Exploring Quang Ngai for Perceptive Travel

Early last year, intrigued by a headline in a Korean newspaper, I struck up an email correspondence with a historian in Hanoi. I was fascinated by his discovery of a nearly 80-mile long wall in central Vietnam, and eventually decided to travel to Quang Ngai province to see it myself. Perceptive Travel published my story about the trip in their September issue. To see a few more pictures of the wall and the countryside it passes though, check out this photo set on Flickr.

Cambodia's Temple City

Last weekend I made my first trip to Cambodia. Like countless other travelers, my primary reason for visiting was to see Angkor Archaeological Park, an enormous complex containing more than 300 Hindu and Buddhist monuments built between the 9th and 13th centuries. What struck me about the site though, other than the scale of the architecture itself, were the thousands of Khmer people eking out a living in the shadow of a ruined city; a former capital considered to have been one of the largest and most prosperous in Southeast Asia. Follow this link to view my photos from Angkor Wat.

Time Traveling

I'm kind of a nerd about history. And I blame my parents. Although I neglected to keep careful records at the time, I have a hunch that every family vacation we took from elementary school onwards, was designed to deliver us to the maximum number of museums in two weeks or less. It's almost as if they didn't really want my younger sister and I to stop learning during our fleeting summer holidays.

The twisted thing about their preferred manner of road tripping is that as an adult, I've partially adopted it myself. I mean, it's fairly easy for me to breeze through London's British Museum or even skip the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, but many of my most vivid travel memories are rooted in the past: wandering through rows of megalithic stones on a misty afternoon at Carnac, climbing the steep staircase of Chichen-Itza's Temple of Kukulkan, standing over the calm blue waters of Loch Tay on a reconstructed crannog.

But a fondness for ruins can go too far. Especially when that enthusiasm is expressed by millions of tourists. In fact, according to the Adventure Travel Trade Association, "increased visits [to archaeological sites] have led to damage at sites and often portions of sites have to be cordoned off from the public to prevent further deterioration." In the good news department, the ATTA partnered with the Archaeological Institute of America to create a "Guide to Best Practices for Archaeological Tourism." Read my interview with the two authors in the current issue of inTravel.