Seriously, dude. Don’t let the haters stop you.

[original photo]

Shanghai’s riverside Bund district is a perfect example of how crazy something (the world’s fastest-growing country) can become as it grows and develops.

I’m afraid that I’m another one.

Forget visiting the Great Wall of China … we ran it! “Bu pao changcheng malason, fei hao han!”

[photo via Rick]

This ancient Chinese saying, pronounced “Bu dao changcheng, fei hao han”, means “If you haven’t gone to the Great Wall, you aren’t a man.” I’ve heard it a few dozen times here in China … and now I can finally claim my manhood.

So can my dad. And my mom.

In this photo, a fisherman on the Mekong River in central Laos beats the water with a large stick to scare the fish to the surface.

This photo was taken in the hidden terrace (behind the Terrace of the Leper King) in Angkor Thom, an ancient temple city in central Cambodia.

In April of 2004, I took a road trip through New England with some of my closest friends. We talked a fisherman in Boston into giving us some of his old lobster cages (for our pirate decorations at camp) … but we had to drive up to his home in Maine to get them early one morning. I decided, the night before, that it was simply too early to wake up … so I skipped out on the Maine adventure and slept in.

This is what I missed.

It’s only been a couple of days since my last header, but I couldn’t stand to see skulls at the top of my screen on this wonderful Day of Life!

During the rule of the Khmer Rouge, 2 million Cambodians (30% of the population) were killed by starvation, torture, or execution. Led by Pol Pot, these communist guerrillas killed people if they didn’t work hard enough, if they were educated or of different ethnicity, if they showed sympathy, or if the fighters simply didn’t like them.

I took this photo at the Killing Fields, a murder camp outside the Cambodian capitol of Phnom Penh. It was sobering, to say the least, to walk among the mass graves and see the shreds of clothing and pieces of bone still littering the ground under my feet.

I understand that they’re not the same thing as the army. But honestly, what’s the difference? Is it the rhetoric, the level of organization, the popular support, the rationales, the intensity, or the simple fact that we’re part of it?

Two buckets of freshly-made incense sticks dry in the warm evening sun outside of a temple’s incense factory in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta area.

Some of you don’t like dirty things. So here’s a nice and clean mountain view for your enjoyment.

Sweet sugar-coated dreams, my dears!

This is what my feet looked like after a long day of trekking around the ancient temples of Angkor in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

A bunch of cows, or water buffalos, or just plain buffalos graze lazily in the Mekong River near Luang Prebang, Laos.

Is it lame that I don’t know what kind of animal this is?

Rick and I had a blast flying off of this rope swing at a beautiful waterfall in Luang Prebang, Laos.

I’m not that disgruntled … but the pun was too good not to use!