By the time we got to Sihanoukville, we'd already seen too many temples.

By the time we left Sihanoukville, we were happy we'd seen two more.

The first stop in this growing Cambodian city was a small Buddhist temple. A friend of Bonnie's urged us to visit a "working" temple on our trip and we had found one.

Bonnie met two young monks and she immediately went into recruiter interview mode. Both had been in the monkhood for a long time and were now attending a local college. One was in HR; the other in IT. They would graduate and leave monkhood with good careers. They had grown up in the temple. Been fed there. Been taught there.

The Buddhist temple is a lifeline for many in the community, not just the monks. Inside the meeting room at the temple, a daily routine was going on. Monks were chanting and praying. Nuns were setting eating places for monks and local people including several families with young children, who are invited to share the monks' one big meal of the day.

The food being eaten usually was collected each morning by the temple monks, who walk through the streets collecting food donations from locals.

This was the essence of a "working" temple, one that supported the community while the community supported it.

The second temple had monkeys, Bonnie's favorite. But the monkeys didn't have Bonnie, who stayed in the touring van on a work call. We also had a great view of Sihanoukville and passed by a trio of swans who didn't like being videoed.

The remainder of the trip was seeing a large public market, a fishing village, a beach and a statue that was built to represent the love of the Cambodian people for family. The statue was of a groom who was helping his bride with a towel representing ever-lasting love.

The only sour note in Sihanoukville was the large number of skeletons of big buildings. Apparently, the Chinese had started construction sites all over the city and when the pandemic occurred they abandoned all the projects. That's something the monks never did in Sihanoukville in centuries.