By population, Bangkok is the 33th largest city in the world with around 10,890,660 people living in the metropolitan region as of 2019. To put this in perspective, the entire population of the country of Cambodia is 16.5 million. Bangkok has roughly five times the number of residents as Phnom Penh. It was interesting to…
Tag: Travel
Airplane Meals
I’ve been meaning to write about airplane meals in Asia for awhile. The quality of the in-flights meals, snacks, and drinks surprised me when I first flew here back in the early 2000s and that hasn’t changed over the last two decades. It was a particularly stark contrast during our visit home last year when…
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…
Return to Monkey Island
Last month during our team visit to Prey Veng we spent a morning at Toul Baray Andet just outside of Prey Veng town. The last time we visited was in 2021 with that year’s YAMEN class. ‘Toul’ is a river delta word, it means ‘an elevated patch of land that is an island in the…
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…
Visiting Ba Phnom in Prey Veng
Last month during our team visit to Prey Veng province we visited Ba Phnom district. Located in the flat heartlands of the Mekong delta, Ba Phnom holds the only “mountains” in Prey Veng province. Ba Phnom is an ancient cultural center of the Khmer people. The name Ba Phnom actually means [Ancestor] [Mountain]. The first…
Incheon Airport
I thought I’d share some photos from our six hour layover at the Incheon Airport in Seoul. The airport was much quieter than normal, far fewer passengers and many closed shops. Yet there was still plenty to see and do. Let’s start with the robots. There’s airporter – who will carry your bags to your…
And we’re on our way!
And we’re on our way back to North America for our first home leave! I’m writing from the Seoul airport where we have a six hour layover. It’s been a long time since we’ve been home and almost as long since we’ve left the Kingdom of Cambodia. The last time we left Cambodia was a…
No visit to the US this year.
We had originally planned to travel back to the US in March of this year for our first home leave. There were many reasons we couldn’t do this in March but they all have the same root cause; as Charlotte has come to say with weary disgust, “because of COVID.” That remains true now as…
Rory and Marcia
Last night our new Peace Coordinators arrived at the Phnom Penh airport after a harrowing journey from the other side of the world. Their first flight had ‘technical difficulties’… Which is the tactful way to say that it collided with another plane while taxing at the Philadelphia airport. This delayed their departure from Philadelphia causing…