Sunrise at Ankor Wat was glorious. Waiting with hundreds of others while listening to the monks chant morning adorations could not be a stronger reminder of what ties us together.

What ties us to our ancestors is our history like that Ankor Wat represents. The temples at Ankor demonstrate how hard humans must work to tell their story. Thousands of slaves labored hundreds of years to build a stone representation of Hindu and Buddhist mythology. Simply keeping the landscape open to the public requires hundreds if not thousands of personnel: ticket takers, tuk-tuk drivers, stone masons, architectural archeologists, gardeners (remember when the world's largest religious monument was encountered again in the 1850's much of it was overgrown with brush as you will see in subsequent photos), artisans, performers and even monks and nuns who keep its history real reminding practitioners of the ritual and values long ago set in the stone of the now deccrepit structures.