The Ten Most Tranquilo Temples in the World

September 20th, 2007 | By Joshua | 5 Comments »

Check out these remarkable photos of The Ten Most Amazing Temples in the World (via Neatorama.com). The collection is exclusively Buddhist and Hindu (otherwise, I would suggest a Maya temple or two to the list). From the Tiger’s Nest Monastery, pictured here atop a 3,000-foot cliff in Bhutan, to the ruins of Angkor and Prambanan, this is quite an impressive gathering.

I’m happy to say that the Tranquilo Traveler has visited three of the top ten. Here are some flashbacks to my original posts about visiting:

Angkor Wat — Siem Reap, Cambodia
The Golden Temple — Amritrsar, India
Varanasi — India

If clicking through these quiet, beautiful places inspires you to sit and take a few breaths, mosey over to this online Zen meditation room: The bell rings…

Map: Cambodia to Ko Chang

February 8th, 2006 | By Joshua | 2 Comments »

This is our overland route from Phnom Penh to Bangkok (from last December).
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Cambodia to Ko Chang

December 13th, 2005 | By Joshua | 4 Comments »

“Never judge a country by its border town,” writes Allan Weisbecker. That’s a good thing to remember when passing through Poi Pet, the scummy Cambodian stain on the Thai frontier about which another writer, Gordon Sharpless, says, “Poipet more-or-less rhymes with ‘toilet’ and the two are virtually indistinguishable.”
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Angkor Wat: The city which is a temple

December 9th, 2005 | By Joshua | No Comments »

The largest religious structure in the world is also the most visited tourist destination in northwestern Cambodia; so much so, that people often erroneously use its name, Angkor Wat, to refer to the entire Angkor Archeological Park in which it resides, where it is actually only one of many sites. Also called “the city which is a temple,” Angkor Wat demands multiple visits to take it all in. We oblige it.
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Cambodia Landmine Museum

December 8th, 2005 | By Joshua | 1 Comment »

A rough, brown-puddled lane bounces our tuk-tuk to an unassuming rural compound next to a muddy river, several kilometers off the main road between Siem Reap and the Angkor Archeological Park. The entrance is “guarded” by a one-legged child, dressed in the black Khmer Rouge uniform with peasant cap and checkered scarf. He stands on his crutches to raise the bamboo gate with its red “Danger Landmines!” sign. This is our first clue that the Cambodia Landmine Museum is unlike any museum we have ever seen.
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Killing Fields Sketch: Art Imitates Life

December 7th, 2005 | By Joshua | 1 Comment »

San Francisco-based Artist/Activist Todd Berman made this drawing based on my recent Killing Fields blog entry. It’s not the first time Todd’s art has spun off something in my/our lives since he oozed his way out of the same womb as me 29 years ago.
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Angkor: Exploring the lost city

December 6th, 2005 | By Joshua | 1 Comment »

At its peak (around 900 years ago), the royal Khmer capital of Angkor was as big as Manhattan and home to as many as one million citizens. Its sophistication, technology, and art far surpassed anything in the Western world at the time. After falling to invading armies however, the city was moved east to Phnom Penh, and Angkor was consumed by the jungle –“lost,” though parts were maintained by Buddhist monks until French explorers “rediscovered” it in the 19th century.
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Unreal Angkor

December 5th, 2005 | By Joshua | 1 Comment »

The jungle-carpeted capital of the 1,000-year-old Khmer Empire has been accessible to tourists for less than a decade. Before that, the area was so ridden with landmines and Khmer Rouge bandits that the only people who had visited the site were a handful of archeologists and explorers, plus a centuries-long string of invading armies, all the way up to the Vietnamese in the 1980s. Today, the astonishing ruins of Angkor form the glittering jewel in Cambodia’s budding tourist industry, the single attraction that makes people like us decide to come to Cambodia in the first place.
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Phnom Penh

December 3rd, 2005 | By Joshua | 2 Comments »

Cambodia is not all death and destruction — not anymore, and I find its capital city, despite its uniquely violent history quite pleasant. Once again, I am acutely aware that my short glimpse of the place is entirely limited to what the vast majority tourists see: namely, the lush interior of a quaint guest house, the exquisite grounds of the Royal Palace, and the chic and expensive strip of restaurants along the warm, breezy riverfront (plus the heart-wrenching Tuol Sleng/Killing Fields tour about which I’ve written below).
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A Visit to the Killing Fields

December 1st, 2005 | By Joshua | 2 Comments »

A motorbike takes us through southern Phnom Penh, a low-built, barely-bustling city, whose traffic is more casual than chaotic; our driver goes slowly and carefully along the road’s edge, past a row of assemblage plant sweatshops which, at 4:30 p.m., are letting out thousands of female workers in a scene identical to one I’ve seen throughout Central America. When we turn from the pavement onto a red-clay road, crossing a broken wooden bridge, our driver stops to purchase color-coordinated surgical masks to protect our lungs from the dust, then continues on through a string of villages until we reach the mass gravesite known as “The Killing Fields.”
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