Cambodia's treasure of ancient temples goes beyond the group at Angkor. The mystical temple of Beng Mealea is one of those. Build in the Angkorian period, 40km from Angkor Wat on an ancient royal highway, it was among the biggest temples. Today it is a magical ruin that have been hidden under the jungle carpet until recently. Giant serpent-like roots are slowly crushing the walls, while a web of smaller roots are holding the place together. You have to crawl over fine carved sandstone blocks, dug under fallen pillars, and hang in vines to get through the giant maze of closed courtyards, dark chambers and raising towers. Though there are boardwalks at some sections it is a raw experience to explore the this hidden jewel. This jungle temple makes Ta Prohm, the famous jungle temple at Angkor, looks like a groomed little brother.

When the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975 they turn the country into a Maoist state. Everyone who were of higher education was considered an enemy of the state and should therefor be executed. For that purpose a high school in central Phnom Penh was turned into a torture center, named S-21. Throughout the four years of Khmer Rouge control more than 16.000 Cambodians were tortured here and eventually killed, either here or at the killing fields at Choeung Ek a bit out of town. The Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records, including photos, of all the prisoners and their horrific torture. These can today be seen at the high school which is turned into a museum. A grim memorial of how bad mankind can treat each other.

The old town of Jerusalem deserves more than this single article. There is so much history and religious important places packed into one spot that it's hard to do more than scratching the surface. By being the holiest place on earth for Christians, Jews and the third holiest for Muslims (after Mecca and Medina) it's a place of controversy, something we won't dwell with. Go there as a traveller and just suck up the atmosphere. It's pure madness; hordes of tourist getting charmed by vendors, strangely outfitted religious characters rushing trough the narrow lanes and teenage soldiers with pimples and guns. With all the most-see sites like Western Wall, Temple Mount with the Dome of Rock and the church of the Holy Sepulchre taken the attention, there are a lot of wonderful strange sites that are half hidden. Try to find where the last supper took place, the birth place of Virgin Mary or the Ethiopian Monastery Deir-Sultan. No matter what your belief or expectations are, Jerusalem will blow you away.

A very well preserved ruin of an ancient Roman city with city walls, theatre, hammams (baths) and colonnaded streets. It was the rich surrounding farmland and the trade with the Nabataeans (The people from Petra) that made the city flourished during the Roman time, for it wasn't on the normal trading route. Various invasions and an earthquake in 747 laid the city deserted until nineteen century. Today it's one of the biggest Roman sites outside Italy and popular with tourists as well as locals.

In the tranquil riverside town of Savannakhet lies this tiny Dinosaur museum. The palaeontology founds are all from the area and the one room exhibition is a very low key affair. A dinosaur is drawn in full size along three of the walls and outlined by Christmas lights. The curators are very friendly, though not much English is spoken, and will pull out drawers to show you hidden stuff up close. You might even get a tour in the store room behind, where all the new founds are. Don't expect a lot of explanation, all signs are only in Lao and French. We like... bravo!

The Ho Chi Minh trail was not a single trail, but rather a network of trails and dirt roads the lead from North Vietnam to South Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia in the bloody years of the Vietnam War. The Viet Minh, who were based in North Vietnam and lead by Ho Chi Minh, used it to supply their allies in the South, the Viet Cong, with arms and men, so they could fight the Americans and the South Vietnamese army. Since both Cambodia and Laos were officially neutral, the Americans decided to secretly bomb the area where the Ho Chi Minh trail went through. Just in Laos the Americans dropped more than 2 millions tons of bomb, making Laos on of the heaviest bomb country in the world. Today there isn't much evidence of the Ho Chi Minh trail, but at the dirt square in Pa-am village you can still see a Russian surface-to-air missile launcher (with missile) that the North Vietnamese troops managed to drag down here.

The most impressive ruin in Lebanon. Besides being located in the middle of "modern" Baalbek town, the site can offer several magnificent Roman's temples. The one for Jupiter is the grandest, unequalled in the world, with columns soaring 23m into the air, where six still stands today. The foundation consists of some of biggest building block, some weighing about 800 tonnes. It is thought that it have taken more than 120 years to complete the temple complex, though different Roman Emperors still added to the complex centuries after. Another temple is the one of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. Smaller than Jupiter's, but still bigger than Parthenon in Athens, it's one of the best preserved in the world with beautiful decorations, where you can still make out the fine details - along with semi-ancient graffiti.

This ancient town claims to be the oldest inhabited city in the world. About 7000 years ago, long before the Greek and the Romans, this town started out as small fishing settlement and turned into a powerful city-state with flourishing trade. To this day it still has its small port, apparently also the oldest in the world. The ruin of the old town does not look like much, which is one of the charming characters of this tranquil site. A "newer" crusade castle (12th century), half a roman amphitheater and a few columns are the main leftovers, but it is the maze of crumbling walls covered in vegetation that makes Byblos special. In spring time the whole place burst into colours with wildflowers.

The Holiday Inn hotel had hardly opened it doors in Beirut, when the civil war broke out in 1975. The fighting was taken to the streets, where it went from alley to alley and house to house. The city got divided by the Green Line with Christian forces occupying the East side and Muslims on the West side. By being one of the tallest buildings in town the Holiday Inn was sought after by snipers - and people shooting after snipers. Though the war ended in 1990 and most parts of Beirut has been through a facelift, the bullet riddled Holiday Inn building still stands empty and untouched as a ghostly memory of the war.

In the middle of the Gobi desert, where dust and stones rules, the flat plateau breaks off to a lower level. During sunrise and sunset the exposed cliffs give off an orange hue which gives the place its name. It was here in the 1920's the American archaeologist Roy Chapman Andrews made the amazing discovery that dinosaurs were egg laying - and made some wrong assumptions that the new found dinosaur specimen, Velociraptor, was an egg thief. You can still to this day walk around and find dinosaur bones and eggs shells at the bottom of the cliffs. Close by (in Gobi terms) grow the rare Saxual trees. These wooden creatures are so dense that they can not float in water... well, if there was any.