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Visiting the Great Wall of China
I’ll tell you now, before I get into my post, that this post has a LOT of pictures. I hope you enjoy my journey along the top of the Great Wall of China! To pick up where my last post left off, after we hung up with Kevin we wandered around the Beijing Olympic Stadium for a while. The tour company called us several times, asking if we wanted them to come get us, where we were, what had upset us (haha, that one was funny) and if we could work out a deal. We weren’t about to tell them where we were and we definitely didn’t want to attempt another…
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How We Almost Didn’t Get to the Great Wall of China
When you visit China, there are several things you want to see. You want to see the Terracotta Warriors, giant pandas, the Forbidden City and, of course, the Great Wall. When we were in China we planned to spend the majority of our last day at the Great Wall. The first part of our trip had several hiccups, but we’d meticulously planned our last day and felt like everything was going to be perfect. And then we woke up. Scott, Troy and I got up early and made sure we were ready well before our tour guide was supposed to arrive. It was an early day, 7am, but we wanted to get an…
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The Ruins of Pre Rup
Pre Rup is an ancient Khmer temple in Angkor, Cambodia, just outside Siem Reap. It was built about 961 AD and dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. Not much is known about this temple, but the common belief is that this temple was used for funeral ceremonies. “Pre Rup” translates to “turn the body”, which coincides with ancient Khmer funerary practices of rotating a person’s ashes during the funeral ceremony. When you first arrive at Pre Rup, this is what greets you. From a distance is just looks like a pile of disordered rubble, but as you get closer you can see the detail and precision that went into creating the…
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Life Lessons Learned While Traveling Through Asia
One of the things that is so great about traveling is that you get exposed to vastly different people than you’re used to. While I as living in Malaysia, I had the opportunity to meet and interact with so many more people than I had while growing up in my small town in Southern Utah. Sure, I’d lived in Virginia for two years and Oklahoma for four years and had visited several other states, but most of the people I’d interacted with had been American. There would be the random British person, a smattering of Hispanic people or an occasional Chinese person, but 99% of the people I’d interacted with in…
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Photo Essay: Sunset From A Forgotten Monastery
On our first day in Bagan, Myanmar, we spent a lot of time riding our bikes from temple to temple. We thought it was the best experience ever and didn’t think there was anything that could surpass it. But then we were talking to a shop keeper at one of the tourist stalls in front of Ananda Temple and he said that we should come back there at sunset. Well, why?, we asked. We’d already seen the temple in the daylight. Why would we want to come see it in the dark? That’s when he told us that we could get a wonderful view of the sunset from the top of…
