy to issue the visa is that we had time to explore the city and visit a few of it’s many wonderful gardens…
Visiting Bokor Mountain during Rainy Season
Last month we were in Kampot for a teambuilding retreat and, afterwards, our family decided to drive up into Preah Monivong Bokor National Park to see how things had changed since I was last there (in 2007, I think?). Bokor is a mountain near the coast and marks the southeastern end of the Cardamom mountain…
Three Sisters on an island in Kratie province
In November 2022, I visited one of the MCC/Cambodian Rural Development Team project participants on a remote island in Sambour district, Kratie province. She is a poor farmer named Sopheat. She’s part of the local vegetable producer group and village savings bank. She had started a tremendous vegetable garden and I asked her why she…
Monitoring Visit to Kratie – January 2023
In January, I scheduled my backlog of blog posts from 2022 to publish once a day and then traveled out to Kratie province on a monitoring visit to the Rural Livelihoods and Social Cohesion in Interethnic Communities project. This was my third visit to the project villages in Sambour district, Kratie province – the first…
Monitoring Visit to Kratie – November 2022
In November I traveled to Kratie province on a monitoring visit to the Rural Livelihoods and Social Cohesion in Interethnic Communities project. I was on my own this time – unlike our April 2022 visit – and met up with staff from our partner Cambodian Rural Development Team (CRDT). The trip from Phnom Penh to…