We asked to spend a few hours with a Bedouin family near Palmyra, a city in the Syrian desert. None of them spoke English.

It could have gotten awkward. But language barriers are irrelevant when you’re around children. They are fluent in the universal language: fun.

A perfect day trip from Byblos (or even Beirut) is Batroun, a town offering a millennial Phoenician sea seawall, Lebanon’s best lemonade, and a roaring nightlife.

It’s perfect for a day trip because it’s compact: three hours are plenty to digest it. The highlight is the seaside old town with an impressive 18th-century stone church above the fishing marina and a nicely restored residential quarter.

In the town of Koh Kong, near the border with Thailand, there’s a Buddhist spiritual retreat with a bizarre collection of sculptures by its riverfront.

In the photos below you’ll see sadistic-looking sculptures dressed in KR uniform killing people with the heads of animals. You’ll see a man being sawed in half while being pecked by a garuda, a bird of Buddhist mythology.

See full article for photo gallery.

One of the hardest parts of traveling to the Papua New Guinea highlands is knowing what to do when surrounded by forty people who behold you in utter rapture.

Stroll into any market in the Mt. Hagen region and you’ll soon have a captive audience that sees a white person every two or so years.