The Arizona Republic (USA)
May. 21, 2006
CAMBODIA - The gleaming eyes painted on the passing junk stared ominously ahead, while nearby, a dredge, still bearing U.S. military markings, presumably from the time of the American War (as the Vietnam War is called in Vietnam), clanged as it hauled sand from the bottom of the Mekong River.
Onshore, a man tossed a large circular net into the river, hoping to haul in that night's dinner. Watching the orange ball of the sun slip below the trees as we sailed up the Mekong toward Cambodia, it was hard to believe that only 26 hours earlier we were in Phoenix battling traffic on the 202.
Ours was, at least partially, the same route plotted by Capt. Willard and Chief Phillips in the Vietnam War classic Apocalypse Now. Only in 2006, no one was shooting and no one was shouting, "Don't get off the boat! Don't get off the boat!" Although reminders of the war were around us, getting off the boat was the reason we were in Vietnam and Cambodia.
The boat was not a Navy "Swift Boat," it was the R.V. Mekong Pandaw, owned and operated by the Irrawaddy Flotilla Co., a Scottish company. The company operates the only two boats (the Tonle Pandaw is the other vessel) that provide scheduled cruises on the Mekong River in Vietnam and Cambodia; two other boats also cruise the Irrawaddy River in Myanmar (Burma).
We went aboard the Mekong Pandaw in My Tho, south of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and sailed upriver to Siem Reap (Angkor Wat), Cambodia, where we disembarked.
As you travel upstream on the seven-night cruise, the character of the river changes - from a crowded international waterway around My Tho and Cai Be in Vietnam to little more than a tropical backwater in Cambodia beyond Kampong Cham.
The region is so diverse that none of the stops are redundant. In Cai Be, we saw a floating market and a brick works, and visited local communities and families.
Crossing the border into Cambodia just beyond Chau Doc couldn't have been easier - the boat's crew collected our passports and took care of most of the paperwork, even filling out the visa forms - all we had to do was sign them.
Across the border, the river in Cambodia was quieter, without the constant drone of diesel engines and clang of dredging equipment. Onshore, Cambodia's greater poverty was obvious. Working-class homes, made of tin in Vietnam, were made of rough-hewn wood in Cambodia. The homes of more impoverished families, wooden houses in Vietnam, were thatched huts in Cambodia. Even the Cambodian cows were skinnier.
In Vietnam, folks were friendly but reserved. They waved to the passengers as the Mekong Pandaw passed. In Cambodia, children bounded down to the riverbank, shouted, "Hello, hello!" and waved wildly as the boat chugged by.
Tortured past
However, it's impossible to view Cambodia outside the context of wars through much of the past century. This bloody history includes the nearly four-year reign of terror by the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s.
For six years, Cambodia has enjoyed relative peace.
In Kampong Cham, Koung Thol, a "tuk-tuk" operator (tuk-tuks are motorized rickshaws that serve as taxis in most of Cambodia), said his father had been a high-ranking officer in the Cambodian army that fought the Khmer Rouge in vain. His father, high-school-educated mother and college-educated aunt and uncle were executed after the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. His brothers and sisters fled toward Thailand, but he hasn't heard from them in nearly 30 years and assumes they are dead. He lived in the jungle until the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia in 1979.
Yet, against that backdrop, wherever we went in Cambodia, people were smiling and schools were packed. Peam Chihykaung, a community so small it doesn't have a gas station, had five English-language schools with roomfuls of Cambodian children and teenagers struggling to learn the foreign tongue.
One of the joys of taking the Mekong Pandaw upriver was its leisurely speed of about 7 mph, exposing you to parts of Vietnam and Cambodia you couldn't see any other way.
Horrifying sites
On the third night of the cruise, the Mekong Pandaw tied up in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. In the morning, some folks toured the city in air-conditioned motor coaches and some walked around on their own.
The sites most worth seeing - the Toul Sleng Museum, the Royal Palace, the temple of Wat Phnom and the old market - are within easy walking distance of the pier. (The Mekong Pandaw also offers air-conditioned motor-coach tours of these sites, but the area is compact enough that independent travelers might want to explore it on their own on foot.) After a morning tour of Phnom Penh, you can return to the boat for one of the excellent meals served aboard or eat lunch on your own in one of the city's restaurants.
The afternoon tours in Phnom Penh are heartbreaking but probably the most important ones you will take on the cruise. The first stop is at the Toul Sleng Museum. It had been a high school before the Khmer Rouge took over and used it as a prison and torture facility. Some of the cells are still there, as are the tools of the torture trade, such as manacles and car batteries. The walls of the museum are lined with victims' mug shots, taken by their torturers as they went about their grisly work.
A souvenir stand at Toul Sleng sells DVD copies of the movie The Killing Fields and books about the Cambodian genocide. From Toul Sleng, the tour stops at Choeung Ek, which was a killing field, about nine miles southwest of downtown Phnom Penh. Thousands of such killing fields spanned Cambodia during the nation's holocaust, which claimed between 1 million and 2 million lives. Almost 9,000 skeletons have been excavated from one small field near Angkor Wat, and each rainy season exposes more. The excavated skulls are on display in a shrine in the center of the field.
Angkor Wat
The boat cast off from Phnom Penh early the next morning and continued upriver to several small Cambodian towns. Peam Chihykaung, Kampong Cham and Kampong Chhnang are well off the beaten tourist path. We were the only travelers in these communities during our port calls there, and the people in the towns welcomed us into their homes, schools and temples.
The cruise ended at the mouth of the Tonle Sap (Great Lake). Because of its shallow draft, the Mekong Pandaw can get into places that larger vessels cannot. But this part of the river and lake are too shallow for even it to navigate safely. So we transferred to an air-conditioned high-speed ferry for a three-hour run across the Tonle Sap toward Siem Reap. At the lake's opposite end, which is even shallower, we transferred to another, much smaller and slower boat for a 20-minute ride through the shallows. We then transferred to a small bus for a 30-minute ride to a hotel in Siem Reap, the town closest to the ruins of Angkor Wat.
Angkor Wat, the center of the ancient Khmer empire, is a massive complex of Buddhist and Hindu temples. Some were built as long ago as 950, but most were built around 1100-1200. Angkor Wat is the most important and spectacular temple in the complex, but the entire area, about 77 square miles, now is known collectively as Angkor Wat.
No trip to Cambodia is complete without a trip to Angkor. The Pandaw cruises provide you with about 48 hours in Siem Reap and about eight hours in Angkor, which is barely enough time to scratch the surface of this World Heritage Site. If you choose to spend extra time at the beginning or end of the trip, I would plan to spend it in Siem Reap and the Angkor complex.
Hundreds of temples are scattered throughout the Angkor complex. The best times to visit are early morning, before the heat of the day sets in (daily highs in central Cambodia easily can break triple digits and are accompanied by oppressive humidity), and late afternoon, when the setting sun bathes the main Angkor Wat temple in a warm orange glow.
The Cambodian government expects 1.5 million tourists to visit Angkor this year. As recently as 1989, virtually no tourists were coming to Cambodia or Angkor.
Angkor Wat has turned Siem Reap into a major international tourist destination. Visitors stay at five-star hotels that rival any Scottsdale resort. Air-conditioned Lexus sedans share road space with horse-drawn carts. Restaurants catering to the jet set and "glitterati" are on the same block as sidewalk food vendors using charcoal braziers. To accommodate the tourists, a new international airport is under construction on the edge of town. It's expected to open this summer.
From Siem Reap, we were driven to the current airport to catch a flight to Da Nang, Vietnam, then to Singapore and on to Los Angeles. Finally, 48 hours after walking through a temple that was used as a house of worship 400 years before Columbus came to the "New World," we were back in Phoenix.
Onshore, a man tossed a large circular net into the river, hoping to haul in that night's dinner. Watching the orange ball of the sun slip below the trees as we sailed up the Mekong toward Cambodia, it was hard to believe that only 26 hours earlier we were in Phoenix battling traffic on the 202.
Ours was, at least partially, the same route plotted by Capt. Willard and Chief Phillips in the Vietnam War classic Apocalypse Now. Only in 2006, no one was shooting and no one was shouting, "Don't get off the boat! Don't get off the boat!" Although reminders of the war were around us, getting off the boat was the reason we were in Vietnam and Cambodia.
The boat was not a Navy "Swift Boat," it was the R.V. Mekong Pandaw, owned and operated by the Irrawaddy Flotilla Co., a Scottish company. The company operates the only two boats (the Tonle Pandaw is the other vessel) that provide scheduled cruises on the Mekong River in Vietnam and Cambodia; two other boats also cruise the Irrawaddy River in Myanmar (Burma).
We went aboard the Mekong Pandaw in My Tho, south of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and sailed upriver to Siem Reap (Angkor Wat), Cambodia, where we disembarked.
As you travel upstream on the seven-night cruise, the character of the river changes - from a crowded international waterway around My Tho and Cai Be in Vietnam to little more than a tropical backwater in Cambodia beyond Kampong Cham.
The region is so diverse that none of the stops are redundant. In Cai Be, we saw a floating market and a brick works, and visited local communities and families.
Crossing the border into Cambodia just beyond Chau Doc couldn't have been easier - the boat's crew collected our passports and took care of most of the paperwork, even filling out the visa forms - all we had to do was sign them.
Across the border, the river in Cambodia was quieter, without the constant drone of diesel engines and clang of dredging equipment. Onshore, Cambodia's greater poverty was obvious. Working-class homes, made of tin in Vietnam, were made of rough-hewn wood in Cambodia. The homes of more impoverished families, wooden houses in Vietnam, were thatched huts in Cambodia. Even the Cambodian cows were skinnier.
In Vietnam, folks were friendly but reserved. They waved to the passengers as the Mekong Pandaw passed. In Cambodia, children bounded down to the riverbank, shouted, "Hello, hello!" and waved wildly as the boat chugged by.
Tortured past
However, it's impossible to view Cambodia outside the context of wars through much of the past century. This bloody history includes the nearly four-year reign of terror by the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s.
For six years, Cambodia has enjoyed relative peace.
In Kampong Cham, Koung Thol, a "tuk-tuk" operator (tuk-tuks are motorized rickshaws that serve as taxis in most of Cambodia), said his father had been a high-ranking officer in the Cambodian army that fought the Khmer Rouge in vain. His father, high-school-educated mother and college-educated aunt and uncle were executed after the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. His brothers and sisters fled toward Thailand, but he hasn't heard from them in nearly 30 years and assumes they are dead. He lived in the jungle until the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia in 1979.
Yet, against that backdrop, wherever we went in Cambodia, people were smiling and schools were packed. Peam Chihykaung, a community so small it doesn't have a gas station, had five English-language schools with roomfuls of Cambodian children and teenagers struggling to learn the foreign tongue.
One of the joys of taking the Mekong Pandaw upriver was its leisurely speed of about 7 mph, exposing you to parts of Vietnam and Cambodia you couldn't see any other way.
Horrifying sites
On the third night of the cruise, the Mekong Pandaw tied up in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. In the morning, some folks toured the city in air-conditioned motor coaches and some walked around on their own.
The sites most worth seeing - the Toul Sleng Museum, the Royal Palace, the temple of Wat Phnom and the old market - are within easy walking distance of the pier. (The Mekong Pandaw also offers air-conditioned motor-coach tours of these sites, but the area is compact enough that independent travelers might want to explore it on their own on foot.) After a morning tour of Phnom Penh, you can return to the boat for one of the excellent meals served aboard or eat lunch on your own in one of the city's restaurants.
The afternoon tours in Phnom Penh are heartbreaking but probably the most important ones you will take on the cruise. The first stop is at the Toul Sleng Museum. It had been a high school before the Khmer Rouge took over and used it as a prison and torture facility. Some of the cells are still there, as are the tools of the torture trade, such as manacles and car batteries. The walls of the museum are lined with victims' mug shots, taken by their torturers as they went about their grisly work.
A souvenir stand at Toul Sleng sells DVD copies of the movie The Killing Fields and books about the Cambodian genocide. From Toul Sleng, the tour stops at Choeung Ek, which was a killing field, about nine miles southwest of downtown Phnom Penh. Thousands of such killing fields spanned Cambodia during the nation's holocaust, which claimed between 1 million and 2 million lives. Almost 9,000 skeletons have been excavated from one small field near Angkor Wat, and each rainy season exposes more. The excavated skulls are on display in a shrine in the center of the field.
Angkor Wat
The boat cast off from Phnom Penh early the next morning and continued upriver to several small Cambodian towns. Peam Chihykaung, Kampong Cham and Kampong Chhnang are well off the beaten tourist path. We were the only travelers in these communities during our port calls there, and the people in the towns welcomed us into their homes, schools and temples.
The cruise ended at the mouth of the Tonle Sap (Great Lake). Because of its shallow draft, the Mekong Pandaw can get into places that larger vessels cannot. But this part of the river and lake are too shallow for even it to navigate safely. So we transferred to an air-conditioned high-speed ferry for a three-hour run across the Tonle Sap toward Siem Reap. At the lake's opposite end, which is even shallower, we transferred to another, much smaller and slower boat for a 20-minute ride through the shallows. We then transferred to a small bus for a 30-minute ride to a hotel in Siem Reap, the town closest to the ruins of Angkor Wat.
Angkor Wat, the center of the ancient Khmer empire, is a massive complex of Buddhist and Hindu temples. Some were built as long ago as 950, but most were built around 1100-1200. Angkor Wat is the most important and spectacular temple in the complex, but the entire area, about 77 square miles, now is known collectively as Angkor Wat.
No trip to Cambodia is complete without a trip to Angkor. The Pandaw cruises provide you with about 48 hours in Siem Reap and about eight hours in Angkor, which is barely enough time to scratch the surface of this World Heritage Site. If you choose to spend extra time at the beginning or end of the trip, I would plan to spend it in Siem Reap and the Angkor complex.
Hundreds of temples are scattered throughout the Angkor complex. The best times to visit are early morning, before the heat of the day sets in (daily highs in central Cambodia easily can break triple digits and are accompanied by oppressive humidity), and late afternoon, when the setting sun bathes the main Angkor Wat temple in a warm orange glow.
The Cambodian government expects 1.5 million tourists to visit Angkor this year. As recently as 1989, virtually no tourists were coming to Cambodia or Angkor.
Angkor Wat has turned Siem Reap into a major international tourist destination. Visitors stay at five-star hotels that rival any Scottsdale resort. Air-conditioned Lexus sedans share road space with horse-drawn carts. Restaurants catering to the jet set and "glitterati" are on the same block as sidewalk food vendors using charcoal braziers. To accommodate the tourists, a new international airport is under construction on the edge of town. It's expected to open this summer.
From Siem Reap, we were driven to the current airport to catch a flight to Da Nang, Vietnam, then to Singapore and on to Los Angeles. Finally, 48 hours after walking through a temple that was used as a house of worship 400 years before Columbus came to the "New World," we were back in Phoenix.
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