Gatwick Airport, England - The year was just a few hours old as bleary-eyed passengers turned up at Gatwick Airport near London, destined for all corners of the world. Battling fatigue and trying hard to overcome the excesses of the night before, folks, especially those traveling to the US, were bracing themselves for the security fallout from the attempted bomb attack in the U.S. on Christmas Day.

International travelers, such as these at Berlin’s Tegel Airport, face tightened security.

Check-in lines for the Delta flight to Atlanta were the same as ever - passport checks were carried out as we lined up and everything seemed completely normal.

At the check-in desk came the first clue that things were going to be a little different. A friendly young chap who checked me in told me to arrive at the gate early - like an hour-and-a-half before the flight was due to take off. That meant there was no time to devour a full English breakfast, which I was rather looking forward to, AND I couldn't do any shopping either - hardly a tragedy.

So off I plodded to Gate 50 at Gatwick's north terminal. It's 7.30am - the flight takes off at 9.15am. I walked for a few minutes and was quite surprised to see a line had already formed.

This was definitely different.

While I waited to go through the next layer of security, the line got longer and longer as the staff battled the backlog. From my experience, the Brits are good at standing in line - the Americans are not.

I listened eagerly for passengers complaining but heard nothing. Several people were discussing the Detroit attack - they all had their own theories about what needed to be done like full-body screening and better use of watch lists but nobody was complaining - as the line got longer and longer.

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Eventually I got to the front of the line. A few more security questions and a passport check before going off to be searched. Off came the shoes and the security guard took a close look at them - a brave guy.

Then came the patdown, my coat was searched and my briefcase given a good going over. It took about three minutes. The guy chatted a bit and noticed the headline in my newspaper about the introduction of body scanners at UK airports. "All very well having this stuff," he said, "but you can't beat a good pair of eyes and ears." Well said, if you ask me.

I waited about half-an-hour in a chair before it was time to board the aircraft. Some kids were starting to get bored and one poor lad really wanted to use the toilet. But the family had gone through security and in the gate area there are no toilets.

Airport managers need to take a look at this: being in a holding area for over an hour with no toilet facilities is not good, especially if you have young ones.

Off I went to the plane, but as I did my heart sank a bit when I saw how the line of people waiting to get through security was stretching way into the distance. Forty minutes to take off and at least 100 people in line. No way was this plane taking off on time. Bet this lot are the shoppers, I thought. Arriving late at a gate is not an option any more, guys.

People get these new security measures - yes it's inconvenient, yes the kids play up, yes there's very little shopping time but so what? If these great security guards, who dedicate their working days to protecting people like me need more of my time, then they are very welcome to it.

The last thing we need is for this really important job to be rushed. If they miss something to try to meet some daft deadline, god only knows what the consequences would be. So, as a New Year's resolution, let's all be a lot more patient when we fly and give these security folks every bit of help we can to keep the skies safe.

In the end I was right - the plane did take off late - an hour late actually. Still, there was no complaining, no tutting, no rolling of the eyes. And as for the flight itself, nothing was different. I even followed the flight map all the way to landing in Atlanta. Having said that, I didn't have much choice as the sound on every movie I tried to watch didn't work!

Happy traveling.

Mirissa, Sri Lanka - It is not hard to see what happened five years ago in southern and eastern Sri Lanka. About 34,000 people died in this small South Asian country. Wreckage of the tsunami is still apparent and in some places seems to have grown to be part of the landscape. Fishing boats dropped along roadsides still lay there, some now sprouting grass and plants. In the southern town of Mirissa, locals and tourists enjoy the beaches, barely noticing the partial hull of a fishing boat. 

A woman remembers victims of the 2004 tsunami with flowers and candles in Peraliya, Sri Lanka, on Saturday.

Here workers are busy building a monument not to the tsunami, but to soldiers of Sri Lanka's recent victory in the war with rebel Tamil Tigers.  Many Sri Lankans are too young to remember a time when their country wasn’t at war. The conclusion of more than 25 years of civil war, and decades of terrorist bombings around the country draws their focus now.

Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapaksa has called for an election two years before the conclusion of his term. Now that the war is over, Sri Lanka's economy needs attention: There is concern about Sri Lanka's economy and rising food prices.

In the years since the tsunami, the hordes of aid workers and well-meaning benefactors have drifted on leaving signs of renewal in some places and dried up expectations in others. Scatterings of foreign-built playgrounds, new schools and housing can be seen along the roadsides of southern and eastern Sri Lanka, the most tsunami devastated parts of the country.  Locals will say money is sorely needed for schools and the few apartment buildings are not liked by locals, since they were not used to living in such clusters.

In a village just outside Hikkaduwa, women wait for rides sitting on the remains of someone's kitchen counter.

This town was among the most devastated. Here a memorial shows an artist’s rendering of the horrifying aftermath when the deadly wave overturned a passing train, bodies strewn on the tracks and flung into trees. The train line still runs along the shore.

Go to the beaches in Yala on Sri Lanka's eastern shore and you will see a heartbreakingly beautiful beach.  

Stories abound about how the animals of Yala's National Park sensed the vibrations of the earthquake and ran inland before disaster struck.  On the beach here, is a memorial to the Japanese and German tourists and many locals who had no such warning.

Even though the mosque is several miles inland, it too was damaged by the tsunami waters. People clambered up the marble steps and clung to the white pillars, stretching out their arms to grab those swept up in the wave.

Banda Aceh's Grand Mosque was damaged by the Asian 2004 tsunami.

Today, the mosque has been restored and the courtyard, once clogged with mud and debris, is now a pleasant green park.

One of the striking details of the tsunami aftermath in Aceh was how the mosques survived when everything around them was destroyed.

Religion had always been important to devoutly Muslim Acehnese, but the tsunami highlighted Aceh's Islamic character even more.

Aid groups from all religions were offering help, including several fringe, radical Muslim groups, but also evangelical Christians and even Scientologists equipped with massage tables and "anti-stress therapies."

For the most part, Acehnese gladly accepted their help.

The mosque has now been restored to its former glory.

But after the tsunami, the imposition of Islamic shariah law gathered momentum, to the surprise of many Acehnese.

Today, in certain districts of Aceh, women follow a strict dress code. The tight jeans and t-shirts once fashionably worn with a brightly-colored headscarf are now illegal. Offenders are publicly lashed as punishment. Those found guilty of adultery can be stoned to death.

Not all Acehnese agree with this and one of the legacies of the tsunami is the tussling for political power among those who survived.

Most Acehnese are very friendly to foreigners and graciously received many aid workers without imposing Muslim dress on them.

But one man today, firmly insisted that I wear a Muslim headscarf, even though I was not in a religious area. In fact, the monument by one of the mass graves, was intended to cater to all religions. So, it surprised me.

But as he reminded me: "Aceh is different now"

Banda Aceh, Indonesia - I am sitting at one of Aceh's mass graves.  It lies on the road from the airport.  The day after the tsunami hit, this was one of the first things that CNN encountered.

Women attend a mass prayer for victims of the 2004 tsunami on Friday in Banda Aceh, Indonesia.

Our cameraman, Neil Bennett filmed a bulldozer piling bodies atop each other into one giant pit. That night, as we sat together comparing notes on the destruction we saw, I remember former CNN Correspondent Mike Chinoy was visibly disturbed by what he had seen here.  "Like something out of the Holocaust", I remember him saying.

And it's true.  There were too many bodies. The mass graves buried those that could be collected. But so many more were still lying in the streets, sometimes wedged into the buildings that survived. Bodies broken and bloated.  And no matter where you went it reeked of death.

Today, the grass has grown over the gravesite.  There is a small monument with a plaque. A stylized wall in the shape of a giant wave looms over the site.

People trickle in to say prayers.  It is a simple thing. There don't bring flowers or wreaths or anything at all.  They just walk up to the site, bow their heads and turn their palms up to the sky in Muslim prayer.

There is no crying. It has been five years past, after all.  When they finish praying, they turn around and ride away on their motorcycles to continue their day.

On the day the tsunami struck, we rushed to the airport and boarded a flight for Aceh. 

Two young boys look at parts of the city previously devastated by the Asian 2004 tsunami.

The death toll at first was ridiculously small: 60 people, I remember the radio saying. But it climbed quickly. 60 became 600 became 6000 in the space of a few hours as news filtered in. 

We did not know then that it would climb past 200,000.

As we flew over North Sumatra, all the passengers craned their necks to look out the plane windows. I remember seeing coconut trees flattened like scattered toothpicks on the coast.  There were also patchworks of squares in pink, white and blue.  It took me a while to realize that used to be homes.  The walls and roof all swept out to sea.  All that was left was the tiled floor.

Today, there are rows and rows of newly built houses. Their bright red and blue roofs shine in the sun. From the plane, you can see they are positioned a fair distance from the beach, on the slopes of the nearby hills. 

When we arrived, the airport was in chaos. We were the first flight to land after the tsunami. People were trying desperately to leave Aceh.  The only people coming in were journalists and aid workers.

The airport's control tower had been damaged in the earthquake. So, a makeshift tower had been erected.

Today, the Banda Aceh International Airport is a bright, spic and span operation with a stand advertising Aceh's "first boutique hotel", The Pade. The brochure shows a picture of white hotel with graceful arches and an inviting pool that overlooks Aceh's lush hills.

They advertise "happy hour" and a tour agency that offers "tsunami tours"

Boutique hotel, indeed.

By complete coincidence, one of the first people we meet coming out of the airport is Faisal, one of the drivers we had flagged down when we first arrived after the tsunami.

We were so desperate to get into town, we just grabbed the first cars we could find, a sputtering space van and a battered flat-bed truck owned by Faisal and his brother.  Faisal became our driver for the rest of our coverage.

He still looks the same. Grinning from ear to ear and a fast-talking motormouth, still negotiating the price of his car.  He's moved house closer to the airport but says work as a driver is drying up now that aid workers are leaving.

About 15 minutes into our drive, Faisal's car starts filling up with smoke and we have to pull over.  Nothing some pliers can't fix, he says grinning.

Some things don't change.

I'm on my way to Aceh. The first time I've been back since 2005 in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami.

Two women stand alone on a beach in a region of Banda Aceh devastated by the tsunami.

I'm actually really looking forward to going back and seeing how much has changed. Has Aceh realized its dream of "building back better"? Did those devastated villages, swept out to sea, ever rebuild? What happened to the orphaned children and fractured families? Will they ever be able to recover from that emotional loss?

The world responded to Aceh's plight with an outpouring of generosity. Money and aid - some $7 billion - was rushed to Aceh. How effectively was it managed? And what have we learned in the process?

But this is also a very personal visit for me. The devastation of the tsunami was so complete, so horrific, I have never seen anything like it and I hope the world never sees anything like it again.

And yet, I remeber also being inexplicably hopeful, as we clambered over the wreckage of destroyed homes. We cried often. Every person we spoke to had lost family. It was not uncommon to speak to a child who was the sole survivor in his or her family.

But there was also a gritty determination underneath the grief. It was not enough to survive. People in Aceh seemed determined to show that they would not just recover, but manage to thrive in the aftermath.

I remember a music school teacher who was determined to get a piano for the few students that survived. And a village chief that had drawn up plans to rebuild his village days before aid workers had reached him.

But it was always the children that seemed the most resilient. At one camp, I remember kids drawing pictures of the wall of water that took so many of their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. But then they would turn and smile and tell you how they planned to become teachers and doctors as if nothing could really stop them.

I'm looking forward to seeing if those dreams have been realized.

"There's no way on earth we're going to get out of here tonight. We'd have more luck playing pickup sticks with our butt-cheeks than we will getting a flight out of here before daybreak."

People, people everywhere but not a plane to spare. Charles de Gaulle airport during the disruption.

So said Del in the movie "Planes, Trains and Automobiles." A line I recalled with grim relish on Monday at Paris Charles de Gaulle as I tried to leave before Christmas.

Some of the confused and frustrated thousands were lucky and escaped after a single night's delay. Others I encountered are almost certainly still there. The man who lived at the airport for 18 years may be apprehensive that his record is at risk.

And it wasn't just Paris. The grapevine (always on overdrive where flight delays are concerned) said Brussels was worse; Amsterdam was paralyzed.

So what inspired this travel chaos in Europe? Was it the sort of record-breaking snowfall that closed US east coast airports for a few hours last weekend? Yet another strike by French air traffic controllers? Festive overbooking?

My own odyssey suggests a series of events colliding in a way that spelled chaos for an already over-stretched system.

From the outside, London Heathrow’s Terminal 4 looked peaceful enough on Monday morning. A couple of hardy smokers were braving the sleet. When I stepped inside I found out why. Lines snaked in every direction.

A Japanese woman was threatening an airport employee with some dreadful retribution; an Australian had been there 26 hours and was still waiting to begin her journey to Seoul.

Two inches of snow, the closure of the Eurostar rail service plus the failure of Air France’s computer system - and the scene resembled the scramble for the last flight out of Saigon.

In the face of the same questions thousands of times over and finger-wagging abuse the airport employees were a model of restraint and good humor.

Inevitably my flight to Paris to connect to Atlanta was very late leaving and even later landing. Sometimes taxiing at "CDG" takes longer than the flight itself. A crazy dash to gate E32 to connect was to no avail.

Along the way, I felt a pang of sorrow for the dozens lined up at "re-ticketing" windows. I would soon be joining them.

Waiting in an airport line for more than four hours is like a crash course in human anthropology. There are those who sidle up to the desk in a breathtaking effort to avoid queuing, apparently oblivious to the vicious glares at their back. There are those whose humor never seems to desert them; even cracking jokes about Christmas dinner in the airport bistro.

And then there are the airline employees (just three of them) tasked with finding non-existent seats for the unwashed masses. Some stick rigorously to their meal breaks, despite the risk of being lynched; others strain every sinew (I could get you on a flight to Budapest that would connect to Moscow where there is a flight to…)

Eventually I reached the front of the line. I was almost speechless to be there and stuttered that I needed to get to Atlanta the following day – please. Any route; any time; I’d pay for an upgrade. Nothing doing – everything was overbooked already.

I received a voucher for an anonymous hotel in an anonymous suburb. Would-be travelers swapped war stories in a bar that probably last saw this sort of business when France won the World Cup.

I returned to the airport at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday. The one airline employee at the Customer Service desk looked as if she was about to face a firing squad. Thinking she might want a last meal I bought her coffee and a croissant before the hordes arrived.

Hours later, she summoned me to the desk. Someone had not turned up for their flight to Cincinnati. If I ran…

As I collapsed into seat 21E, I thought for a moment about my bag – now apparently in the bowels of CDG along with 9,000 other "delayed" items. But you can’t have everything.

Banteay Chhmar, Cambodia - It's hot and I have a headache.

The sun is too bright and reflecting off the corrugated tin roofs of tiny shops. And there are so many people, it is dizzying.

Everywhere you look, throngs of people walking from home to store, store to home, milling around street vendor carts, begging for change, or sitting on plastic chairs by the side of the road silently watching it all unfold.

Sitting in this backseat of a cramped crew cab pickup truck, I'm sharing with two other guys, our backpacks, and a 16 kilogram camera.

It's 33 degrees Celsius and I'm told it's winter: The end of the rainy season. I can't imagine it could be any worse than this, so I ask our Cambodian driver what it's like here in the summer.

He looks at me through the rear view mirror.

"Hotter," he replies, focusing his smirking eyes back on the road.

No matter how tropical or humid the climate, dry humor exists everywhere.

Out the window, I see there are far too many people on the road and too many types of vehicles. Bicycles. Bicycles with motors rigged up to their frames. Motorcycles. Motorcycles with carriages rigged up to their backs. The Cambodians call those tuk-tuks: their equivalent of a taxi. Toyota Camrys and well-worn Nissan pickups. All fighting for space on the road with the cattle and chickens and men and children and women carrying woven wicker baskets on their heads.

There are no stop-lights, no stop signs. No rules or order to the roadway that I can make out, except that if you are going to pass, you have to honk.

A man on a motorcycle weaves around an old piece of farm equipment plodding down the road, then swerves awkwardly to avoid an oncoming car. The man's wife and two small children clutch on to each other's clothing, to avoid being thrown off.

It's all too much. I look in my backpack for a bottle of water. All the activity is making me nervous and nauseous.

Some of my crankiness can be attributed to the fact I'm just a few hours removed from an arduous 17 hour trans-Pacific flight that started in Atlanta, crossed the Arctic Circle, dropped me off in Seoul to catch my breath and stretch my cramping legs, and then carried me on to Siem Reap.

We're going to be here for the next 10 days shooting a documentary on human trafficking and the personal impact it has on the lives of families. Before we do that, though, we're taking a side trip to a place called Banteay Chhmar, to file a story about climate change and the effects it can have on a civilization.

Banteay Chhmar is the kind of place I didn't think still existed on Earth. An ancient ruin, it's discovered but still unknown. Built in the 12th century by the great Khmer ruler Jayavarman II, today it sits empty. Historians still don't know why the city was built or why it was abandoned. It's hard even to understand why it's still here. Just a few meters from a village with the same name, there are no tourists, no squatters and very little evidence that there ever have been.

There are only a few dozen local laborers who, under the supervision of project leader John Sanday, are working to restore the site to the point it's safe and attractive to outside visitors. The hope is, they'll be able to train locals to set up a responsible, sustainable tourist industry, where the money goes to members of the local community, not foreign investors from countries like South Korea, the United States, China, or Japan.

The city was abandoned more than 500 years ago. Sanday, who is an architect by trade and lives in Katmandu, is our guide. He tells us that scientists believe that changes in the climate coupled with political instability and an aging infrastructure. He surmises that a period of prolonged drought created water scarcity, food shortages and unrest, which forced the royal family to move south to the area which is now Phnom Penh.

When that happened, like the city's reservoirs, its wealth and economic energy also dried up.

As our truck rambled into the site, we turned onto a pathway that crossed over that same reservoir. Two giant Buddha heads made our welcome at the entrance.

I was amazed they were still there. Two minutes later we were in the main part of the city. Now I was shocked. To me, it felt like re-entering a city that had been evacuated during a bombing raid. Sanday led us around, pointing out why this gate was important, why rulers had created that massive bas relief to show their power, and how this structure had been felled by the roots of a tree. Everywhere you looked were piles of rubble. It went on for hundreds of meters in every direction.

There were large courtyards where only pillars remained. Huge rooms that opened to the sky and jungle canopy. Intricately carved doorways stood, upright and exposed, while the wall that had encased it lay in a heap. Each time you rounded a corner, or even turned your head, there was something new and breath-taking to look at and take a picture of.

My favorite part of the city, though, were faces of the Buddha, carved seamlessly into the towers of the temples, looking out over all of it. A precursor to the architecture you see on the Bayon Temple at Angkor Wat, the entire time we were there they seemed to be looking down at us, smiling knowingly, as we explored their city and pointed our cameras up to take their picture.

We spent two days there, bounding over the ruins, looking at the incredible art and architecture, taking pictures and discussing what led to the collapse of this once-powerful civilization.

When it was time to leave, and we crawled through to the old corridor made dark by dusk's fading light, I thought about the people who passed through these hallways so many centuries ago. I thought how interesting that, thanks to the potential tourism industry, their hard work then, might now bring about a new dawn in the lives of their descendents.

And as we packed into pick-up for our long ride back to Siem Reap, I was struck by another thought and smiled.

This was definitely worth the trip.

Copenhagen, Denmark - It's one of the first messages that I see at Copenhagen airport. "Let's turn Copenhagen into Hopenhagen." Posters displaying this slogan adorn the city everywhere I go.

A 'Hopenhagen' poster on display in the Danish capital.

Over the last few days, covering the events at COP 15, one wonders if perhaps the Danish government itself has been a little too hopeful thinking that a legally binding international document to replace the Kyoto Treaty can ever be achieved.

But while headline-grabbing issues - "Climategate"and the "Danish text" - have cast a shadow over the summit's Bella Center venue, there is still plenty of hope abounding that some sort of framework document or political agreement will be reached by December 18th.

This is down to mainly the overwhelming amount of young people present here. So far, I've seen people dressed as mermaids, robots and a strange version of the Blues Brothers in red suits.

It's their enthusiasm that's infectious and I think also serves as a reminder as to why the international community has a great responsibility to come to some type of accord. It's not for our generation so much but for those who come after us.

As one young activist told me, she doesn't mind looking silly if a strange costume is what it takes so that people hear her message. Looking at the hundreds of forgettable attendees in the halls, she might have a point.

Hopeful too are the non-governmental organizations. They cite U.S. President Barack Obama's visit as the catalyst for their optimism.

Everybody knows that the two key countries that could influence the outcome of this summit are China and the United States. The latter even more so as where it goes, others tend to follow.

In the impressive American Summit Center, while hundreds gather around a big screen watching the U.S. president receive his Nobel Peace Prize, one of his secretaries tells us that if Obama can't drive the COP 15 agenda forward, who can?

It's a message that seems to be shared by many people here who admit that their hopes were much lower even two weeks ago when it looked like COP 15 was not going to be much more than a massive anti-climax. President Barack Obama? Yes! He can!

It's the vibrancy of the Bella Center which is really captivating however. In terms of events that I've helped cover, this is by far the largest in terms of the amount of journalists and participants who are here. Apparently 3,500 journalists are accredited as opposed to the 2,000 which were originally expected.

Here in the halls, people in traditional Peruvian costumes jostle for space with the suited observers from energy companies and over-excited young students. There seems to be a representative from literally every part of the world and everyday there seems to be more and more people...all with a message to bring.

It will be interesting to see if COP 15 really will be remembered by the world as the summit that changed the course of climate change, whether optimism can overcome the deep chasms between the developing world and the so-called developed world, whether negotiators can succeed in managing the delicate balance between economy, industry and our earth's fragile existence.

But for the next week or so the city of Copenhagen continues to be Hopenhagen.

Paris, France - Covering what is probably one of the most wired events in the world, it's hard to deliver any surprises that haven't already been blogged, tweeted, emailed, Facebooked or simply reported to death within seconds of occurring.

At LeWeb, a major Internet conference in Paris, most delegates come armed to the teeth with laptops, phones, cameras and other gadgetry to broadcast their experiences in "real time" (this year's online buzz word).

According to organizers, more than 3,000 devices were connected to the conference's mega-fast broadband during the opening day of the session, while thousands more users logged on to a Web site streaming the main events.

And as if that wasn't enough, no less than 25,000 tweets relating to LeWeb were posted via Twitter, chronicling everything from major company announcements down to punch-ups with taxi drivers on the street outside.

So, it was with pleasure that - despite being hopelessly underequipped with a misfiring computer, a two-year-old BlackBerry, an even older camera and a cantankerous dictaphone - I managed to create genuine surprise with something as simple as a pen and paper.

Interviewing one delegate, Swiss blogger Marcel Bernet, I resorted to abandoning my ailing technology and noting down his comments in shorthand - a compulsory skill for journalists trained in Britain that comes in handy when all else fails.

A gratifyingly impressed Bernet, who confessed that he had learned to write "steno" himself before eschewing such retro means of reporting, leapt into action, filmed the event and - inevitably - posted it on YouTube.