Vietnam / Cambodia

Once again, it's been a long time since my last post. With just two or three days sailing between Vietnam, China, and Japan, I've been too busy preparing lectures, organizing "cultural preports", and preparing for travels in the next port to get to the blog. But now that we've embarked on our longest ocean-crossing--18 days across the Pacific--I think I'll have time to catch up. We're four days into the crossing this morning, the seas are calm, and the sun is shining.

Our visit to Vietnam and Cambodia was in many ways the most interesting one so far, especially to someone like me who studies and teaches about Asian international relations and grew up during the Vietnam War and Cambodian Killing Field eras. As we approached the port of Ho Chi Minh City, I lectured on the war and the great power competition between the United States, Soviet Union, and China that contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. We had on board as an interport lecturer a visitor from Cambodia named Kaseka Phon who contributed lectures on Cambodian history, covering not just the modern period but also the period in which Cambodia was one of the richest and most dominant kingdoms in Asia--producing the extensive and beautiful temples of Angkor Wat that are shown in the first photo and more below.

Our first excursion in Vietnam was a visit to the Cu Chi Tunnels, where the Viet Cong hid out in dense forest just outside a giant American military base during the war. This photo shows one of our students slipping into a hiding places used by the Viet Cong fighters. Once the lid was put on top of him, you couldn't see any evidence of the hiding place along the trail. The location also gave us a chance to crawl down into some of the tunnels where hundreds of fighters were able to hide out underground, protected by the bombs dropped on the area and able to pop up to harass the US soldiers sent from the base to pacify the area. Having read and studied about the war mostly from an American perspective, it was quite a change to watch a propaganda film produced by the North Vietnamese extolling the sacrifices of the Cu Chi warriors and visiting a graveyard and memorial showing vicious US soldiers killing Vietnamese.

If we had stayed in Vietnam, we would have visited more war memorial sites, but we had planned to devote most of this port stay to a trip to Siem Riep in Cambodia, which began on our second day. The very first evening there, we visited Angkor Wat and explored this almost 1,000-year-old temple. Our visit would take us to a total of five temples in this area, but this was the grandest and most famous. We were able to view it at sunset and sunrise the next morning and took more pictures than can be shared in a blog (we'll save them to show you in the future).

The temple we visited midmorning the next day, Angkor Thom, was actually more fascinating to me. It told classic tales in carved panels like that shown here. The panels also included scenes from daily life many centuries ago.

The towers, with faces of Buddha, were also amazing. I'm glad we have photos to share since it is hard to describe the mystical, magical feel of this place. This temple complex, built a century after Angkor Wat by another in the line of Khmer kings, demonstrated the incredible wealth of this place in an era when the ancestors of modern Cambodians presided over the grandest regime in Southeast Asia. As our guide, Nin, shared some of this history, it was clear he carried many centuries' worth of grievance against the Thais and Vietnamese who had invaded the Khmer lands over the years and chipped away at the territory to the point where Cambodia today is one of the smallest and poorest of the states in the region.

Among the other three temples we visited, the one that stands out most is the "jungle temple." The authorities who have been restoring temples in this area since they were "rediscovered" in the jungle in the 1850s decided to leave in place many of the large trees that had grown up in and around this temple.

When French archaeologists first came to the area, all of the great temples from the Khmer kingdom had been covered over by dense growth. They removed these as they restored Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, but in the jungle temple the trees had merged with the structure to such an extent the removing the trees threatened to bring them down. These two photos capture, again, the enchanted feel of the place.

In between these temple visits, we had a chance to explore a floating village on Lake Tonle Sap, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world. This lake grows during the wet season when surplus water from the Mekong flows up a tributary into it. Then the flow of water reverses and water flows out during the dry season. We happened to be there as the lake approached its maximum size, flooding large areas where local residents build their houses on stilts. The lake contains a bounty of fish, and entire floating villages, complete with churches, schools, and libraries have grown up around the fishing families that park their boats to take advantage of the best fishing grounds and move them with the seasons.

While the inherent beauty of Cambodia had a great to do with why we enjoyed this visit so much, our stay was made even more pleasant by the opportunity it gave us to get to know our guide, Nin. He was incredibly kind and compassionate, and by sharing some of his personal story--about how he had lost his parents to Khmer Rouge brutality when he was just a child and how his life continued to be difficult because of the poverty and poor governance of his country--and juxtaposing this with the grandeur of the Khmer kingdoms we were viewing, he helped us get a sense of how Cambodians see much of their history as a grand tragedy. And yet they are warm and friendly, and make us feel more welcome than we've felt in any visit so far on this voyage. Thanks, Nin.