go behind the scenes of our journey

My friend and one of the kindest people i've met on my journey, showing me his daughter.

It's amazing who you find wearing our smiles t-shirts sometimes…

While we haven't yet published the video we were filming here, this was a short piece we filmed with a group of women from the USA who had come to Phnom Penh to lend a helping hand to some local women who were responsible for housing many orphaned children. The US women were taking the local women for a day of pampering, giving them pedicures and manicures. What I loved was that they literally got down on their hands and knees and cleaned and made the local women feel not only beautiful, but on the same level as them.

He was the winner of our race up the beach.

As he sat and told me about his journey, there were many things that startled me. For one, he had been an alcoholic for some time in his younger days, before turning to the Monastry about 15 years ago. When I asked him “do you think people need to understand darkness in order to appreciate light?” He replied, “Of course, for without one's sense of their darker side, and ability to control it, we cannot find true happiness, for life will never be 100 per cent good, but our mind can be.”

This was arguably the best sunset I've ever seen. Being able to capture such beauty was enough to keep me smiling for days.

A bit of a self-indulgent snap in a mountain community in Malaysian Borneo, where we met a number of locals who lived sustainably off the land, before going white water rafting back down the valley.

Curled up in a train in Malaysia, I was photographing a father looking after his disabled child. It was evident that kids with this sort of condition were shunned by most, which made the fathers open and unforgiving love for his little boy that much more beautiful. It is an image that will stick with me forever, and may be stored in my mind for those darker days, when I need a lift.

My partner in crime Sashenka, enjoyed re-visiting some of the slums she hadn't visited since her childhood in Sri Lanka. There was such a freedom and happiness among these children that you didn't see in wealthy suburbs.

It is funny. Whenever I stop to play around with groups of young kids, there is often a moment of complete fear in the eyes of the first child I throw into the air. But after they realise it is completely safe, lines form and the result is normally a sore back for days. But it's absolutely worth it to see the looks on their faces.

Everyone probably thinks we take all the photos, when really we just hand over the reigns to the kids we meet and let them discover something new. The results are often stunning.

There's something about not only playing with kids, but acting like a big kid that will always make me smile.

From buying a local map from this wheelchair bound man, to meeting his entire family and finding out he worked day in day out to send his children to school, the entire experience was nothing short of completely inspiring. Really puts some of our first world problems into perspective when you stand there and all he has to say is positive about his life and the world.

The lack of fear amongst the children of the slums was staggering, you might think they have the most to be scared of, and yet they jump and play and run to greet you in a way that tends to suggest they have not been hurt by the world at all.

Fair to say I was slightly scared, but these kids literally about 15 minutes after meeting me decided to try and lift me up. Fair to say they succeeded.