The oldest girl in the group of children, she couldn’t have been more than 13, leveled a sly look my way before stating:
“Lady, you buy our bracelets or who knows what will happen to your bicycles…”
At that point, I think my jaw dropped.
The Backstory
Laura and I rented bikes for a day of exploring the Angkor temples closet to Siem Reap – and after a pretty harried bike ride down a dusty and trafficky road we were grateful to chain up our bikes to a nearby tree with some pretty …

Let’s take a flashback today to the Cambodia stop on my RTW trip…exactly this time last year; I was traveling with a friend through SEA.

I’m not sure what it is about music, but it just bridges gaps. Perhaps it’s the nature of music – inclusive; everyone who can hear it feels a part of the experience.
Laura’s green guitar and with a hand-embroidered Laotian pink strap was like a magnet for all of the children hawking bracelets and guidebooks near the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. As soon as …

Having Jenn join us for this leg of the trip has really given me a bit of perspective about the months spent traveling in developing world. For me, after five months of backpacking I really lost track of the delineation between my developing world experiences and life back home in the states.
Jenn though had no such confusion when she arrived with shiny-clean clothes and a backpack that smelled distinctly better than mine (what is that funk!?!). Jenn knew two things about herself when deciding to join a leg of …

I have come to a pretty clear conclusion from my four months of travel in Asia -the name Shannon is not common, normal, or in some cases, even comprehensible. It’s completely normal in the United States…and Ireland for that matter!…but Asia is a whole other story. I dare-say that the theme for my journey over the past seven months could be summarized as “The Changing Names of Shannon” or, perhaps even more appropriate:  “The Complete Bastardization of my Name.”
Where did this start you may ask? Well, in Australia actually. Shannon …

I don’t want to be too overly dramatic here, but I feel as if this trip has firmly closed a chapter of my life for good.  I started the trip as a quarter-life crises of sorts as well as because of a general yearning to see the world and break out of the borders of the United States.  A lot of friends and family have sent emails and made comments about how lucky I am to have a year of vacationing.  Let me clear something up just …

After the Gibbon Experience I really didn’t have a lot of time left in Southeast Asia before I was due to meet cousin Helen in India.  With that in mind I hopped on a quick puddle-jumper flight out of Luang Prabang and landed in Siem Reap, Cambodia just an hour later.  I decided to take out Vietnam from my itinerary – it was just too much to do in just six weeks and now that I’ve been on the road for a while I’ve really been able to appreciate …

I have largely neglected my duties to this blog so far by not updating all of my readers on the state of driving on this side of the world.  For those who have not yet had the pleasure of traveling or backpacking through Asia, well, it’s unique and an assault on Western safety sensibilities.  To understand the way these people drive you pretty much have to completely abandon your conceptions about Western driving tactics and strategies and instead accept the organized chaos of a free-for-all.
From what I’ve discovered so …

My time is just flying by it seems – I can’t believe I have been traveling around the world for three months at this point!  With just a week left in Southeast Asia though, I couldn’t have spent it much better.  Laura and I decided to head out of the city to stay at an orphanage located just 30 minutes outside of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.  I really had no idea what to expect from the experience – one of Laura’s friends came here last year for a week …