Year-in-review Part I : Cambodia

I was going to do a massive mega end-of-year blog post spectacular. But then I figured that since the Internet has pretty much killed the average attention span, it made more sense to break it down into more digestible little postlettes instead. Plus if I did one huge post I wouldn’t get around to finishing it until 2013.

2011 was an incredible year for our family. After years in Vietnam, and a brief spell in a Canadian winter, we moved back to Southeast Asia, and our first stop was Cambodia. Siem Reap to be exact. I had my first photoshoot of the year booked for Angkor, and it seemed as good a place as any to spend a week getting over jetlag. Siem Reap is a lovely town, and a great place to hang out with young kids. There’s not much going on, and that’s just fine. There’s some nice restaurants and cafes, old French colonial villas lining the boulevard along the river…. But of course the main event is a few kilometers away at the Angkor temples, and it was amazing taking our children there. “Hey kids, this is…. one of the most amazing places on earth. Enjoy.”

They won’t remember it. But we will.

And someday we’ll return when they’re older. We’ll walk around these hallowed grounds again. We’ll touch the magical earth and rock and trees. We’ll watch as the rising sun breathes life into the stone carvings on the walls and the Banyan roots clutching at the fallen temples, as it has every day for over a thousand years. And we can tell our son that he had already danced on this earth. And we’ll tell our daughter that she had already breathed this air, when she was but three months old.

That will be a good day. I’m looking forward to it.