In 2003, early on in my fourteen-month journey across Asia and while sitting atop the Great Wall of China, I wrote in my notebook, "Many ways exist to measure a journey—miles, months, passport stamps.  But now another measure has come to mind: walls traversed." In the year that followed I wrote a lot about traversing walls, though not the physical kind.

But measuring miles (or as is more often the case, kilometers) is a more time-honored method, and there are plenty of mileage marker signs around the world to help you do it. Whatever their size or shape, I love the frame of reference the markers provide the traveler. There's nothing like seeing a marker that says something like "700", then sixteen hours later, in a semi-delirious state, finding one which brings better news because it says something like "5".

Billy Joel's 1989 hit "We Didn't Start the Fire" includes the town's name its lyrics, but Dien Bien Phu isn't recognizable to most Americans. To the Vietnamese, however, it is well known, for here in the remote northwest of their nation a pivotal point in their history occurred: the defeat of the French.

Several hundred miles from Dien Bien Phu is the Vietnamese city of Nha Trang. If my memory is correct, the first time I saw "Nha Trang" was as a kid watching "Magnum PI". I think it was TJ who sometimes wore a cap with the words written across the front. So that was my first exposure to the place—letters on a hat.

Little did I know that I would one day visit the city myself. But not only that: here I would even come to the defense of a pineapple.

Centuries ago, Cambodia was a great power and ruled over territory stretching from Vietnam to the Malay Peninsula. The empire's center was Angkor, a city that at its peak held a population estimated at one million people—twenty times larger than London at the time. Between the 9th and 13th centuries, Cambodia constructed a vast temple complex at Angkor.

The empire crumbled in the 15th century. And in the 20th century, specifically in the early 1970s, an estimated 100,000 Cambodian civilians were killed by U.S. bombing. But the greatest slaughter came in the late 1970s during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1,700,000 Cambodians—21 percent of the country's population.

Many Cambodians find pride in the temples of Angkor, where the distance marker above is located. Today the area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

This mileage marker sits along a little-used stretch of road in northern Thailand, in an area known as the Golden Triangle. Behind the marker flows the Mekong River. The region is known for its drug trade, but all one can see growing from the highway is corn.

On a train between the Indian cities of Gorakhpur and Varanasi I often had a nice view of my neighbor's foot. But every so often I'd catch sight of a distance marker as well, which were spaced out all along the track.

Here in the far north of Pakistan, the Karakoram Highway (KKH) cuts a path through daunting terrain en route to the Chinese border. The highway, built at the cost of hundreds of lives, was inaugurated in the 1980s.

The highest point of the Karakoram Highway is the 15,397-foot Khunjerab Pass, where China and Pakistan meet. This is the first distance marker I saw on the Chinese side. The final destination of this leg of my journey, the city of Kashgar, was still a day and a half away.
 

Joel Carillet, chief editor of wanderingeducators, is a freelance writer and photographer based in Tennessee. He is the author of 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia. To learn more about him, follow his regular photoblog, or purchase images, visit www.joelcarillet.com