Having satisfied our curiosity about the horrors visited upon the inhabitants of the Plain of Jars and beyond, our Mekong journey carried on from Vientiane. After reading the Vientiane Times, a state owned newspaper, and having breakfast at the Scandinavian Bakery, I went to collect Simon following a night of white mischief. We got into Sommay’s jeep and I threw him the newspaper with the headlines, “Crackdown: Night Clubs and Brothels Closed in Vientiane.” As we bounced down the red earth road, Vientiane receding in the rear view, Simon gave me the garbled version of dancing with the cats in the government cathouse.
We picked up the tarmac and drove east out of Vientiane on Highway 13. Built in the 1930s by the French, the road tracks the meander of the Mekong from a discreet distance, converging with it at the larger villages, and stretches all the way to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City). Near Pak Kading, as the Mekong begins to turn south toward the panhandle of Laos, we crossed a bridge built by the Soviets over the pristine Kading River. The bridge was constructed in the early 1980s when the Soviets were playing sugar daddy to the newborn communist regime. At the confluence of the two rivers the Kading River broadens into a sea of jade before melting into the silt-laden Mekong.
The Kading originates in the Annamite Mountains bordering Vietnam, a wilderness home to such rare animals as Asiatic black bears, langurs, gibbons and elephants. To the east of Pak Kading, running alongside and often braiding the Mekong catchment area all the way to the delta of Vietnam, is the jungly track once known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
During the Vietnam War, there were 12,000 miles of trail having five main tracks, 29 major branches, and myriad cutoffs, all of it pulsing with caravans of martial materiel. The trail spread from Laos and Cambodia into the border frontiers of South Vietnam like seismic fissures in a perpetual state of aftershock. Today, the trail is essentially extinct, although still alive with unexploded ordnance. In many places it has been overgrown by the primeval forest from which it was carved.
Several miles south of Pak Kading, we cut through the Hmong village of Ban Tong Na Me. Stilted homes of thatch and wattle gave way to fallow wet rice fields. An air of poverty hung over the place. Before being resettled at Ban Tong Na Me in 1996, the entire village had spent 21 years as refugees. Sommay was sympathetic to their plight and explained how they have not adapted to living in the lowlands. Instead they have attempted to drift back into the mountain fastnesses where they once lived. Regarding the uplands as their exclusive domain, they had recently slashed-and-burned several acres of government tea plantations to plant their own crops. According to a Hmong proverb, “Fish swim in the water; birds fly in the air; the Hmong live in the mountains.”
For centuries, the Iron Age Hmong have distinguished themselves in China and Southeast Asia by maintaining their ethnic identification without the cultural glue of a written language; it is instead their deeply embedded animist world-view that makes assimilation into other cultures extremely problematic. Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, describes Hmong traits: they do not like to take orders; do not like to lose; would rather flee, fight or die than surrender; are not intimidated by being outnumbered; are rarely persuaded of the superiority of customs of other cultures, even those more powerful than their own. And they are capable of getting very angry.
The Hmongs, as historic enemies of the Vietnamese, were recruited by the CIA as anti-communist soldiers. Known in the quirky military parlance as “irregulars,” they became the main force fighting the communists in Laos. But after the war, the United States denied them any compensation or veterans’ benefits despite their role as surrogates for U.S. GIs in fighting communists for as long as 15 years. In fact, the communist takeover forced more than 120,000 Hmong to flee Laos. They had been sucked into the secret war, spin-cycled through its havoc, and then centrifuged across the Mekong to the Ban Vinai refugee camp, among others, in Thailand.
A refugee has three options, none easy for the Hmongs: integrate into the first country of refuge (which Thailand refused to allow); eventually repatriate when the situation stabilizes (which it did not within a reasonable time); or convince a third country to open its doors. Ideally, the Hmong should have returned to Laos, but in 1975 the Pathet Lao announced a policy of genocide against them.
The fleeing families were forced to live in the cramped, deracinating confines of the Thai refugee camps for several years before they could find a sponsoring country. Finally, honoring old CIA promises, the United States opened its doors to the homeless Hmong veterans and their families. Many, as it happened, were processed into the United States at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and later settled in nearby Fort Smith, my hometown.
By choice, the Hmong living in the village of Ban Tong Na Me never made the leap from the Stone Age to the Space Age. The remote upland valleys, with pristine rivers bountiful with fish, and spirit-inhabited forests where they hunt, forage and gather herbs, are the settings for their world view.
Before long we passed the turnoff for Highway 8, which leads through Kaew Neua Pass into the north of Vietnam, a distance of about 60 miles. We stopped for lunch in Thakek, a river town where the population is mostly Vietnamese. The Mekong around Thakek has always been an unspoken buffer zone—for centuries a watery Great Wall separating the mandalas of Thailand and Vietnam. In the first half of the 20th century, many Vietnamese emigrated to Laos as colonial administrators, doing the bidding of the French over the less industrious locals. Those Vietnamese stayed and then more arrived en masse after the French left the north of Vietnam in 1954.
We found a Vietnamese pho shop along the forlorn promenade on the river, next to the colonial square, with its shabby stucco buildings in blue and buff-yellow. The French buildings wore a mangy face of chipped paint and crooked shutters. Thakek was a ghost town where all clocks had stopped. The loudest noise was the buzz of flies. I walked down the waterfront and found a couple of monks sitting on the floodwall. A leper cowered under a tree, fitfully scratching his sloughing skin and avoiding the sun.
In a typical pairing of Thai and Laotian cities along the Mekong, across the lazy slick of muddy water was the ancient muang of Nakhon Phanom, smiling back with glints of urban fluorescence at its country cousins. Many anti-colonial Vietnamese settled in Nakhon Phanom in the early 20th century to escape the yoke of the French. The most famous of those settlers, whose house and garden now stand as a tourist attraction, was Father Chin, Ho Chi Minh.
During my REMF days as a finance clerk, I used to pay an army detachment at Nakhon Phanom, or NKP as we called it. The detachment was part of a special operations group attached to a gaggle of Air Commandos flying the panhandle of Laos and the Plain of Jars. NKP was blessed with having one of the largest statues of Buddha in all of Thailand for protection. It was the perfect location for a special operations unit also because of its proximity to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Beginning in 1959, and lasting for the next 16 years, over a million North Vietnamese went south on the Trail, toting countless tons of supplies and weaponry. By the mid-1960s, activity on the trail was like “the Long Island Expressway during rush hour,” in the words of one Special Forces commando.
The Pentagon and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, were bedeviled by how to stem the flow. Old fashioned bombing as a means of interdiction had failed. The US techies had already unleashed the latest products from Dow Chemical: silver iodide to make rain, Calgon to make mud, and Agent Orange to defoliate the forest. Then operation “Igloo White” was hatched. The busiest sections of the trail were “wired” like a pinball machine with tens of thousands of seismic and acoustic sensors. When the system detected movement, it beamed coordinates to drones circling above. Back at command center in NKP, circuit boards flashed with lights to indicate bombing targets. It was the control panel for the biggest blitzkrieg in history. By 1970, our best fighter planes were flying almost 10,000 sorties a month over the trail and our B-52s were averaging 900 missions a month. Lower Laos and the Ho Chi Minh Trail became to many American military leaders what Moby Dick was to Captain Ahab—the object of a self-defeating obsession.
In the first century A.D., the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, “They made a wasteland and called it peace.” Two millennia later we dubbed it “peace with honor.”
Near the crossroads town of Xeno, at Highway 13’s intersection with Vietnam’s Highway 9, we turned west on a tributary road leading to the Mekong. By mid-afternoon we arrived in Savannakhet, a larger, dustier version of Thakek.
I had been to Savannakhet once, crossing from the Thai sister city of Mukdahan by ferry. On that trip a dry-season island emerged in the middle of the Mekong, blocking the ferry’s passage. The boat was stacked with tins of Thai coffee, plastic containers of detergent, tires, canned goods and piles of packaged incense. It was crowded with day shoppers from both countries, who cross the river border freely without passports.
I stayed on that trip at a courtyard-style guesthouse frequented by international aid and development staff and owned by the Donald Trump of lower Laos—a man nicknamed Souvanna. There were more SUVs parked around the courtyard than I had seen in all of Vientiane. When I checked in, Souvanna’s daughter Tina invited me to go swimming across the street in a large pool, perhaps the only one in the panhandle of Laos. Unlike the surrounding streets of tamped earth, the road in front of the motel was paved in concrete.
Souvanna was pudgy for a Laotian, and dark-skinned. As the local big wheel, he seemed to benefit from crony capitalism in the mode of Russia, via good connections in Vientiane. He owned, among other assets, “the” concrete and dredging company P.P.S. Sand & Rock, three cash-ginning ferries, including the one on which I had arrived, a travel agency, a 10,000 square foot palace in Vientiane, a Mercedes, and Lexus. He was President of the Chamber of Commerce and Vice President of the Savannakhet Red Cross. Eyes shining like a boy showing off his Christmas gifts, he conveyed all this within 10 minutes of meeting me, offering his business cards and various snapshots as proof.
I didn’t get to meet Souvanna’s wife. She had left for Bangkok to do some shopping. I spent my time drinking beer and talking to Tina. She took her anglicized name when she attended the International School in Vientiane. After leaving that pricey institution (with tuition of $12,000 a year), she moved to the States to live with an aunt and attend high school in Baltimore. While in the States she tooled around in a $25,000 Toyota Camry. After graduating high school, she went to live with a sister in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Tina’s sister was married to an enlisted man with the 82nd Airborne based there. Tina had not yet told Dad, but she, too, was in love with one of those rangers. The American called once a week and they exchanged daily emails. She showed me a picture of him in his Persian Gulf uniform. “On soldier’s pay he can’t afford a ticket to Savannakhet from North Carolina,” she moaned. And no Laotian father would ever consider buying his daughter a ticket to the States to see a boyfriend.
Tina had been to Paris, and then Fort Bragg. She was smitten with America. “There is no way I will date or marry a Lao man.” But as long as she lives in Savannakhet, she has to keep both feet in Lao tradition. She stays in at night unless chaperoned. Otherwise she would be looked down upon as having low morals, or worse still, as a prostitute. Her real dream is to marry her “ranger dude” and move him to Savannakhet to be a part of the family business.
As darkness fell, Souvanna burst into the office and opened the vault. He and Tina counted out what must have been a trillion kip, the equivalent of about a thousand dollars. It was payday for P.P.S. Sand & Rock. Seventy or eighty funky-smelling laborers fell in line, and Tina counted out a week’s pay, about $15 a piece. They were all tongues a-wagging, thirsty for a night of rice whiskey, or lao-lao.
While Tina paid the crew, Souvanna showed me snaps of himself with the former American ambassador. His favorite, however, was an eight-by-ten glossy with the American MIA team who stay at his motel when in Laos searching for remains. He handled all their field logistics, another tidy profit center, compliments of Uncle Sam.
After drinking the first half of a case of beer and seeing Souvanna’s MIA-team pictures, I mentioned having been stationed in Isaan while in the army. He stood up in surprise and shook my hand as if I were some long-lost relative. He considered us members of the same club; which club, I was unsure. His sudden warmth pointed at some collaboration with the Americans during the war, although he wouldn’t say so. But he had not left the country after the war. And now he was a tycoon.
An educated Lao friend later told me that a figure like Souvanna was probably “owned by the Politburo,” a group of nine who control all policy in Laos. “They send their kids to the U.S. to be educated,” my friend warned. “Be careful what you say if you ever see him again.” Even without the warning, I was as skeptical as I was intrigued by Souvanna.
We decided not to stay at his courtyard motel on this trip, although I was curious about how Tina and the “ranger dude” were doing after the passage of a year. Instead, we settled on a newly-built guesthouse a few blocks away from the river with air conditioning and a private shower.
Extending from the modern, box-like customs building, the river promenade was a cluster of plastic tarps slung over Lilliputian red and blue stools, where Laotian women served skewers of barbeque chicken and fresh fish. A block away, at the end of the town square, was a colonial church used by Vietnamese Catholics. The usual complement of dilapidated French buildings peeling from humidity flanked the square. Dotting the surrounding area were Chinese and Buddhist Temples, home to a kraal of half-painted, concrete stupas housing the ashes of deceased votaries. An inordinate number of dogs roamed the old part of Savannakhet, baring teeth at farangs. One Pancaker, with head wrapped in a red do-rag, his purse strapped across his chest, sat at the end of the colonial plaza beneath a shade tree, surrounded by kids as he sketched Savannakhet’s faded elegance.
Late afternoon I found Simon at a riverfront bar with a couple of Pancaker women. As travelers do, we exchanged stories of our journeys. Reflexively they asked how much we had paid for rooms in places like Muang Sing. We had paid five dollars. They stayed on one dollar, but had to take cold showers from a bucket and walk a gauntlet of goblins in the middle of the night to use a squat toilet.
They told of fellow Pancakers who had been invited to a hooch in Muang Sing to smoke opium. By the time the calumet-pipe got cooking, the police showed up and threatened to arrest them unless they paid hundreds of dollars on the spot. Our angels had served us well.
The Pancakers ordered Lao vegetarian dishes for dinner, while Simon and I requested hamburgers. We had to settle for water buffalo steak. hey were appalled, tossing light jibes across the table. Buzzed on the booze and full of mischief, Simon morphed into a Walter Mitty persona... “How about a Banana Pancake tour boat down the Mekong? Paint it yellow, shaped like a banana. Banana-scented, cold bucket showers, and a crew in yellow pantaloons. Banana pancakes served round the clock...”
After Simon’s shtick, our neighbors put their hound-dog faces back on. They had waited since early afternoon for their run-down guesthouse around the corner to turn on the water. It was ten o’clock and they hadn’t bathed in a few days. I had offered the shower in my room, but they were too proud—Pancaker pride. Simon and I disappeared into the sleepy silent streets.
Next morning, Simon recounted his descent into Savannakhet nightlife. He had followed an echo of music to an obscure alleyway at the back of the hotel. There a guitar and organ duo played Laotian ballads—sappy love songs—that blended into one another with no apparent beginning or end. The only foreigner present, Simon settled into a table by the stage. From that vantage point, he watched in amazement as a dance pageant unfolded.
Women of all ages and shapes swayed gracefully, at intervals lining up back to back, and twisting their elegant hands like enchantresses. In a seamless segue they glided around in a circle while the men slowly formed an inner ring, hands on hips, mirroring the women’s pace. Elegant, gentle, bizarre, the dance was the sala vhan lamvhong, a kind of mating dance peculiar to Savannakhet. The décor was 1960s neon, but the dance seemed to recall tribal ritual. Female companionship soon was offered, and the visionary artist found himself performing his own version of the dance.
We left early the next morning for Pakse, 150 miles to the south and the last town of any size before Cambodia. Colonial Highway 13 to Pakse was recently asphalted by a consortium of countries—Thailand, China and Japan—each taking an equal share in the construction. The highway bisects several tributaries of the Mekong—the Bang Nuan, Bang Hiang, and Don Rivers—all flowing out of the Annamite Mountains that border Vietnam. Except for one leftover iron bridge built by the French, the spans were made of concrete, by the ubiquitous Soviet and Australian bridge builders.
The market city of Pakse was built by the French at the turn of the last century as the southern-most of their administrative centers in Laos. They opted for Pakse instead of Champasak, the capital of the ancient kingdom of southern Laos, to avoid interference from the royals.
The Boun Oum Palace, as wide as it is tall, is a white monstrosity that dominates Pakse’s truncated skyline. The last Prince of Champasak, Boun Oum, was the third of Laos’ warring princes, and a devout anti-communist. He once commanded a revolutionary army based in the panhandle of Laos. In the early 60s, the CIA used him as a front for an airline, Boun Oum Airways, equipped with a couple of American planes and piloted by Asians.
Prince Boun Oum began constructing the palace in 1968 as a 1,000-room repository for his collection of fine art, including treasures he pilfered from the nearby pre-Angkor Wat Phu. Although his indulgent lifestyle of gambling and debauchery bloated him to the size of a Sumo wrestler, the roly poly Prince of Champasak was reputed to have indulged himself with over 20 wives. As the Pathet Lao neared victory, he fled Laos in 1974 for France, and never returned, dying in Paris in 1980.
Boun Oum Palace is now a Thai-owned hotel—whitewashed, rimmed in balustrades and wide verandahs—the Lego fantasy of a nouveau riche oilman from Dallas. In over three decades of traveling in Southeast Asia, I have never seen any building so out of place.
Road 13 in front of the palace was abuzz with tuk-tuks, sawngthaews, motorcycles with sidecars, saam-laaws (three wheeled bicycles), and motorcyles with women riding pillion, side-saddled under colorful parasols. There were many vintage American cars left by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, now serving as taxis. It was a scene from the streets of Havana.
Pakse is an ethnic crossroads, with the Bolaven Plateau and its ethnic minorities situated to the east, the Thai border a few miles west and the Khmer frontier not far to the south. Vietnamese comprise 40 percent of the local population, and there is the usual concentration of Chinese merchants. Throughout the town, a continuous flow of saffron-robed monks poured forth from the two-dozen temples there, while rifle-toting militia in camouflage uniforms patrolled the streets.
We tooled out of the hurly-burly of the streets to the surreal opulence of our hotel palace. A forest must have been sacrificed to build it—we found ourselves entombed in walls, floors and doors of musty teak. I decided to be Prince-for-a-Day, and took the royal suite on top with the whole floor to myself, for a pittance.
From my chambers, a spacious view of the Mekong unfolded—a shimmering band of bluish-green shaping the southern shores of Pakse. The muddy brown waters of the Don River snaked around from the north and west, encasing the city on a palm-shrouded tongue of land. Only a handful of French-era church steeples and one modern commercial building pierced the umbrella of palm trees.
Around dusk, I wandered down to the commoner’s floor to Simon’s room and tapped on his door. A Teutonic blond opened it, standing au naturel but for a towel teetering on the pointy ends of her tanned breasts. She was fine as frog’s hair. I took a deep breath and turned away: “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry! Do—do you know Simon?”
She adjusted the unruly towel. “No, and who are you?” I strained to keep eye contact, explaining who I was and apologizing again for knocking at the wrong room. She was unfazed. “I just came from Don Khon Island. It was sooo hot. Now I get a bottle of red wine and celebrate my 40th birthday in the air conditioning,” ending with a giggle and a smile.
A long silence; it was my move.
“Phil, I’ve been looking...,” Simon approached from behind and stopped mid-sentence as he clapped eyes on my nude Hildegarde.
“Oh, Simon, do you know... I didn’t get your name,” I said, still trying to steady my breath. With my marital vows intact, I hurried after Simon down to the verandah next to a garden of follies. The grounds in the back of the palace, nestled above the Don River, feature a Buddhist shrine flanked by a concrete menagerie of zebra, giraffe, kangaroo, elephant, lion, deer and cranes.
Over drinks and a few laughs about my encounter, we ordered burgers. The kitchen made its half-baked attempt: a baguette with ground beef, Thousand Island dressing and cucumbers.
The next morning Simon claimed his room had been visited by a poltergeist. Perhaps just bats and bad dreams. But I thought of the barrier of just six inches separating him from Hildegarde. My royal suite night was remarkable only for a gaggle of geckos hanging on the walls, shrieking with the lungs of raptors.
We drove south along the Mekong to the ancient imperial muang of Champasak. Going back to the early years of the first millennium in lower Laos, population centers such as Champasak coalesced wherever people were drawn together by ample local resources—food, water, tin, copper, iron, and salt. But these centers were unstable. Their chieftains augmented their authority by adopting Hindu deities from the Indian traders and holy men wandering the region. Lao historian Martin Stuart-Fox wrote:
“Indianization occurred... as a slow and complex [process] which owed more to the needs of the local elites than to any [missionary] impetus on the part of the Indian informers. Worship of the great Hindu god Siva reinforced the belief that kings were imbued with divine powers, and thus carried with it a powerful notion of [legitimacy].”
The sacred temple of Champasak, Wat Phu, was the center of a cult that worshiped the Hindu god Siva. Siva was formerly represented there by a phallic megalith, or lingam, where sacrificial rites were held. Khmer kings worshiped and sent priests to serve at Wat Phu during the ninth to thirteenth centuries. As in the case of Angkor, which began as a complex of temples dedicated to Hindu gods, in time the priests of Wat Phu overlaid Buddhist iconography and ritual in a seamless mix of the two Indian-born religions—a foreshadowing of Theravada Buddhism found throughout Southeast Asia today.
The white-sand beach at Ban Muang—the ferry crossing to Champasak—was teeming with food and drink vendors operating from a cluster of thatched huts. A picturesque row of pirogues were nosed up on the white sand. We drove warily onto the jerry-rigged ferry. The crudely built decking, with several gaping holes, was laid atop two deep-hulled metal pontoons, formerly U.S. Army patrol boats.
Three sawngthaews, overflowing with people and possessions, finessed their way onto the vessel. Market ladies sold skewers of sun-dried fish, golden balls of bitter apricot, gelatinous rice wrapped in banana fronds, and icy coconut juice mixed with sugar and rice. Kids in the water hung on to the anchor rope for a tow, shrieking with laughter. When the ferry approached the middle of the river, they let go and swam back to shore.
We passed through Champasak before skirting a muddy lake, shrunken almost to sludge by the dry-season heat. Except for a few kids astride the backs of water buffalo, the broiled landscape was empty of people. At the end of the lake was a run-down French-style villa, a residence once built for kings to occupy during the annual festival at Wat Phu. Rising above the villa in a haze of smoke was Linga Parvata, the pyramidal mountain thought to resemble a phallus by the Hindus who built Wat Phu.
A tumbled promenade, surrounded at its base by dried-up lotus ponds, led up the mountain through a long archway of blooming frangipani. Before antiquities thieves arrived, it had been bracketed with lions’ heads and nagas. A couple of snotty nosed temple urchins in tattered clothing, with incandescent smiles as captivating as those of my own children, joined us. They guided us through two decrepit pavilions amid a sandstone forest of carved lingams, lintels, statues and bas-reliefs showing Siva, Parvati, Ganesh and Nandi, a who’s who puzzle of Hindu Gods.
Walking up the narrow stairs to Wat Phu, the soothing shade of the frangipanis drew my thoughts to the ancient Khmers who must have enjoyed the same picturesque vista of the Mekong valley below. On top of the mountain, shrouded in a sprawl of ancient trees, a statue of Buddha wrapped in golden yellow stood next to the half-crumbled Siva sanctuary, which once housed the sacred lingam of the Hindu worshipers. Although many carved dancing apsaras (heavenly nymphs) and other Hindu images remained in the sanctuary, a statue of Buddha now presides in the inner sanctum, where the lingam once stood.
I followed the temple urchins beyond the sanctuary, past a blackened boulder incised with a crude relief of the Hindu triumvirate—Siva, Vishnu, and Brahma. A short walk from there, up a small outcropping, was a sheer wall indented with a shallow grotto from which a plastic pipe released trickles of fresh spring water. In ancient times, the purifying water was funneled there from the cave to wash the lingam. In the heat of the day, the cool water was rejuvenating. Locals say it is charged with sacred molecules of good luck. Along the same rock ledge, about 50 yards away, a giant footprint of Buddha was etched into the mountain. As an offering, I placed a nosegay of frangipani mixed with the orange blooms of a nearby acacia, given to me by the urchins.
When the French explorers arrived at Champasak in the 1860s, Mr. Delaporte, the expedition artist, wrote in a state of nostalgic passion:
“Indeed, what vanished beauty... after having wetted my lips with this fresh, limpid water, I lay down in the shadow of the rock, my head resting on an old, admirably worn-down stone which was lying in front of the cave. Looking around me, at the ruins which surrounded me, my spirit was transported to the days when we were visiting Angkor the Great...”
Now seated on the rock ledge described by Delaporte were a couple of German travelers. They had been battered for 12 hours on a provincial bus traveling to Champasak. Grousing at what they saw, they said they had expected the grandeur of Angkor.
Travel is an attitude, which often imitates the disciplines of a method actor: purge all preconceptions and replenish with fresh impressions. Although Wat Phu is a flyspeck next to “Angkor the Great,” the French explorer seemed to bask in its romance. In today’s shrunken world—where so many destinations are fair game for tourists swarming from pink tour buses—there is great solace in the solitude of such places as Wat Phu.
To the east of the old temple, beyond the monk’s residence, is the crocodile rock, believed to have been the site of human sacrifices conducted by the ancients during the annual Wat Phu festival. We and the urchins sat nearby in the shaded daydream of an old banyan. Its low-hanging branches framed a view of the Mekong valley’s timeless patchwork of field and forest.
Farther south on Colonial Highway 13, approaching the border of Cambodia, we left the tarmac for a pot-holed track that led to the riverside village of Ban Nakasang. Taking a shaky pirogue ride in shallow waters, we threaded our way through a flooded forest of willows where clusters of submerged water buffalo peeked out from the branches. We entered a narrow strait with stilted bungalows on either side. To the west and ahead was the French-built railroad trestle. And a few miles beyond the antiquated bridge, the mountains of Cambodia were amassed into a hazy sky.
We were in Si Phan Don, or Four Thousand Islands, a 30-mile section of the Mekong littered with inhabited islands. Here the river widens to almost nine miles, before narrowing at the Khone Falls, the doorstop to commercial boat traffic and river trade with China.
Louis Carne, a member of Doudart de Lagree’s 1866-67 expedition, wrote in his book Travels on the Mekong, “These cataracts offer an insurmountable obstacle to steam navigation... steamers can never plough the Mekong, as they do the Amazon or Mississippi; and Saigon can never be united to the western provinces of China by this immense river-way.” Van Wuysthoff had reached the same conclusion over 200 years before on his exploration of the river, but the French were not convinced. They persisted like salmon migrating upriver to spawn, attempting to hurdle the falls and scatter the milt and eggs of mission civilsatrice all the way to China.
By 1920 docking facilities were built on the south end of Don Khon island, complete with steam cranes and Vietnamese coolies. From the loading dock, a narrow gauge railroad track was laid, linking the islands of Don Khon and Don Det. When a boat arrived from downriver, the cargo was painstakingly offloaded on the south side of the falls. From there the freight was transshipped by miniature locomotive to another docking station on Don Det, where a fresh steam barge awaited.
When the Japanese occupied the region in 1940, the French abandoned the railroad. It had proved less than efficient. Even with the train, it took 37 days to ship cargo from Saigon to Luang Prabang by boat, longer than it took to travel by sea from Saigon to Marseille.
We debarked from the pirogue at the village of Ban Khon Tai and walked a shaded path of coconut palms to the old French hospital, now converted to a guesthouse of four rooms. Stilted huts along the path were strung below with fishnets, untangled and drying like gossamer curtains for the women and children sprawled in tropical torpor beneath the buildings on crude wooden divans or in hammocks. Sprinkled amid the hammocks and beds were bevies of pigs, chickens, fish traps and barrel-sized clay vats filled with water, in the Khmer style. A man on a bicycle selling hammocks pointed to his product, smiled broadly, and pedaled off. In the shadow of parasols, several women strolled by in brightly hued sarongs. They welcomed us with dulcet chirps of sabai dii, sabai dii. We felt as if we had been greeted by a covey of tropical birds.
A riotous garden of red and white bougainvillea fronted the hospital-turned-guesthouse, where we met Yoi, the manager and part-owner. The spacious rooms were carpeted in bamboo mats and strung in a cat’s cradle of mosquito nets. French doors and shuttered windows opened to a fluvial breeze, brief respite from the blazing sun. The walls were adorned with prints of Tahitian scenes by Gauguin.
After dusting off in the ward-size room, we walked in the direction of the bridge, coming upon a sullen group of 50 or more men constructing a coffin and drinking beer on the water’s edge beneath a cluster of coconut palms. The last conductor of the French train—the Casey Jones of the Mekong—had died the day before, at the age of 90 or more.
Until the coffin was finished, his body would lay exposed in his home across the footpath, protected from evil spirits by his vigilant family. There would be a wake of several days, with food, drink, card playing, and offerings of flowers to festoon his coffin, before they would take him in a cortege led by monks to a nearby temple where he would be cremated.
In some overgrowth near a rice field was the rusted-out carcass of the miniature French locomotive, once operated by the deceased man. Further up the path was the temple of Wat Khon Tai, set in a clearing of palm trees on the site of an ancient Khmer temple. Crowding the fenced grounds of the traditional Lao temple, a fanciful forest of gaily colored stupas, scored in arabesque designs, housed the ashes of generations of local families. The deceased conductor’s ashes would be placed here.
We doubled back, following the rail-bed across the old bridge and met a mad Welshman carrying a couple of fiberglass spinning rods. When I asked about the fishing, he wasn’t clear about what kind of fish he hoped to catch, but he held up a cup of worms with a stoned grin: “They love these things.” On down the footpath, several demi-locals, Pancakers-Plus, were stashed in the porch shade of small bungalows that faced the river, idling away the afternoon heat in hammocks, enmeshed in clouds of ganja. We settled into a thatched restaurant hovering over the water and enjoyed a plate of laap, spicy minced chicken salad, and a couple of beers before going to the falls.
By mid-afternoon, with the mercury still spiked, we were sweating like a couple of sundrenched cheeseballs. Two boatmen picked us up in a long pirogue, steering us back through the flat swirls of flooded willows. The half-submerged water buffaloes there reminded me of hippos I’d seen in the pools of East Africa. Weaving through islets and boulders, the light jade waters gave way to a sheet of silvery ripples, where solitary gulls and herons perched on rocks and the rumble of the Khon Phapheng Falls droned nearby.
Pirogues of fishermen plied the shoals above the rapids, working perilously close to the rocky bilge—the point-of-no-return. On the east side of the falls, plumes of white fell into a turbo of surging foam, before settling in a swollen channel of fast moving sage-green water. On the west side, the falls threw up columns of spume like geysers jetting skyward.
The captain maneuvered onto the east bank of the river. Following a well-trodden path, we circled downstream below the falls. Fishermen had fixed a scaffolding of bamboo ladders, extending from a shale ledge to a three-story sandstone monolith, high above a frothy pool of distilled turbulence. From the ladders, maneuvering downward like salamanders on the slick surface, they slung their spacious nets over the crest of falling water—the most precarious effort to trap fish I had ever witnessed.
After coming upon a hollowed-out cirque of flat rocks, fed by a secondary fall of water, we stripped and slid down into the natural whirlpool, our searing flesh practically sizzling as we entered the coolness. Several locals modestly took baths in a terrace of pools leading up to the rocky embankment, surmounted by a line of trees. Other visitors stayed dry on the high ground, picnicking on bamboo mats in the shade, sipping the juice from fresh-fallen coconuts.
Once cooled down, we trudged back to the boat, and powered upriver against a subtle but strong current. We were escorted by iridescent kingfishers that wheeled and skimmed the water in short bursts of flight before alighting on rocks in mid-stream, a cautious distance ahead of us. Fish darted among rocks in the limpid waters below. We turned in and out of a labyrinth of islets, happening upon small groups of women bathers and shrieking kids jumping in and out of the water. In less than an hour, we were back into the main channel, shallow but sea-like in its breadth.
With near perfect timing, the sun dropped across the water to present the vast skyborne shape of some mythical bird—spread-eagled with copper wings of flattened clouds, its head a fire-breathing orb. It stalked us with its radiant stare. In the dancing waterscape, two silhouetted fishermen stood waist deep beside their pirogues, casting their nets. As we stared back into the face of the fiery bird, the fishermen appeared to be lassoing pools of gold with strands of shiny silk.
In this reposeful scene, we drifted onto the sandy banks of Ban Nakasang village, pushing up alongside a row of retiring fisher folk who had slivered their pirogues onto the beach for the night. Saronged women gathered the fish and nets, while kids swam among the lapping waves. Lao tunes wafted from the jam box of a nearby sawngthaew. Many of the fishermen gathered along the sandy banks with us drinking Beerlao and lao-lao.
Once covered in darkness, we pushed off from the beach to return to Don Khon. The whiskey-happy captain and his equally sloshed first mate, with the aid of a dimly-lit torch, guided us through the flooded forest.
Back at Don Khon, we joined Yoi by the water’s edge and ordered fresh catfish cooked in a coconut sauce, presented atop a bed of rice—all fresh staples of the self-sufficient islanders. The meal would take a while to prepare. As we waited, the beacon light hanging over the water was clouded in a steady swarm of insects. It was the beginning of an aquatic food chain: the fecund water churned with silver flashes of fish surfacing to feed on the light-crazed insects, the bigger fish eating the smaller ones, the frogs leaping down the banks for their share.
Through the evening, the conversation with Yoi drifted over several subjects. Of Lao-lum lineage, Yoi’s family fled the country in 1975 to a refugee camp near Ubon, Thailand, as did 90 percent of the nation’s educated people at the time. Before fleeing across the Mekong, Yoi’s family lived on rations for several months as the war drew to a close. “It was very difficult. No opportunity for my family,” he lowered his voice while shaking his head. After a year in the refugee camp, they were re-settled in Australia, where he lived for 20 years.
During Yoi’s time in exile, Laos was cut off from the rest of the world, and known as the “Albania of Asia.” In part Laos’s isolation was self-imposed. But Thailand and other anticommunist U.S. allies embargoed the little country. During the 1980s, 95 percent of Laos’s trade with Thailand and other countries disappeared. A few supplies trickled in from Vietnam, but that country was working through its own difficult period of economic isolation. Both Vietnam and Laos were struggling to recover from the tatters of war and from dependence on the Soviet Union.
In due course, a sea change in economic policy occurred, coinciding with the breakup of the Soviet Union and Vietnam’s doi moi policy of economic liberalization. The doors of Laos were swept open in 1991. At the same time as in Vietnam, a capitalist lifeline was tossed into Laos’ economic backwaters to rescue Karl Marx from drowning. Yoi returned to the Panhandle a couple of years after this ideological back flip. He had not seen his homeland since fleeing as a young adolescent.
I asked him why he would sacrifice Australia’s modern comforts, and the presence there of much of his family, in order to return to Laos.
“It’s peaceful here, there is opportunity. Besides there is no stress. I will live longer,” he replied in a soft, philosophical tone. “We smile when we are happy, we smile when we are sad. But most important, Laos is my home.”
But what about freedom of speech?
He laughed at my question: “We have Playboy, we can talk, we just can’t spread influence.”
Yoi kept raising the subject of U.S. President Bill Clinton’s errant member, baffled by all the hoopla over Monica Lewinsky. From Yoi’s point of view, such mischief should be considered a duty of office. And Clinton’s mere wanderings could hardly compare to the epic appetites of Champasak’s last prince.
As the night wore on, we heard what sounded more and more like an uprising, coming from across the channel where the Pancakers were staying. Yoi noted they had been loud the night before, partying on booze, grass, and ecstasy and methamphetamine brought in from the Golden Triangle. Prostitutes will be next, wait and see,” he predicted.
Yoi obtains sexual relief every two weeks when he goes to Pakse, where he visits the brothels and bar girls. There are no women for him here on the island, unless he should marry one. This is in keeping with the Asian principle of “loving the one you marry, not marrying the one you love.”
Our meal had still not arrived after an hour and a half, but Simon and I were enjoying the conversation and didn’t mind. Yoi felt a need to explain the delay, pointing to the ongoing convulsion of fish beneath the dangling bulb, “Lao people don’t need jobs: say something wrong and they quit. They have all the fish and rice they can eat. In Thailand they have 70 million people and Vietnam 80 million. They have to compete for food and jobs. Lao people’s needs are few, maybe some new clothes and someday a bicycle or motorcycle. That’s all.” He paused and framed his thoughts, “For example, I sit here and wait on food. And wait. And then I get up and go cook myself. I go around the problem, not confront it.”
Finally arriving at the glacial pace contentment affords, food was served. Yoi left to cook his own meal. While hastily swallowing my sweetened catfish, I was reminded of Yoi’s words and the French saying about Indochina, “The Vietnamese plant rice, the Khmer stand there and watch, and the Laotians listen to it grow.”
Morning broke in a medley of creature sounds... frogs, cicadas, geckos. Birds were cooing and warbling from the palms and bougainvillea, roosters crowing everywhere. We set out for the beach on the west end of Don Khon where we hired a dugout to take us downriver to see some remarkable creatures.
The Irrawaddy dolphin, or Orcaella brevirostris, adapts to both salt-and-fresh water. For thousands of years, they have inhabited the warm coastal and fresh waters of south Asia and Australia. Their inland migrations have led them up several rivers—the Mekong, Burma’s Irrawaddy, the Mahakham in Indonesia and the Padma in Bangladesh. Rarely are they observed at sea, and when sighted they are often confused with porpoises and dugongs.
Under unstressed circumstances, the average family size is six, but can be as large as 15. The dolphins can live to be 30-years old, growing up to nine feet in length and weighing as much as 300 pounds. The river people from Laos through Vietnam feel a mystical connection to the dolphins. They are considered sacred protectors—reincarnated humans, maidens turned mermaids, who pull fishermen from the jaws of crocodiles or save people from drowning.
Now the dolphins themselves need protection from the humans. The dolphins get caught in the fishermen’s nets and cannot surface to breathe. In a major dolphin habitat in Cambodia, near Sambor Falls, locals have used dynamite to harvest fish, but this kills dolphins.
The deluge of dam-building on the Mekong and its tributaries also bodes ill for them. The dolphins follow seasonal migrations of quarry fish when the river is flooding, then seek deep-pool sanctuaries during the dry period.There are few such pools in the Mekong, and there will be fewer still as the dams go up and reduce the river’s eco-diversity.
Through the 1960s there were countless dolphins in the Mekong. Then, in a matter of a few years, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered thousands of them to quash local superstition and to obtain dolphin oil for greasing their weapons and boat motors. Vietnamese soldiers occupying the country in the 1980s used them for target practice with their automatic weapons. Now there is a fragile genetic pool of fewer than 100 animals, blowholing for life.
As with many endangered species, when the numbers become critical, people get interested. After all, extinction is a modern idea. Fish Conservation Zones are being established in deep-pool habitats to curb net fishing. Ecotourism is beginning to boost both conservation awareness and the funding needed to implement sustainable, community-based resource management programs. A conservation group working in Phnom Penh reports that ecotourism has encouraged fishing communities to successfully stabilize the dolphin population near Sambor Falls.
Because the Irrawaddy dolphins are considered sacred, fishermen do release them when they catch them in their nets. River people have never hunted them for food. In one village fishermen even claim that dolphins help drive fish into their nets. There are tales of locals holding cremation rites for dolphins they find dead.
As we scrunched into the shallow and cramped dugout we must have looked like a thousand pounds of sausage being squeezed into a hundred-pound crate. Water flowed over the gunwales when we hit the first set of rapids. At the foot of the rapids, a heron stood on a prominent rock, letting us pass closely as if it were a gatekeeper punching our ticket. Along one stretch, the channel was rocky and lined with cypress-like trees. Kingfishers wheeled in iridescent flashes from tree to tree, while crows fished the rocky shoals. Soon, the fast water gathered into an open expanse. A couple of fishermen cast their nets in the distance. We idled to the middle of the Mekong, cut the motor and drifted in silence.
Answering our need for instant gratification, within 10 minutes two dolphins sounded a loud blow and slapped the water 50 yards away.Their tapered, dark gray bodies blended with the water. Their lumbering pace resembled fresh-cut logs floating downstream, but their dorsal fins gave them away. Our pleasure was unbridled as we harpooned them with pointed cameras. And almost as quickly as they surfaced, time for 20 or 30 unmemorable clicks, they disappeared. Another pod of three soon appeared and sounded—rolling, then diving in arcs, giving us a flash of their white undersides. Over the span of an hour, we watched eight individual dolphins broadcast their whereabouts with tailfin slaps to the water. Even though the dolphins are known for their friendliness, we were not able to observe them from any closer than 50 yards away.
We motored back upriver to Somphamit Falls, passing by elaborate fish traps of bamboo built into the frothy crevices like sluice gates, with a flock of crows standing on the framework.
Back on land, we treaded over a sandy knoll to a leafy umbrella of spiraling kapok trees. In the shadow of the gnarly, prehistoric columns, webs of cascading water fell from a series of five or six discrete cataracts, their beauty sublime.
Nearby we joined a French couple beneath a roof of thatch for a coconut shell of fresh juice. Soon a stream of Thai tourists poured in from the larger island of Don Khong, day-tripping to see the dolphins and waterfalls. Simon and I breathed sighs of relief at having seen the animals under pristine conditions, when we, as eco-tourists, were fewer than the remaining dolphins.
Early the next morning, we paid some fishermen to bicycle our bags to the west side of Don Khon. From there, it was only a short pirogue ride to the Lao village of Voen Kham, where the customs office was located.
There we would be entering Cambodia across a border that was closed to foreigners for most of the 30 years the Khmer Rouge controlled the area. In 1998, on April 15th, the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died. By early 1999, most of his withered band of followers had put down their weapons and accepted the amnesty they were offered by the Cambodian government. Today it is relatively safe to travel anywhere in Cambodia, although there are plenty of armed robberies thanks to the many weapons still around. As for crossing the Lao-Cambodian border, it is done every day with the help of bribes, but it is still unclear whether it is a legal border crossing for foreigners.
So we paid our bribes in Voen Kham—a reasonable sum of $5—and soon were crossing the river in another boat to Cambodia. We made a deal with a Cambodian fast boat captain to ferry us to Stung Treng, a major outpost 30 miles south on the Mekong.
The national flag, emblazoned with an image of Angkor Wat, fluttered atop the customs house on the Cambodian side. Inside, a picture of King Sihanouk, a figure now back in favor, was framed above the customs official’s desk. Across the room was a small armory of grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs at rest in a metal gun rack, gun barrels pointing up the loins of a blonde Playboy foldout pasted on the wall above. The armaments seemed to warn against bargaining too hard on the bribe.
Henri Mahout wrote about custom officials in Cambodia in the 1860s: “... they are licensed beggars. A little salt-fish, a little arrack, a little betel, if you please—such are the petitions; and the more you give, the less strict will the search be.”
After affecting a grave face, the official behind the desk demanded, “Excuse, twenty dollars for one.” Round numbers and a couple of words were the extent of his English, and my Khmer was zilch. I pulled out a sawbuck. His swarthy, handsome face spread into a toothy grin—the smile of a guy who owns the cookie jar—as laughter settled upon us. He repeated, “twenty dollars for one.” Seeing the futility of resistance, Simon and I laughed as we each handed over the crisp and familiar face of Andrew Jackson. We had already paid for our visas before beginning the trip, but it would take this impromptu processing fee of $20 to get them stamped for entry. The men never so much as glanced at our bags.
Our fast boat had arrived by the time we came out, and two armed and uniformed soldiers jumped in the front, catching a ride to Stung Treng on our nickel. Who were we to argue? Welcome to Cambodia!
The prow sliced southward. Mountains stood port and starboard, and as our journey wound on, slowly receded to flat low banks. In 1866, Francis Garnier called Stung Treng the “commercial intermediary” between southern Laos and Phnom Penh: “The village itself of Stung-treng still probably has about eight hundred inhabitants, all Laotians.” Khmer Rouge militia hid out in the jungle here during most of the time they ruled the area. Stung Treng was a safe haven for the guerillas, thanks to its remoteness and proximity to the mountain fastnesses of the hill tribe region of Ratanakiri.
We were greeted on Stung Treng’s banks by a wolf pack of young hustlers. Their guile was not hard to detect, virtually leaping out at us. They offered a commission-based menu of products and services: hotels, boats, cars, women, dope, buses, food, booze and guides to the mountains of Ratanakiri. Their most valuable commodity, however, was spoken English. They flashed a cell phone. I suspect that for the right price they could have dispatched the mayor to lead a parade for us.
In the business of predation they enjoyed a monopoly, and we were certain prey. We decided against spending the night in Stung Treng unless necessary. But the river was low, and a king’s ransom would be needed to hire a fast boat to Kratie. Luckily it was still before noon, early enough to travel to Kratie by car and arrive before nightfall. It was just 120 miles south along the river, on Colonial Highway 13.
Our young fixers made a couple of calls while coaxing us to have a seat at a hot and dusty streetside cafe for food and drink. Before long, a 1970s model Toyota arrived—three-toned corrosion, no shocks, a full set of bald tires, and an engine that coughed more than purred. The driver, old and weary looking, was a perfect match for this hapless heap of metal. But it was as good a day as any for misadventure. With daylight wasting we paid half the agreed-upon price and chugged southward in the rattletrap, molting loose parts along the way.
My map showed the thick red lines indicating a primary road. Nevertheless we had not steeled ourselves for the battle we soon were facing: well-evolved potholes now used as pig-wallows and rickety, metal bridges with big sections of planks missing. “On the road,” as it were, we spent more time in the sandy margins avoiding slabs of broken tarmac than on tarmac itself. In short, the road was an obstacle to be avoided rather than driven on. It was easy to understand the warnings we had received regarding road bandits: with all the detours and impediments requiring a stop, they could have developed a thriving trade in waylaying travelers.
But the route did unveil Cambodian village life. In the first hour of driving, we saw three cars, a few stilted huts and a herd of bullock carts. The poverty was disarming, with a severity we had not seen in Laos. In the tidy enclaves of stilted huts and gardens, men seemed to come and go in aimless excursions—tea, a cigarette, a brief word—as if on holiday or taking a break from a relay of naps. They were often shirtless, wrapped in sarongs, and wearing the krama (the red-checkered Khmer scarf) as a headband. When carrying heavy loads, the women wrap the checkered krama around their head and use it as a platform—an influence from India, like the use of spoons instead of chopsticks and the wearing of sarongs rather than loose pants.
All of the villagers were dark-skinned, and would automatically be looked down upon as peasants by the lighter-skinned denizens of the cities. It was not uncommon to see women with massive goiters swelling from their necks, a consequence of a lack of iodine in the diet. Malnourishment appeared widespread, seen in the excessive number of kids with ginger hair and potbellies. Plenty of food is available, I was told, but the children don’t get the right balance. Most of the kids’ eyes were runny with conjunctivitis, by the age of three or four they had acquired the rheumy eyes of old people.
None of the remote hamlets we passed through had electricity. The thatched-roof homes were perched on stilts, with walls of bamboo matting and an open byre below for the pigs, similar to houses we had seen all the way from China. Beneath each home was a large clay vat of drinking water sharing space with an idle bullock cart. The margins between huts were slotted with fecund trees of banana, mango and coconut. However remote the hamlet, there was always at least one home of someone active in politics, with an archway festooned as a kind of permanent campaign sign for the favored party—Sam Rainsy Party, Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC) and the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party (BLDP).
Cambodia is a destitute country, but its people are proud of the patronage benefits—money for campaign signs and votes—offered by their nascent if shaky democracy. It may be politics shaped by venality, but Cambodians clearly value their right to speak out against the government, a freedom not known in Laos and Vietnam.
Cambodia’s current era of multi-party politics essentially began with the Vietnamese invasion on Christmas Day, 1978. Vietnam’s combat-experienced army overran Phnom Penh, putting an end to Pol Pot’s four-year reign. The Vietnamese, with an occupation force of 200,000 troops, remained in Cambodia for the next 10 years, reconstituting a nation gutted at every level. In some ways, it was just an example of a strong country exploiting a weaker neighbor for its resources: food and timber to name a couple. Even so, the occupation force was an economic drain on Vietnam.
Under international pressure, mostly from the United States, the Vietnamese pulled out of Cambodia in 1989. Within a year the country again found itself immersed in a bloody civil war with the Khmer Rouge. After a few thousand more Cambodians were killed and 150,000 refugees fled to the Thai border, the international community stepped in under the auspices of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), and ran the country.
The UNTAC supervised elections held in 1993 ended in a dead heat. Prince Norodom Ranariddh, leader of FUNCINPEC and son of King Sihanouk, was named as the first prime minister. He failed to win the two-thirds majority needed to govern alone and a second prime minister was named—Hun Sen—anointed by the Vietnamese, a former member of the Khmer Rouge, and head of the communist CPP.
Hun Sen’s control of the military doomed the uneasy coalition. By 1997, a coup in July forced Prince Ranariddh to flee the country. Hun Sen and his CPP party won the 1998 election, but again lacked the necessary majority. The two adversaries switched places to form a new unholy alliance—Hun Sen is now first prime minister, and Prince Ranariddh is second.
Our rusted-out heap broke down in a FUNCINPEC village. An assembly of locals convened to jawbone the problem until a shade-tree mechanic arrived. For the next hour we watched him crawl around the hood of the car, testing the plugs, the battery, the fuses, the ignition. Valves, springs, rings and screws were scattered beneath the hood and dashboard. He pulled out the backseat, disassembled the console panel in front and rewired some wiring. Soon the poor beast was coughing with life. We pulled out of the village sincerely concerned for the car’s well-being.
Less than half an hour down the road a front tire blew. Our scruffy driver flashed an embarrassed smile, hurried out of the car, rolled up his sleeves and traded the spent tire for a fresh bald one in a matter of minutes. It was our last spare, in a place where flats could not be fixed.
Our driver tried to help by making up for lost time. Crossing a bridge, we nearly smashed into a bullock cart and herd of water buffalo. Before long, the road mated with the Mekong once again and we arrived in the village of Samdan. The traffic circle in the middle of the town featured a pirouetting silver dolphin raised on a blue pedestal, herald of the nearby Sambor rapids, the Mekong’s largest dolphin habitat.
We reached Kratie in an hour, and settled in a river-front restaurant watching a CNN replay of the Queen Mum’s funeral. Later as I wearily drew shut my door before collapsing into bed, I overheard the night attendant asking Simon if he would like a massage girl. Simon sniffed the unalluring scent of desperation, however, and declined.
Kratie had not impressed the French explorers in their gunboats. They sneered at its subsistence lifestyle, “Nothing provides a sadder idea of the carelessness and indolence of the Cambodians, than the sight of these small squares of rice, lost amidst the fertile land left fallow.” To this day it is a fairly idle place, but not without the charm of decaying colonial villas and buff-yellow administrative buildings left by the French.
We stayed across the road from the Kratie port, where the fast boats depart each morning for Kampong Cham and Phnom Penh. Beginning at daybreak, the loudspeakers along the waterfront screeched with shouting voices that read public service announcements and socialist news of the day; then followed the haunting strains of a Khmer opera singer.
By the time we made our way down to the fast boat, striped red and blue, the seats inside the metal capsule were taken. People were massed on top of the roof—soldiers in floppy hats, monks, armed policemen, krama-shrouded men and women. Market ladies worked the crowd selling dried fish, eggs, chicken and sticky rice in banana fronds. We joined the roof-riders on the rounded top.
The overloaded boat listed under the shifting weight of the many people on its roof. The captain blasted ahead, however, without adjusting for the imbalance. The cabin below had a couple of exit doors in the front, but none in back: no chance of escape should the boat capsize, as Khmer boats at sea often do. According to a French wire service, international maritime authorities have assessed Cambodia’s global shipping record and concluded the nation should stay on dry ground. Following its rapid growth as an international shipping registry, Cambodia has incurred “an appalling rate” of sunken ships. So there on the express boat, I calculated I was better situated on the roof, from which I could leap if the captain was determined to uphold his nation’s record.
Ferries brimming with cars and people crisscrossed the broad river. The occasional pagoda loomed into view, fronted by two pillars, roofed in red and laced in a golden twist of flying nagas. Within a couple of hours, we stopped beneath a modern bridge built by the Japanese at the old French trading post of Kompong Cham.
Our craft gave up a few passengers, and took on many more before roaring away with a starboard tilt. We glided by floating fish farms surrounded by palisades of bamboo. A long sandy beach was littered in fresh cut teak, strewn about like tinker toys.
After Thailand banned logging within its borders in 1989, the price of teak spiraled from $1,900 a metric ton to $10,000. Conveniently for global timber barons, 70 percent of Cambodia’s hardwood forests remained intact as of the early 1980s. Western Cambodia then saw a boom in illegal logging. The devastation was so rapid and intense that UNTAC banned the export of Khmer logs.
But in 1995 the Cambodian government secretly awarded 32 concessions covering a third of the nation’s land area. The logging was not selective and gradual. Global Witness, an environmental group monitoring logging in Cambodia, estimates that in the past 20 years, the forest cover there has been reduced by 70 percent.
The result has been a deluge of floods in the last 10 years. Healthy forests in the Mekong basin absorb the excessive rains of the monsoon season, then slowly release them during the dry season. But deforestation forces brute gravity to take over the ecosystem: the unanchored soil gives way and the rivers rise.
Prime Minister Hun Sen, under persistent pressure from the international donors on which his government depends for most of its funds, suspended logging indefinitely in January 2002. In May that year he declared no more permits would be issued for the transport of logs. Yet illegal logging continues, in line with the excessive bribes demanded by government officials.
Opposition leader Sam Rainsy blames it on Hun Sen’s CPP. “They resort to corruption to survive. It’s a warlord system with senior army officers and civilian officials exercising power in the different military regions and provinces of Cambodia.” Hun Sen gives the warlords control of valuable resources in return for their political support. “The result is institutionalized corruption and lawlessness,” Rainsy concludes.
We reached Phnom Penh around mid-afternoon, veering right as we passed the Naga, a riverboat casino. We turned up the Tonle Sap River, passing by the Royal Palace on the capital’s flag-shrouded esplanade. A hot white sun shimmered off the ceramic-tiled roofs in painful radiance. The low-slung waterfront is like a movie façade of glinting temples, palaces, ministry buildings, shops, hotels and restaurants, all washed in faded French elegance, splashed with the saffron of Buddhist robes.
As we climbed the embankment, we were met by a hard-bitten lot of guys in baseball caps and floppy hats offering us a variety of conveyance—Honda motos, tuk-tuks, taxis, cyclos, remorques (a trailer pulled by a motorcycle), buses, boats and bicycles. Edging our way past a couple of legless war victims with their beggar’s hats extended, we emerged on Sisowath Quay, the riverfront road.
Their Foreign Correspondents’ Club is housed in a French-era building, the open-air bar and restaurant overlooking the confluence of the Tonle Sap and Mekong rivers. The opposite side of the club affords a view of the terra-cotta nagas that crown the National Museum. Fans hum from the club’s musty ceiling, geckos spackle the dull yellow walls and cats skulk the floor beneath. Furnished with a clubby scatter of low-set tables, padded armchairs and reading lamps with dusty shades, the nostalgic atmosphere leaves one expecting the arrival of a band of colons sporting tropical whites and pith helmets.
As I cleaned up the remains of an exquisite cheeseburger of New Zealand beef, dripping in fried onions and French’s mustard, a balding man with a small ponytail sat at the bar stool next to me. His deep tan gave away his tropical residency. Taking a café latte, he introduced himself as Bud Gibbons, a friend of a friend of mine in Hanoi.
Bud came to Vietnam the first time around as a soldier in the U.S. army. He was stationed near Ben Tre in the Mekong delta during the famous Tet Offensive of 1968. After returning to the States, he married, started a family and a landscaping business. By 1982 his life was reeling out of control from alcohol abuse. Divorced and having lost his business, he gave up the sauce. Once his youngest daughter graduated from secondary school in 1993, he decided to begin a new life in Vietnam, a place his thoughts had never left.
Around the same time, he met Bobby Muller, a former marine who was paralyzed during the war. Bobby had established a non-profit organization called the Vietnam Veteran’s of America Foundation (VVAF) and encouraged Bud to go to work at their clinic in Phnom Penh where they provide prosthetic limbs and physical therapy to war victims.
After opening a sister clinic in remote Preah Vihear province, where almost 40 percent of the villages are seeded with landmines and cluster bombs, Bud realized the amputees needed not only prosthetics, but also a way to earn a living. Cambodian amputees are usually reduced to begging or total dependence on their families. Maimed women have no hope of ever marrying and leading a traditional life. Even today, as many as 20 people a week are either killed or maimed by landmines and unexploded ordnance in Cambodia.
Bud converted some of that gloom to hope by starting a silk weaving factory in Preah Vihear, reviving a craft that had disappeared under the tyranny of Pol Pot. Bud’s vision took the name of Joom Noon, meaning “gift” in Khmer. Joom Noon now employs 85 people, all but 15 of whom are disabled. Counting their family members, it thus supports an extended family of over 500 people. At Joom Noon they weave expensive scarves and sarongs, exporting them to First World markets. Many employees now have their own homes in an expanding compound of 30 huts, with sanitary boreholes, electricity and a pre-school. At least two of the disabled employees have married and become parents.
As Bud told us his story, several fortyish Westerners with four newborn babies settled into a pair of tables at the other end of the club. Although they had the look of Americans, pear-shaped and in baseball hats and Nikes, they were Australians. The U.S. had banned child adoptions in Cambodia, which costs up to $12,500—not an excessive price in the region. But in a country with a per capita income of $300 and rife corruption, such big sums encourage mothers to deliberately bear children for sale. Middlemen sell the babies on to adoption agencies.
Soon, Simon and I left Bud to visit Café Freedom, a place to catch the sunset over Boeng Kak, the oxbow lake located in the middle of Phnom Penh. Riding along the quay, we noticed police filling a bus with hookers whose nonchalance suggested they might be hitching a ride to a friendly destination. Nearby a chained monkey stood on top of a beat-up taxi, wearing a hat and entertaining a crowd of locals with a magic routine. His handler gave onlookers the chance to purchase medicinal herbs, in a Khmer rendition of an old-time American snake-oil promotion.
We reached Café Freedom riding in cyclos, or bicycle chariots. Brian, the Scots proprietor, and a wee bit out of kilter, greeted us bare-chested, his eyes like pencil-drawn slits. “Let me get you a beer! Sit down, let’s talk.” Simon had visited before, but this time found he was in for a shock. He glanced around and proclaimed his haunt had been “spiritually castrated” since last time. A Zen garden had been replaced with a spartan slab of concrete shaded by a bland pavilion. Brian clued into Simon’s astonishment, and waved his beer in the air, crowing, “I met my September 11th on October 10th when the guesthouse burned!” A fire had snuffed out 20 homes thereabouts.
A nearby table of rough-and-tumble Western men vegetated with their shirts off, exposing badly drawn tattoos. Ned, a long, skinny guy who resembled a praying mantis, joined us at our table with Brian. They had been hanging out since noon—drinking beer, smoking pot, fishing in the lake. Brian has been hooking the same fish there for years. He considers them his own pet fish—he feeds them bread and scraps from a nearby pier every day. A year earlier Brian had planned to move to East Timor and open a “girly bar.” He is a junkie for hot spots, the world’s shifting lawless reaches. His Thai wife, however, saw some Dili riot footage on CNN, and put the kibosh on his startup dreams. Brian takes a certain professional pride in being a renegade, bragging about the hard time he did in an English prison for armed robbery as well as an incarceration in Japan.
Ned, in contrast, was a bit of a “techie.” He had set up planetary headquarters in Phnom Penh for the secret advancement of what he called the “hologram,” a three-dimensional imagery that, according to Ned, will “replace the digital age.” Ned flailed his bony arms in a reptilian manner, speaking ominously of “them” and things “up there,” which considering Ned’s presentation, I initially took for references to extraterrestrials and outer space. But it eventually became clear that by “up there” he meant Laos, and “they” were the CIA. The Agency desperately wanted his research, it seemed, because it was needed to reinforce America’s military and economic dominance of the world.
Brian had heard Ned’s spiel many times, and sought to cut it short with an illustration. The Scotsman pulled out a Visa card—hard to imagine where that came from—and pointed to the iridescent square illustration of an eagle in the middle, “There, that’s a goddamn hologram!”
Ned had once had a bright future—the son of two doctors, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas, a mathematical genius. But he took a detour a few degrees south of reality in the early 1970s, washing ashore in Phnom Penh in 1993 amid Brian and other expatriate flotsam. That was the year of the UNTAC elections when billions of dollars from worldwide aid and relief organizations were flooding into Cambodia. Eventually the swell of money and expats receded, leaving behind a few success stories like Bud, along with Café Freedom’s many bottom feeders, successfully angling for pet fish.
As the rogues’ gallery grew, we departed Café Freedom for the “Heart of Darkness” bar, a name-brand venue where sightseeing dabblers can take a walk on the wild side. It was empty, but for a side room of local gays shooting pool and camping it up with the cue sticks. After 11 p.m. the nightly rave would start taking wing. We smoked a spliff at the bar, which quickly put Simon back into shore-leave mode. I left him to his work, “an artist living the artist’s life.” Returning to his hotel alone much later that night, he would admit the next morning that it seemed unsuitable to take one’s pleasures in a city that had felt so much pain.
Pol Pot and his madness defy explanation. He died without volunteering any regrets. There was no Nuremberg-style trial to force him to confront the truth of his crimes against humanity. His life remains shrouded in secrets and mystery. In contrast, a vast library has been written about Adolf Hitler. But after myriad attempts to identify a single personality flaw or childhood trauma to explain Hitler’s tyranny, one writer concluded, “There is no real mystery: he was no more than the sum of his atrocious actions. He was what he said and did what he thought.” Pol Pot’s life, too, should be seen for what it is.
Pol Pot was named Saloth Sar when he was born in 1928 in the village of Prek Sbauv near the provincial capital of Kompong Thom. Although his father and mother were farmers, they had connections to the royal palace in Phnom Penh. In 1935, Saloth Sar and his older brother Chhay were sent to the live in the capital where he began his education as a novice at Wat Botum Vaddei, a Buddhist monastery favored by royals. From there he went to Ecole Miche, a Catholic primary school attended by the children of French bureaucrats and Vietnamese Catholics.
By 1942 he was selected to attend the College Norodom Sihanouk in Kompong Thom. While pursuing his French-sponsored education, he took up the violin, played soccer and basketball. Saloth Sar’s classmates knew him as a quiet, mediocre student. His best friend at school was Lon Non, brother of Lon Nol who in 1970 would become Cambodia’s president, ousting King Sihanouk in an American-orchestrated coup.
Saloth Sar left for France in 1949, where his academic pursuits gave way to political interests. He never took an examination and eventually lost his scholarship at the City University of Paris. He did, however, absorb the literature of Marx’s Das Kapital, Lenin’s On Imperialism, and Stalin’s The National Question.
World War II had laid bare the Achilles heel of France and other colonial masters, lending strength to the independence and nationalist movements in Asia and Africa.
Before returning to Cambodia in December of 1952, Saloth Sar joined the French Communist Party (FCP), just as Ho Chi Minh had done 31 years before when living in Paris.
In 1954, the Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu. The ensuing Geneva Accords partitioned Vietnam at the 17th parallel and ended French control of Indochina.
The Geneva agreements called for Cambodia to elect a National Assembly in 1955. Back in Cambodia, Saloth Sar’s job was to prepare for the election by recruiting candidates and pushing a communist agenda. The Geneva agreements mandated Vietnamese elections in 1956, and pre-election polls made clear Ho Chi Minh was the overwhelming favorite. Buoyed by Ho Chi Minh’s popularity, Saloth Sar and the Cambodian communists hoped to gain control of the National Assembly.
In a shocking turn of events, however, King Sihanouk abdicated the throne, crowned his father as the new Cambodian king, and entered the election himself as “citizen Sihanouk.” Using all the heavy-handed tactics at his disposal, Sihanouk’s party won every seat in the Assembly. As Cambodia’s prime minister for the next 15 years, Sihanouk ruled the country like a personal fiefdom, while dabbling as a movie producer, director and leading actor. The 1956 elections in Vietnam never took place, under pressure from the U.S., which feared a Ho Chi Minh victory.
Saloth Sar continued his underground work and married Khieu Ponnary, a frumpish school teacher at the Lycee Sisowath, older than him but like-minded in politics. At the same time Saloth Sar began teaching French, civics, history and geography at a newly established private school. In Cambodia, teaching was a respected profession in the ancient tradition of the Hindu Brahmans and later Buddhist monks. Students remember Saloth Sar as engaging and passionate, softly eloquent, reciting French classics by heart.
Having risen to be secretary of the central committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, his double life ended in 1963 when he gave up teaching and became a full time maquis, a guerilla fighter, in the remote jungles of Ratanakiri province. Similar to the guerilla experiences of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong, he lived among the hill tribes. Applying his Marxian theory of social development, Saloth Sar viewed the Brao and Jarai people with whom he lived as “noble savages,” unsullied by money or social class and operating within a primitive framework of subsistence solidarity, aboriginal communists.
In 1966, Saloth Sar traveled to China to witness the beginnings of China’s Cultural Revolution. Engineered by an aging Mao Zedong, this authoritarian dissembling was designed to attain “continuous revolution, class warfare, and the empowerment of the poor.” Saloth Sar befriended China’s head of secret police, K’ang Sheng, “Mao’s pistol,” who used the interrogation techniques he learned in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s purges. He then unleashed the same horrific genocidal methods in China.
Saloth Sar and the Khmer Rouge, with abiding respect for their Chinese ideological mentors, would later adopt Mao’s penchant for purging “class enemies.” Saloth Sar labeled the Khmer Rouge’s plan for an agrarian, barter economy the “Great Leap Forward,” in spite of the fact Mao’s same misguided economic initiative in the late 1950s caused as many as 20 million Chinese to starve to death.
By 1970, General Lon Nol managed to topple the government of Prime Minister Sihanouk, thanks mostly to assistance from the U.S. Lon Nol then declared Cambodia the Khmer Republic, ending almost 2,000 years of various forms of imperial rule. But however feudalistic Sihanouk’s government, the vast majority of Cambodians supported him. This U.S.-backed coup would destabilize Cambodia for the next 30-plus years.
Concurrently, the war in Vietnam, particularly in the Mekong Delta, was shifting more and more into Cambodia. For many years Sihanouk had allowed the North Vietnamese to use Cambodia as an extension of the Ho Chi Minh Trail (known in Cambodia as the Sihanouk Trail) and as a jungle redoubt for staging their raids into South Vietnam. When Sihanouk fell, the Khmer Rouge engaged Lon Nol’s army throughout Cambodia, and also were enlisted by the North Vietnamese against the South.
As the Khmer Rouge tightened the noose on Phnom Penh in March 1973, the U.S. ratcheted up the B-52 bombings. America had no combat troops in Cambodia, never declared war there, but nevertheless dropped a quarter of a million tons of bombs in the countryside over a five-month period. The casualty estimates of Cambodians killed, mostly civilians, range from 30,000 to 250,000. By spring of 1973 most American troops had been withdrawn from Vietnam, Thailand and the secret war in Laos. As far as Americans were concerned, Cambodia was left as “the only war in town,” in the words of one U.S. official.
America’s indiscriminate bombardment of the countryside produced a flood of peasant refugees in Phnom Penh. By the time Khmer Rouge troops arrived on April 17th of 1975, the city had mushroomed to two million people, mostly refugees. Shadowed by an eerie sense of uncertainty, they welcomed the heavily armed, young soldiers. By all accounts the troops resembled Boy Scouts carrying their RPGs (rocket propelled grenades). They paraded through the streets as menacing victors.
In a new twist to the Marxist-Leninist notion of class struggle, these peasant refugees were tarred with the same broad brush as city dwellers, and were regarded by Saloth Sar and the Khmer leadership as “enemies” of the revolution. Even though the fleeing peasants had not actively participated in the armed struggle, they became known as “April 17th people,” a new class of undesirables. Women, children, the elderly and all others were ordered to evacuate Phnom Penh and Battambang within 24 hours—coaxed to hasten their pace with warnings like “Quick, Quick the Americans will drop bombs.” They marched for weeks to rural collectives without adequate food and water during one of the hottest months of the year. Over the weeks that followed, tens of thousands died, families were separated—in some cases forever. The genocidal terror of the Khmer Revolution’s “Year Zero” had begun.
After almost 12 years of anonymity as a guerrilla, Saloth Sar emerged as the architect of the revolution under the nom de guerre of Pol Pot. He became prime minister of Cambodia, renamed Democratic Kampuchea. Managing and growing a self-sustaining economy would prove a tougher challenge, however, than leading a bunch of privileged, French-educated ideologues to foment a revolution underwritten by rich patrons, such as China.
Pol Pot’s four-year plan of economic and social reform envisioned rice as the wellspring from which all else would flow. In a ruthless attempt to destroy all cultural identity, the Khmer Rouge forced everyone to wear black pajamas like the Chinese instead of the sarongs traditionally worn by both men and women. Buddhism was suppressed along with folk culture, private property gave way to collectives. Pol Pot initiated these reforms and went on to abolish money on the premise that private markets and industrial development was of no concern.
The Khmer Rouge targeted families as a capitalist conspiracy, one which prevented communist revolutions in both China and North Korea from gaining full flower. Thus, family members were not allowed to eat together in collective dining halls. Health care was assigned to traditional healers and 15 year-olds. Youths were put in charge of the collectives, where tens of thousands of the “April 17th people” met their deaths by malnutrition, disease, or execution Khmer-style, a club to the head. Before this genocide was ended by the invasion of the Vietnamese army in late 1978 and the Khmer Rouge’s flight from Phnom Penh, at least 1.7 million souls had perished—one of every four people in Cambodia. An ancient, dignified Buddhist kingdom had been transformed into a charnel house overnight.
On my first trip to Cambodia in 1997, when Pol Pot was still alive and the Khmer Rouge still controlled pockets of the countryside, I went to Choeung Ek, a Chinese cemetery and the site of mass graves where bodies were dumped after being bludgeoned to death. I was greeted at the entrance by an army of legless men, all extending their beggar hats. Better known as one of the “killing fields,” a 50-foot-high glass memorial tower (stupa) holds shelf upon shelf of the victims’ skulls. Bones remain strewn about in open graves, never to be identified.
While walking around the tower, I looked closely at many of the skulls. Only a few lacked the cracks and indentations indicating massive blows to the head. Executions were usually carried out at night, with the prisoners blindfolded and made to squat beside an open trench. Saving ammunition, their heads were smashed with ox-cart axles. Below the memorial tower were piles of the victims’ blood-stained clothes. It does not take long, as you look upon the mass of darkened clothes and then the mass of skulls, for the sense of horror, for the sense of the enormity of man’s capacity for evil, to seep in.
To one side of the skull tower, was an 80-foot row boat used today by local villagers in the annual holiday races on the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers. After a guide explained its purpose to two chirruping matrons from London, they replied, “In England we have the same competition between Oxford and Cambridge.”
Upon returning to Phnom Penh, I found myself walking numbly around the Holocaust Museum at Tuol Sleng, a secondary school that was converted in 1975 to a prison and interrogation center, code named S-21. When the prison was first discovered by the invading Vietnamese army, it was the stench of putrefying flesh that drew them there. The only identifying sign at the former school was a red placard over the gate, “Fortify the spirit of the revolution! Be on your guard against the strategy and tactics of the enemy so as to defend the country, the people and the Party.”
The victims came from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds: professionals, intellectuals, petit bourgeois, soldiers, factory workers and any citizen who wore prescription glasses—a sign of education or elitism. In a strange contrast to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, most of the 14,000 victims at S-21 were loyal Khmer party members who were fingered in some paranoid ritual to cleanse the “microbes” infecting the army, the collectives, the ministries, and the revolution in general.
My guide at the museum lost his father, two brothers, and a sister. When the Vietnamese arrived at S-21, only decomposing bodies were left—there were no prisoners to set free. Otherwise, the Vietnamese left the torture rooms as they found them. They took photographs and later had artists paint pictures of the ghastly site.
Van Nath, a painter and one of only seven who survived torture at S-21 and still escaped death, provided many stark images, two of which hung in an interrogation room: vultures eating the viscera of torture victims chained to beds and scorpions crawling about the gaping wounds of chained women whose breasts had been partially removed. Some say the paintings are an exaggeration, but when I recently met Van Nath, he said that they are what he and fellow inmates witnessed.
The floors are still stained with blood. Neighbors say they heard howls of death echoing from S-21’s torture chambers almost every night. These are the stains that shape the psyche and culture of contemporary Cambodia.
Like most soldiers and functionaries, the henchmen, often boys wearing Mao hats, were obedient to their superiors; imbued with the sense of impunity and detachment of those who blindly obey orders. Systematically, they took the victims’ pictures, then tortured them into a signed confession of disloyalty, and finally executed them with all paperwork in order. I sat in the chair where the photo IDs had been taken. Hundreds of the victims’ pictures blanket the walls. It put faces on the skulls I had seen earlier. S-21 was but an urban microcosm of the paranoid, genocidal tyranny that swept the entire country during what is now called “The Pol Pot Time.”
Welcoming the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh in April 1975 was Saloth Sar’s best friend from College Sihanouk, Lon Non, who offered his help to the new regime. Within days Pol Pot had him executed.
Saloth Sar’s older brother Chhay, who had arrived in Phnom Penh 40 years before with his younger sibling, was one of the tens of thousands of April 17th people who perished on the road to the rural cooperatives in 1975. Chhay would not have known Pol Pot though. He last saw his brother Saloth Sar sometime in the early 1960s.
As for America’s political intruders in Cambodia, Richard Nixon is dead, having never apologized for the Kent State killings, much less acknowledging the faceless thousands of innocent Cambodians who died as a result of American bombings. Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace prize in 1973, receiving the award at about the same time Cambodian refugees were fleeing the countryside being devastated by B-52s sent as a result of his policies. Today the former secretary of state is usually treated as an eminence, enjoying a lucrative practice as advisor to governments and leaders around the world, including the U.S. president. He recently published a book, Ending the Vietnam War, in which he defends the Nixon Administration’s policies in Indochina. Like Augusto Pinochet, Kissinger has had to limit his overseas travel for fear of being arrested for international war crimes by some local judge bent on sending a message to despots.
Prince, King, ex-King, Prime Minister, ex-Prime Minister, citizen Sihanouk, spent three years under house arrest in the royal palace during the Khmer Rouge reign. Only because the Chinese intervened was he not executed. He continued to make movies and was crowned King Sihanouk once again in 1993. Like the ancient Khmer kings, he took the title “varman,” meaning protector, much to the objection of the many Cambodians who have suffered because of his whimsical political exploits.
Ieng Sary, Saloth Sar’s old friend from student days in Phnom Penh and Paris, defected from the ranks of the Khmer Rouge in 1996 and was given a royal pardon. Like many of the Khmer Rouge leaders who have struck it rich in gems and timber, Ieng Sary now lives prosperously in Pailin, a Khmer town near the Thai border.
Even after the damning movie, The Killing Fields, was released in 1985, the United States, Thailand and China were only mildly embarrassed by their ongoing support of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In each case, national foreign policy favored tactics over principles, following the pattern of the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend.
A Dutch non-governmental organization estimated that over one-third of Cambodia’s populace—approximately four million people—is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The sickness that took over a country left its survivors with another sickness, one which pervades and has changed the culture. The gentle-cultured people, the gestalt of an earlier time, have been replaced by a culture characterized by emotional volatility. Violence erupts daily in families, disputes are settled with hand grenades, and vigilante street gangs take the law into their own hands.
On January 29, 2003, a Thai actress was “rumored” to have said that Angkor Wat belonged to Thailand. Once word hit the streets, raging vigilantes in Phnom Penh marched on the Thai embassy, looting it and burning it to the ground. They danced on portraits of the King of Thailand, an offense the Thai neighbors cannot forgive. The prestigious Royal Phnom Hotel and many other Thai-owned businesses were torched, as Thai merchants fled the country under threat of violence and death.
This rage now lies beneath Cambodia’s surface of Buddhist calm and humanity. As a war-torn, impoverished country, Cambodia was deprived of any cathartic process to mourn its holocaust. There were no “truth commissions” like in South Africa, or “criminal tribunals” such as those in Rwanda. In place of the healing that might have come from a process of grieving, truth finding and justice, Cambodia is plagued by thinly suppressed blind rage.
Van Nath, the artist and survivor of S-21, was given his life by the prison guards because he could paint, mostly portraits of Pol Pot. He told me at his open air studio above a tea shop on a quiet street in Phnom Penh, that he could not allow his thoughts to be consumed by the talk of a tribunal unless and until it happened. In addition to his prison torture, Van Nath and his wife, Kith Eng, lost two boys in the collectives during the Pol Pot Time. His sorrow forced him to quit painting for over a decade, and he now prefers doing therapeutic landscapes.
In 1988, Pol Pot married a second wife and had a baby daughter, his first child. He was once sighted holding his daughter, a loving father. In 1997, suspecting treason by Sun Sen, a long time friend and comrade, Pol Pot ordered his assassination and the murder of his children and grandchildren. Only then did several outraged Khmer Rouge members put Pol Pot through a public tribunal, sentencing him to life in prison solely for the murder of Sun Sen. Armed guards escorted Pol Pot away from the jungle courtroom to his two-bedroom house, where he died of a reported heart attack in bed 10 months later. He was wrapped in a tarp and cremated over a fire made of scraps of furniture and old car tires.
He never issued a mea culpa, except to express regret about his abolition of money, calling it “a drastic measure.” Even though Pol Pot had attempted to abolish Buddhism in Cambodia, friends and comrades have built a stupa in his honor, housing his ashes in the foothills of the Cardamon Mountains on the border of Thailand. Former Khmer Rouge officials are now building a casino and “five-star hotel” nearby, hoping to cash in on the macabre celebrity of Pol Pot.
As for isolating the trait that might have predisposed the likes of Adolph Hitler and Pol Pot to be able to lead their nations to practice genocide, what mostly comes to mind is blind ideology, and the ability to inflict a nation with its inherent sickness and proclivity for true evil. The “banality” of evil is illustrated throughout Indochina. It was not just certain evil people that devastated a land and people—it was a confluence of factors, not the least was foreign aggression.
On two previous journeys to Cambodia, I visited the ancient ruins of Angkor near the provincial capital of Siem Reap by crossing Tonle Sap lake. Producing over 100,000 tons of fish a year, the lake is a honey hole that made a great civilization like Angkor possible. It is the fourth largest captive fishery in the world, providing Cambodia’s 11 million people with up to 70 percent of their annual protein intake and irrigating vast acreage of rice paddy.
What makes the lake so fertile is its link to the Mekong. Each year in June at the beginning of the annual monsoons the rising waters of the Mekong force the Tonle Sap river to reverse direction and flow into Tonle Sap lake. At the height of the rains in September the lake swells to a depth of 30 feet and covers up to 10,000 square miles, an increase of 60 percent in size.
In November as the monsoons end and the lake begins to recede, the Tonle Sap river flows once again southward into the Mekong. That is when Cambodia holds its biggest annual festival—the Bom Om Tuk, or Festival of the Reversing Water—to mark the end of the floods, to ensure a bountiful rice and fish harvest, and to honor the Mekong. And so it was in ancient times, as told in a 13th century account by Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan:
“In front of the royal palace, a great platform is built, capable of holding a thousand people, and decorated with lanterns and flowers... The rockets are released and the firecrackers lighted... the festival goes on like this for fifteen days.”
Today as well, under the spell of a full moon, Angkor Wat hosts great firework shows, monks row golden-prowed ceremonial pirogues around the moat, and in Phnom Penh, boats race up the Tonle Sap river. The royal family attends in both places.
By February, fishermen are gathered at the mouth of the lake with nets and bamboo traps plucking fish from the water as brown bears would at an Alaskan salmon run. Henri Mahout was amazed: “... they [fish] are actually crushed under the boats, and the play of the oars is frequently impeded by them.”
In April and May, the lake has been drained so low it becomes like a giant holding tank for fish. Elephant fish flop across the mud flats looking for deeper pools, able to leave water for several hours at a time. But that makes them easy prey, and they’re considered a delicacy, selling for up to $60 each.
The hydrological wonder starts anew in June with the seasonal symbiosis of monsoons, rivers and lake engineering a refuge of Mekong biodiversity. Kings and ideologies will come and go, but arable land and fish-filled waters will always be the basis of local beliefs here, just as pre-biblical Mesopotamia was founded on water cults.
Simon and I boarded the commercial fast boat to cross Tonle Sap lake. The smell of marijuana wafted through the hold from the half-closed cockpit. Working the crowd of staid tourists and a few Pancakers, a cabin boy passed out glossy flyers for Siem Reap’s Sok San Club: “Private Karaoke Lounges. And Full of Lovely Girls. Massage and Pay as You Go Dance Partners.” Not that many of the brochures fell on the floor.
We throttled to the northwest up the Tonle Sap river’s narrow straits before it slowly widened into an oceanic sweep, the Great Lake. The boat was listing uncomfortably, to the point where I was trying to counter the tilt by leaning the other way. The captain, possibly stoned, sent the cabin boy to balance the oblivious sprawl of people on top. He had to shuffle and reshuffle every half hour or so.
After about two hours, a chain of low-slung mountains appeared to the west, fronted by a floating fishing village where television antennas crested each roof, whether thatched or tin. Across the otherwise redundant waters, a fishing scowl acting as a tug boat towed a family and its floating farm: a tin roofed house with kids playing and dad soaping down on the front porch, trailed by a vegetable garden and banana trees, piles of chopped wood and fish traps. A dog sniffed around the garden in this moveable estate; it could have doubled as a movie set.
On the opposite side, the shoreline was a muddy swamp of flooded thickets that receded seamlessly into a forest. Those wetlands are home to a variety of aquatic plants and provide breeding grounds for fish and migratory birds. In the last several years, the lacustrine forests have been trimmed in half, leaving parts of the waterway clogged in silt.
In the relatively shallow waters, a wind threw up whitecaps. The stippled grayish expanse was garnished in drifting clumps of water hyacinth, aquatic plants that spread like duckweed on a warm summer pond. In many parts of the world, the purple-flowered plant is considered a pest. But around Tonle Sap, in addition to being used for pig fodder, the water-resistant fiber makes it useful for baskets and other woven products.
This is not always the case, however, in the peasant fishing villages of Cambodia. Along a major tributary of the Tonle Sap we attempted passage that felt as if we were driving through a Kansas cornfield: for ten miles the vegetative flourish slowed boat traffic to a standstill, as it completely engulfed the river and its floating villages. A Cambodian friend described the mounting ecological dilemma these peasant fishermen are faced with, “They live from hand to mouth; they don’t have time to clean it up. Only 60 percent of the country is literate, so these people don’t understand the long-term dangers of water hyacinth.”
After six hours in the roaring bowels of the capsule, we entered calm water and idled slowly through a floating Vietnamese fishing village. In 1177, armies of the ancient Chams of coastal Vietnam followed the Siem Reap river another 10 miles to the fabled city of Angkor, before pillaging it and putting the Khmer king to death. The next year the Khmers led by Jayavarman VII defeated the Chams in a naval battle, and memorialized the event in detail on the bas-reliefs in the temple-city of Angkor Thom. The Vietnamese now living in the fishing village are descended from people who arrived in the 19th century, then fled back to Vietnam during the Pol Pot Time, and after that returned.
Fishing skiffs with small thatched compartments for cooking and shelter plied the waters around us. The occupants wore the cone-shaped peasant hats peculiar to Vietnam. We wove through a corridor of tattered, thatched-roof houseboats. Heaping pyres of branch wood pruned from the lake’s canopy of trees provided charcoal for cooking. The more prosperous floating homes were mounted on pontoons, with mesh fish tanks below their docks. Storks, ibises and pelicans perched and plodded on the docks as tourist photo ops. Scattered in the floating mishmash was a primitive hospital, post office, petrol stations and a police headquarters.
Several barges of oceangoing size were being loaded near a spit of land occupied by Khmers in their traditional red and white scarves. We debarked along a skinny canal that smelled of the dried fish spread in silvery sheets along a dike, where we were met by a group of local touts and drivers attempting to monopolize the transportation options on to Siem Reap. As we rode west along the dike in a taxi, straight ahead was Phnom Krom, crowning a hillock like a medieval salient. It is an 11th-century temple dedicated to the Hindu gods Vishnu, Siva, and Brahma. It seems to guard the approach to Angkor and bestow bountiful harvests upon the Great Lake.
The point of departure for touring Angkor’s ruins is the city of Siem Reap, which Cambodians proudly point out means “Siam (Thailand) Defeated,” an allusion to a 16th century battle when the Khmers routed the Thais and retook Angkor. The city is built along the banks of the southward-flowing Siem Reap river, which during the dry season comes to a muddy standstill, mirroring the somnolent pace of the locals.
Like some Klondike town, the crazy waterway is cluttered with the Old Market, temples, many new hotels, fewer old ones, Sihanouk’s residence, colonial French villas, franchise restaurants, branches of Phnom Penh bars, a host of legless beggars, prostitutes, pimps, and motorcycle taxis. The palatial grounds of the Grand Hotel d’ Angkor, with rooms at $300 a night—about the average annual income of most Cambodians—offer a profound contrast to the fetid squatter huts that line the trash-choked river.
Most visitors overlook the many faces of poverty around Siem Reap, unless the tour bus makes an unscheduled stop. On one occasion, while catching a ride in front of my hotel on the back of a motorcycle to the Old Market, a ring of pubescent girls played in a circle on the earthen ground a block from the Grand Hotel d’ Angkor. When the driver slowed, the children looked up, leapt to their feet and shrieked, “Hey mister, hey mister, come for me.” I waved them off.
Surprised by my lack of interest in the young girls, the middle-aged, scruffy driver assumed I had other desires, “You want boom boom young boy, $10. You boom boom my young friend, $8. Boom boom me, $7.”
As the motorcycle driver took several wrong turns—hard to do in little Siem Reap—he persisted with his sales pitch. “I don’t want to boom boom anyone,” I barked, and got off short of my destination. He was sunken at the loss of business, only trying to stay afloat in a soulless sea after a long storm. Pederasty is not new to Siem Reap, as recounted by the 13th century Chinese emissary, Zhou Daguan:
“In the market place groups of ten or more catamites are to be seen every day, making efforts to catch the attention of the Chinese in the hope of rich presents.”
Today’s givers of rich presents are mostly Western sex tourists. At the end of the day, it is the pimps, prostitutes, pushers and politicians who take home the big bucks in Cambodia, while school teachers are paid $60 a month and policemen take home $15 plus all they can steal. Minesweepers risk their lives every day for a monthly salary of $150. For most well-heeled tourists, all the poverty and decadence around Siem Reap becomes a colorful backdrop for the ancient monuments. “Great Angkor” was built by half-a-million Khmer slaves, after all, and Siem Reap is home to their descendants.
My first impression of Angkor was formed by a Life magazine photo spread showing Jackie Kennedy at the ruins with Prime Minister Sihanouk. It seemed fascinating, equal to any of antiquity’s Seven Man Made Wonders. Since Jackie’s visit, years of war, particularly during the Khmer Rouge period, have taken their toll on the complex. So have antiquities thieves. Even so, its 100 temples spread over 80 square miles remain one of the summits of human culture, still alive with architectural magic.
Officially the Angkor period begins in 802 A.D. with Jayavarman II, referred to in inscriptions as devaraja, or god king. Undoubtedly those Sanskrit writings are an allusion to the king’s association with a popular Siva, a belief that survived in Cambodia into the 1960s. The period of Angkor’s greatness would close when Siam sacked it in 143l A.D., and many Khmers were enslaved or scattered. Although much of the Angkor complex was abandoned after the Siamese invasion, the royal city of Angkor was restored in the 1570s. At the temple of Angkor Wat, an architectural acclamation to the Hindu gods and the largest religious building in the world, Buddhist statuary has been placed there every century since it was built; its last inscription was carved in 1747.
Although most of the ancient monuments had been consumed by the jungle when Henri Mahout arrived in the middle of the 19th century, the temple of Angkor Wat was still cared for by more than 1,000 hereditary slaves. Even today, most of the monuments are only slightly spruced up—the encroaching forest, with its vegetative rage, lends extra charm.
The recent influx of tourists often leaves the causeway leading to the ethereal towers of Angkor Wat resembling the Champs Elysees on a busy day. Yet strolling the celestial corridor across the temple’s spacious moat, it is hard not to be mesmerized watching the young Buddhist monks in saffron blazing against the gray backdrop of Hindu sanctums. Angkor Wat is a working temple, where on the first and 15th days of the lunar month worshippers come to pray and burn incense before a dwindling galaxy of naga-headed Buddhas. Cambodian men smile impishly just inside the portico, fondling apsaras breasts rubbed slick from years of veneration.
It takes more than a moat to keep Himalayan fantasy apart from the tropical jungles of Cambodia. Built by Suryvarman II in the first half of the 12th century, the temple and tomb known as Angkor Wat were dedicated to Vishnu, the preserver. Spiraling from the center of the temple complex is a stepped pyramid symbolizing Mt. Meru, the center of the universe in Hindu cosmology. Surrounding the holy mountain are four lesser peaks of pointed cupolas marking the corners of the universe. They overlook courtyards that represent continents and a rectangular moat that symbolizes the ocean.
Atop Mt. Meru stands an astronomical observatory. From this mystical aerie was the site of the cremation ceremony of Suryvarman, whose ashes would ascend to heaven. There he would be met by flying apsaras, heavenly nymphs dedicated to eternal lovemaking. Today the summit features Buddhist statuary encircled in the reverent smoke of incense.
On Mt. Meru’s aerial sanctuary, once reserved for high priests and the royal caste, Simon and I took a spliff break, enjoying the sepia-stained views, flecked in saffron and spilling out like a cosmic potion. Wobbly, we descended a steep fall of narrow stairs into the spiritual realm of the commoners—the cloistered gallery of bas-reliefs. The carved images stretch continuously for over half a mile, flowing counter-clockwise through an open hall of ornate sandstone. Afternoon light streamed through the galleries and porticos, illuminating stone carvings that depict Heaven and Hell, scenes of Khmers battling Chams in Vietnam, the Hindu epic Ramayana and the famous Churning of the Ocean of Milk, a Hindu allegory of good and evil conspiring with Vishnu to extract a bottle of the elixir of immortality from a swirling sea.
Heaven and Hell are depicted in the southern gallery, orchestrated by the Hindu deity Yama sitting atop a water buffalo and dispatching a column of people either to a reposeful heaven, or to one of 32 infernal chambers, each designed with a macabre torture to fit the transgressors’ crimes. Yama, with his inventive tortures, has often been likened to Pol Pot.
In the late afternoon, hotter than Hindu hell, we found a breezy, shaded space along the eastern gallery’s great bas-relief, the Churning of the Ocean of Milk. Our guide Rith Roeurm told us the story of the antigod Rahu, who succeeded in obtaining a sip of the elixir of immortality. Alerted to Rahu’s devilry, Vishnu the protector, the referee of good and evil, had Rahu’s body severed from the chest down to prevent him from having complete impregnability. To this day Cambodians attribute eclipses to Rahu trying to swallow the sun or moon. Darkness comes as the celestial body passes through his truncated body, before emerging in full luminescence. Similarly Laotians blame eclipses on the appetite of a cosmic frog noshing on the sun or the moon. Laotians shoot guns and make whatever noise they can to scare the demon away. Cambodians, on the other hand, beat drums and gongs out of happiness at Rahu’s folly.
Leaving the terrestrial confines of Angkor Wat via tuk-tuk, Simon and I arrived at the Victory Gate of Angkor Thom. The gate is approached by 54 heads of antigods known as asuras on the right and an equal number of benevolent gods known as devas on the left. Many heads have been pilfered and several originals have been replaced with copies to prevent further theft. Staring down from the imperious gate is Avalokiteshvara, a bodhisattva or patron Buddhist saint of the temple-city, his smiling gaze like an enigmatic death mask.
Hinduism has remained in India, whereas Buddhism traveled on. Jayavarman VII, the founder of Angkor Thom, learned the mystical teachings of Mahayana Buddhism, and introduced this new religion to the Khmer empire in the 12th century. Yet he kept many Hindu practices in place. The ancient Khmer kings enjoyed the powerful status of demigods. Sihanouk squandered the remaining influences of this tradition, though, to some extent, this holy status still attaches to the Thai monarchy. The king is both the sangha-raj, or leader of the Buddhist community, and considered an incarnation of Rama, thus the reigning king’s title, Rama IX.
The center of Angkor Thom is the temple-mountain known as the Bayon, framed in sago palms and kapok trees. Elephants and their mahouts take tourists on short excursions around the ruins. Dominated by the imposing faces of the patron bodhisattva, the pyramid temple looks like a grouping of forest sprites petrified in place. Of all the carvings in Angkor, it is the most mystical. At one time it boasted 54 gothic towers adorned with over 200 larger-than-life faces of the smiling bodhisattva, with “the eyes of a pineapple.”
Elderly monks gain merit in their golden years as caretakers of Bayon’s remaining Buddhist shrines. They pass out joss sticks, take donations, and take the typical diet of older Khmers—watermelon and dried fish. The French explorer Francis Garnier wrote that Cambodians of the day had an apt nickname for Bayon. Suggesting its many hidden chambers, its narrow corridors of ornate bas-reliefs, and the encroaching forest, they called it, preasar ling poun, “the pagoda in which one plays hide and seek.”
A short distance east of the Bayon is Ta Phrom temple, where we were greeted by several enterprising policemen selling their badges for $5 a piece. Beneath a shade tree a band of landmine victims played traditional Cambodian instruments for tips from tourists. Westerners know Ta Phrom as the set for several sequences of the movie Tomb Raider. Ancient kapok trees rise as leafy towers with serpentine carpals and metacarpals for roots, strangling and dislodging the temple remnants, leaving a tumbled wake of fractured apsaras and fallen lintels. Local guides don’t see this as yet another case of tropical eagerness, but instead as an example of nature being more patient than man.
For a donation of $10 to the park police, Simon and I and a few others enjoyed a private sunset on the second tier of Pre Rup temple. Enjoying a view of the towers of Angkor Wat, we drank Tattinger champagne, munched on European comestibles and communed by candlelight with the vestigial Hindu-Khmer spirits. Good ambiance has never fetched a high enough price.
Once back in Phnom Penh, Simon and I spent our last evening at the Foreign Correspondents Club engaged by Dihrya, a Javanese dancer who had spent the last several years teaching Indonesian folk culture and traditional dance at the University of California in Los Angeles. She laughed as she told us about rushing into the FCC to get off the street, “The police are outside picking up prostitutes. I was afraid they might confuse me for one!”
One of Dihrya’s good friends, now living in the States, is a Cambodian woman who survived the collectives of the Pol Pot Time. Her friend was left with many psychological scars, and fingers permanently disfigured from carrying heavy loads of water, her punishment as a child slave in the Khmer work camps. Inspired by her friend’s story, Dihrya had recently been awarded a Ford Foundation grant to write a book on the survivors of the Pol Pot Time. She would be staying in Phnom Penh for a year, documenting as many stories as possible throughout the country and keeping alive the memory of the Cambodian Holocaust.
The next morning we left for Chau Doc, a border town in Vietnam. Riding in a Pancaker shuttle, we were slowed behind a funeral cortege—an open-air hearse with a stylized casket showered in flowers and leaves and encircled by praying monks. Behind the decorative hearse were family and friends dressed in the traditional garments of grief: the women covered their faces in gauzy white veils and wore muslin robes cinctured at the waist with banana-plant-fiber belts; the men wrapped their heads in white bands of cloth. A wake of leaves and flowers preceded us like potpourris of spring and fall.
Following the Mekong by road for an hour to Neak Luong, a ferry-crossing town heavily populated by Vietnamese, we caught a fiberglass boat the size of a hot tub, with a 40 horsepower motor. A family of six Vietnamese with as many boxes joined us.
The river was fast, ever widening, and banked with shallow walls of red earth. For an hour and a half, we passed through the Khmer Plains of fallow cornfields while the young captain, at full throttle, slammed the square bow into wake and wave in tortuous repetition. Using my arms as shock absorbers, I winced from back pain, while holding on for dear life. The Vietnamese family took naps, laughed in conversation, and generally enjoyed the ride as if we were on a cruise ship. Simon shared my misery.
We docked next to a couple of armored naval boats. An arched blue sign with white lettering read, “Kaamsamnar Kohrokar International Border”—from the land of Sihanouk to Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam.
After a bribe-free pass through Cambodian customs, on the Vietnamese side of the border all the customs policemen were lying shirtless in their hammocks for a noonday nap. Hardly vigilant, they would periodically thrash about and spout an order, then go back to sleep. After a short wait, one of the protectors of the border spun out of his mesh cocoon and stamped our passports. His body was covered in crimson circular welts like natural polka dots. It’s common practice in Asian traditional medicine to apply heated cups to the body to draw blood and disease to the skin’s surface, leaving such temporary marks.
The ferry on to Chau Doc had engine problems and would take a while to fix. We passed the time in a flyblown food joint overlooking the river, competing for space with a clutch of scrawny dogs sniffing the dirt floors for scraps. Time passed drowsily. Once on the spacious ferry, we were joined by two other foreigners, an American law professor living in Saigon and a 50-something German man, self-proclaimed sex tourist and almost certainly a pedophile. He bore a strong resemblance to Anthony Hopkins’ character Hannibal Lecter.
Hannibal had overstayed his 30-day visa and was on his way to Chau Doc to get a new stamp. It didn’t take long to figure out that he was an authority on the regional flesh trade, as he spouted expertise on cohabitation laws in Vietnam, and the crackdown on discos and prostitutes in Phnom Penh. When I mentioned I had been to Svay Pak, a boomtown of distressingly young Vietnamese prostitutes seven miles north of Phnom Penh, he lit up: “I go there many times, very nice girls.”
A year before, I had visited Svay Pak with my wife Joellen, who works in the reproductive health field, and to some extent with HIV-AIDS education. Svay Pak is a brothel village with only a couple of streets which are lined with hotels displaying doll-faced girls as merchandise for sale. Our passing car provoked a flowering of smiles and ogles. Joellen said some of the girls were 13 or younger.
Chaos and extreme poverty have fueled prostitution in Cambodia and Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. According to Asia correspondent Mark McDonald, Hannibal’s “very nice girls” are well protected by their owners, who have procured them for a few hundred dollars in the impoverished paddies of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta or villages in lower Cambodia. The young girls are brought to Svay Pak by middle-aged women procurers who promise them a housekeeping job or a position as a waitress. Once there, they are indentured as prostitutes and not allowed to leave until their owner has recouped his cost several times over.
It is estimated that 64 percent of these prostitutes working in Cambodia are HIV-positive, twice the rate in Thailand and Burma. Many customers will pay extra to have sex without a condom. If the girls refuse, they are beaten by their pimps or owners. Sex tourists, if not mostly locals, are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a virgin, an experience the men believe imbues them with virility. Some also believe intercourse with a virgin cures HIV-AIDS, a bit of folklore that generates significant market demand for these sad victims.
The status of women is paradoxical in Asia; they have been elected as heads of many Asian states and “dragon ladies” abound, wielding power in business and government beyond the traditional role of controlling the purse strings at home. Yet beneath the skin of poverty, lawlessness and moral drift in Cambodia and the larger Indochina today, the chauvinist practice of polygamy is still deeply ingrained. Polygamy relegates women to a low rung on the food chain; Confucius summed up the underlying attitude 2,500 years ago: “a woman without talents is virtuous.”
Perhaps as an outgrowth of these ancient belief systems, a permissive culture survives that quietly but often openly accepts the adulterous cavorting of older men with much younger women—prostitutes, mistresses or wives. Even today in Southeast Asia, where there are laws against polygamy, it is still common for men to have second wives, reflecting the substantially Chinese character of local culture.
In almost seven years of living in the region, I have met but a few local men who don’t routinely visit brothels—it’s a rite of passage. Simon had recently spent a weekend visiting ancestral grave sites with a prominent Hanoi artist, the artist’s father and three male relatives in their 50s. On the first day of the traditional family weekend in the ancestral village, they drank jugs of rice whiskey diluted with pureed goat gonads, while also eating slivers of tiger bones provided by the commune chief. The morning after, washing the goat gonad taste from their parched mouths with warm tripe soup, they began swilling more of the teste punch—a libido tonic. Once they had caught their stride of the night before, they set out for a nearby brothel village. Drunk on nature’s Viagra, the family of Vietnamese men raged in the crowded van like a flock of crowing roosters. Simon is no shrinking violet, but the whole ritual became simply more fun than he was ready to cope with. He caught a quick bus back to Hanoi.
In his novel The Quiet American, Graham Greene helped mythologize Vietnamese women as “twittering doves on a pillow.” The objectification of these women was relatively civilized then, seemingly part of the natural order compared to the treatment they would receive in the 1960s and 1970s on behalf of testosterone-sated American GIs. The doves were scooped off their pillows and put into neon birdcages. Witness the sex carnival that continues to this day on Patpong Road in Bangkok where hundreds of young girls pole-dance nightly, or demonstrate how their vaginas can manipulate balloons, cigarettes and goldfish.
Once the war ended and the R&R scene was over, Bangkok was a natural host for “sex tourism” to spontaneously generate, fertilized with local baht, German marks, U.S. dollars and Japanese yen, where anything goes for a price, and everything did: boys became girls, girls became boys, men went after girls, boys took men, men chased men, women enjoyed girls, and virgins male and female were much in demand. It’s not that Bangkok invented any of this sexuality, it’s that rarely if ever before had sex been placed so massively in the service of commerce.
Fortunately Thailand has cracked down on underage prostitution and targeted foreign pedophiles over the past 10 years. Regrettably, poverty-stricken Cambodia then became a choice destination for traveling predators of children.
Hannibal had visited Cambodia seven times in the past two years, staying for over a month at a time, all for pleasure. He was hoping to find a girl in Chau Doc who he had met the year before in Phnom Penh. If he could not find her, Hannibal would return upriver the next day for two more weeks of preying on the young residents of Phnom Penh’s brothels. Thanks to decades of war, economic embargoes and little effort at remediation, the child prostitute’s poverty is Hannibal’s honey pot.
We followed the main channel of the Mekong which parallels the Bassac, a branch of similar size that flows to the east and southeast. Both branches fissure in Vietnam after crossing the border from Cambodia and flow into the delta in nine fingers, giving rise to the area’s traditional Vietnamese name of Cuu Long or Nine Dragons. Transecting the mythical tributaries was an elaborate system of canals, designed by Thoai Ngoc Hau and commissioned by Gia Long, the emperor who unified Vietnam at the turn of the 19th century.
Hau is revered by the Vietnamese as a visionary who saw public works projects like canal building as the force that would drive settlement of the Mekong Delta. He also oversaw the building of the Vinh Te Canal that stretches for more than 50 miles from the Gulf of Siam to Chau Duc. Because building the canal took 55,000 laborers, mostly Khmers, Cambodian accounts describe the project as yet another example of Vietnamese cruelty.
Today, the narrow Tan Chau Canal connects the main trunks of the Bassac and the Mekong. As we entered the Bassac, the Vietnamese quickly lived up to their reputation as worker bees—riverine life buzzed and teemed like nowhere we had seen since joining the Mekong in China. Granary warehouses lined the shores and big-bellied rice barges with eyes painted on the prows loaded, unloaded and cut deep wakes through the water. Three boys in a trio of pirogues tethered end-to-end latched on to one of the barges for a joy ride.
Well-built wooden homes and tin huts floated on the water, dragging submerged wire cages bubbling with catfish. Accompanying each fish farm was a cooking vat shaped like a gigantic teapot, and exhaling pillars of smoke. These vats are used for making cakes of gruel mixed with fish offal. We later stopped at one of the farms. When the owner opened the cellarlike tin doors to reveal a churning mass of boiling catfish, Simon described it precisely, “It looks like some place 007 might retrieve Pussy Galore.”
There are over 500 species of fish in the Mekong floodplain, from which an estimated half million tons are harvested each year, or five times the take from Tonle Sap. Once the Vietnamese sniff out a niche in agriculture or aquaculture, as in the case of catfish, their enthusiasm to produce becomes uncontainable.
As happened in the coffee trade that is now depressed worldwide because of the sudden glut created by Vietnamese farmers, American catfish growers saw their prices plummet and market share fall as “basa” and “tra,” two species of freshwater catfish farmed in the Mekong Delta, appeared in grocery stores in the States at half the price of domestic catfish. A brouhaha erupted as Southern catfish growers appealed to Washington for relief, couching their got-whupped-dilemma in a labeling argument that contended “basa and tra” should not be called catfish so as not to be confused with homegrown U.S. catfish. Of course, when battered, golden fried and placed on a buffet line beneath a heat lamp, which is the way most catfish in the U.S. is served, it’s impossible to tell them apart.
We passed a long stretch of catfish farms, then at least a half-mile row of sawmills with columns of new teak from Cambodia piled along the banks. To the south and east the venerated Nui Sam, or Sam Mountain, the highest eminence in the Mekong Delta, looked over Chau Doc and the Khmer frontier, peeking through the hazy afternoon sky.
At the foot of the sacred mountain stands a temple dedicated to Lady Chua Xu, a Pygmalion local saint who came to life from a stone statue that once crowned the top of Sam Mountain. From this mystical pilgrimage site, which I have visited on two occasions, the glassy mosaic of flooded paddy and canals stretches forever: mirrors signaling the fecund face of the Mekong Delta. That view exemplifies why the Vietnamese word for rice, com, is the same as their word for food.
At a bustling bend in the river at Chau Doc, once again the shore was lined with floating fish farms, and an armada of houseboats draped in laundry, their braziers spewing smoke. The boats flew Vietnamese flags, yellow star centered in red background.
To the west, retreating up a long sloping hillside, a higgledy-piggledy crush of shanties stood candled in a riot of antennas. A French, neo-colonial hotel stood smack in the vortex of this riverine swarm.
In neo-colonial decadence, I enjoyed a cheeseburger poolside on the verandah of the French hotel. With a half pound of Australian beef covered in tangy French mustard, it was a repast to relish, despite the lack of pickles. I listened to the cicada cries of boats chugging by, watching darkness scatter across the sky.
As with many frontier Mekong towns, Chau Doc is a tropical melting pot of cultures—Chinese, Cham, Khmer, and Vietnamese. The river entrepot is home to several domed mosques built by the ancient Cham who live along the water in stilted houses. The Cham are no longer coastal traders, pirates of the sea or conquering warriors; instead they are fishermen and weavers, with names like Salama, Muhammed, Ali, Fatimah and Maridam. Religion has been a revolving door for the Cham—animism for openers followed by Hinduism in the first millennium, Buddhism in the ninth century, and today in Chau Doc, Islam. Other than the mosques and the occasional Muslim greeting, salam aleykum, they keep their religion low key: no veils, prayer caps, or robed clothing.
More apparent are the Cambodians, who still refer to the larger delta region as “lower Cambodia,” or Kampuchea Krom. At least one million ethnic Khmers still live in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. The border clashes during the Pol Pot Time were the brutal culmination of Cambodian resentment over Vietnam’s annexation of large tracts of the Mekong Delta at the turn of the 19th century. The entire delta spreads over about 10 million acres, or some 15,000 square miles, about twice the size of the state of New Jersey. Vietnam now controls almost 70 percent of the Mekong Delta, leaving Cambodia with about a third of this fertile area.
I hired a left-behind American army jeep and went to the nearby Khmer village of Thot Lot, a dusty hamlet of a few thousand almost black-skinned inhabitants, set beneath a forest of coconut palms, with an air of delta laziness. Porches were filled with hammocks and not stools, the women wore sampots, or traditional Cambodian skirts and not trousers. Many wore the red-checkered scarves, or kramas. They all wore the face of economic despair.
Surrounded by palms and several flaming hibiscus trees, a 400-year-old pagoda, Chua Van Rau, was being refurbished by a huddle of resident monks with their saffron robes wrapped around their heads. I knew they were Khmer by the bright color of their habits. The Vietnamese monks, or bonzes, wear gray and brown habits with stocking caps. The Khmers of Thot Lot have held on to their heritage in the face of abject poverty, the result of being marginalized by the governing Viets.
From Thot Lot I traveled to the village of Ba Chuc, famous for its “Skull Pagoda.” A stone’s throw from the Cambodian border, Ba Chuc is an idyllic delta village built into the side of Elephant Mountain, with a thriving central market and a couple of fanciful Vietnamese pagodas.
In April 1978, the Khmer Rouge massacred 3,157 Vietnamese, Khmers and Chinese in the village, often employing torture as they slaughtered. There were only two reported survivors, one of whom now sells soft drinks to the few tourists who drop in. Ha Thi Nga, 64, was shot in the neck and clubbed over the head, then left for dead alongside her six children, husband, parents, and siblings; a total of 37 of her family members were killed that day. Nga fainted and awoke to the grisly aftermath. She was not rescued for another 12 days.
Nga arrived from her next door neighbor’s shanty to greet me wearing a bronze-colored tunic and trousers, mirroring the sundrenched shade of her skin. Her hair was pulled back in a tight pony tail, taut like her face, which only yielded a twitch for a smile. As we idled through a couple of hot Pepsis, I brought up the prospect of war tribunals in Phnom Penh.
“I am scared. I do not want to go there. It will bring back memories,” she said.
Similar to the Killing Fields memorial near Phnom Penh, the ossuary across the dusty road from where we were talking commemorates the massacre at Ba Chuc. Here the skulls are arranged by age—babies, pre-adolescents and so on. Higher up on the glass pagoda are stacks of bones, many of which were Nga’s relatives, piled like kindling.
A wagon train of ox carts formed a kraal 50 feet away around a mountain of freshly harvested and bagged rice. Local men, women and children loaded the bags onto their carts with hardly a glance at the pagoda. Vietnamese tourists from Can Tho, the next province to the east, burned incense and prayed in ritual obeisance to the shrine.
Before leaving, I asked Nga if she wanted her family’s executioners brought to justice.
After a deep sigh, she said, “All I want is to forget everything and live in peace.”
Waking from a night’s slumber in my Chau Doc hotel room, I watched a golden sun rise across the river above the Mubarak Mosque and the stilted homes of the Chams.
Simon had spent the preceding evening at the Café Koala, owned by an Australian who had landed in Chau Doc a couple of years before. An elegantly dressed, flirtatious tour guide tried to tempt Simon to invest in a local culinary wingding of fried porcupine, roasted dog and dried squid, followed by dessert at a Karaoke bar. He settled instead on quaffing bia tuoi (draft beer) while soaking up morsels of the Aussie’s world view.
We rented a sleek-as-basa-catfish fiberglass boat—the Mekong equivalent of the Pope Mobile—to take us to Can Tho, 70 miles down the Bassac, or Hau Giang, as it is known in Vietnam. Traffic on the river was considerable. The shoreline was a corridor of provincial industrialization blended into a hedgerow of sugar palms. Cranes crisscrossed the river dredging the channel of silt, to keep it clear for transport and irrigation. A fuel dump with a short six-pack of giant tanks gleaming in the sun verged the water next to a couple of grain silos, the skyscrapers of the delta.
The smell of burnt sweetness poured from smokestacks atop sugarcane and sugar palm refineries. Ocher, conical-shaped brick kilns fueled by mounds of paddy husk competed with rustic sawmills for status as the most prevalent industry. Newly built, fresh painted barges rested on sawhorses at a boat factory snuggled up to a cemetery of rotting gray cadavers of sampans.
Ocean-going freighters, car ferries, fishing gondolas, skiffs, barges, sampans, and pirogues all play leading roles in the Delta’s water ballet. Mekong artistry in motion is a sampan piloted by a peasant woman in a conical palm-leaf hat, standing astern manipulating a set of double oars in a dance-step cadence through crowded waters.
About halfway to Can Tho, we took a short excursion to the Bang Lang Stork Garden in Thot Not district. Flanked by spiraling palms, several branching trees were billowed in smoke as farmers stirred bees out of their hives to harvest honey. Many palms had pink pouches of snail eggs clinging like barnacles to their lower trunks, out of range of the jaws of fish. Once hatched, the snails fall into the water. As we rounded the bend of a side-canal, four boys stood in the water. They held up a headless dog they were skinning. Eating canine meat brings good fortune. Further on, piles of jute were spread along the canal banks, stripped and hung to dry in sheets like blond curtains; they would later be woven into mats or twine.
Cuongs, or waterside altars, stood on pedestals sprinkled with offerings of lotus blossoms and incense for the river gods. They lined the fronts of the canal homes like mailboxes. In the delta, the annual floods generally bring great benefits to farmers by dumping tons of nutrient-rich silt over their fields, yielding bumper crops and record fish harvests. But for more than a decade now, the floods have exceeded normal levels, partly due to deforestation upriver. The floods have caused massive damage to homes and crops, seen the outbreak of waterborne diseases such as cholera and chronic diarrhea, resulting in great loss of life. Although the technological key to flood control is upgrading the floodgate systems—the dikes and canals—farmers along the Mekong see their fate as rooted in daily communion with the river gods.
Approaching the stork refuge, we edged through rampart-like walls of bamboo filled with the birds’ screeching cries and the stench of ammonia. A gnarly cluster of trees was painted white with bird droppings. Many trees had slumped over and died. The branches were weighed down with a few thousand nesting storks and several hundred cormorants. As the male storks came and went, searching out food for the nesting females, the forest roost echoed with discordant cries and the flapping of wings, sounds evoking some primordial world.
Traveling on, we viewed the river’s fecundity in fields of beans twisting on bamboo arches, low-slung orchards of longan, a grape-like fruit with a hard skin, tracts of bitter melon nestled on the ground in neat rows, and boundless paddies of emerald rice—the heart and soul of the delta.
Through the 1970s and into the 1980s Vietnam was an importer of rice. Due to increased irrigation in the delta, higher yield seed varieties, privatization of land and markets, Vietnam now enjoys food security, ranking second in the world to Thailand as an exporter of rice. The delta yields two to three crops a year in most places, with some areas reporting up to seven in a two-year period. It is a year-round anthill of food production.
Shortly after noon, with the smell of saltwater in the air, we arrived at Can Tho which is only 50 miles from the South China Sea. During the dry season and periods when water flows decline due partly to excess irrigation, the sea tides push up through the maze of canals and waterways, affecting almost half the Mekong Delta. Known as “shaking hands with the flood,” many communities on the delta’s edge have diversified their agricultural options by irrigating fields with the brackish water to earn additional income from shrimp farming.
Once the tide had risen sufficiently, we took a pirogue up Cai Son Canal, worming our way through a tranquilizing trellis of bamboo. The canal banks were a fertile shrine adorned with linear patches of yellow marigolds and fruit orchards of mangos and rambutan, a prickly red ball with a sweet, juicy core. Other plants and produce grown were areca nut for the betel chew favored by older women, custard apples, water palms, and swatches of morning glory brocading the water’s edge, anchored by stakes of bamboo.
The fragrant smell of incense filled the air, as we stopped next to a flower-strewn altar, or coung, at a farmer’s home. The family elder, in his 60s, was a runt of a man, his belt circling his waist twice and pants hanging like a potato sack before piling atop his plastic sandals. Blessed with a gentle face, he served us green tea next to a riotous bougainvillea where grazing bumblebees the size of hummingbirds flitted from bloom to bloom. Once the farmer had figured out I was American, former Private Do Van Be showed me his certificate of completion for a “Refrigerator Maintenance Course” held at Fort Bellevoir, Virginia. The certificate issued by the U.S. Army was signed by Colonel Sidney Killibrew, August 16, 1968. Through translation, he kept assuring me of his affection for America and Americans. After discovering that he had spent a year in one of the brutal re-education camps after the war ended in 1975, I was touched by his pluck and his candid remarks in a place where too much sincerity can mean trouble.
He gave us a tour of his small, canopied farm, which utilizes a method known by agricultural advisors as the “garden system.” Stands of sugarcane, plots of vegetables, fruit trees of all varieties—spotted with pouches of pink snail eggs—crowded his three ponds stocked with catfish, fed by the droppings of his chickens and ducks. His well-fattened pigs, the pride of every Vietnamese farmer, fed off the rice husk from the paddy nearby, which was fertilized by human fecal matter. Planted among the dripping, hothouse verdure were the bones of his ancestors. Someday Do Van Be’s bones will join those of his forebears, and nourish his descendants.
The late astronomer and prolific writer Carl Sagan, was fond of saying that human beings are made of “star stuff.” But farmers like Do Van Be might better be described as a bit of “Mekong stuff.”
After saying goodbye, we moled back through the tunnel-like canal, approaching the lean arches of a monkey bridge. Through a feathery frame of water palms, I spied the profile of a peasant girl in mauve blouse, black trousers and conical hat crossing the bridge to a nearby seed paddy. She stooped and began transplanting the germinated shoots. Nearby on the narrow paddy bund, a boy astride a dawdling water buffalo played the clear tones of a bamboo flute, a scene straight from a Chinese scroll painting.
Can Tho is the commercial heartbeat of the Mekong Delta, home to a slew of rice-husking mills, and the former site of a large U.S. Air Force base during the Vietnam War. I spent my evening there cocooned in a French hotel, having drinks on teak verandahs, enjoying the quavering tones of the Vietnamese sitar, or dan bao, and the intoxicating scents of jasmine and frangipani.
Simon disappeared early in the evening and scoured Can Tho in search of a decent guesthouse. He settled on an “International Hotel” in the center of Can Tho where an old chamber maid awaited him on the fifth floor in the doorway of her linen cupboard. She looked like she had not left the floor of that building in 20 years, as she ushered him into a decrepit and musty room, which reminded him of one of the psychiatric units he had worked in. The Hitchcockian atmosphere unnerved him, but he had already turned over his passport and paid his $10. He was trapped. Having just visited my garden paradise, he felt a bit like Adam banished from Eden.
So out he went wandering the streets, seeking Can Tho’s feral nightlife. Failing to sniff out an expatriate scene, he bounced aimlessly from one outdoor restaurant to another, with a few stray hookers picking up his scent along the way. He settled on oblivion in the bottom of a glass, then returned to his dreary confines for the night through the vacated streets of Can Tho. Back in his isolation unit he found the ageing chamber maid suddenly more attractive; together they finished our pad of opium and passed out in rapturous embrace.
Next day, at Can Tho’s Cai Rang floating market, the empty streets and sidewalks sprang alive with the same hocus pocus a magician uses to pull a rabbit from a hat: Women in conical hats carrying shoulder poles suddenly morphed into pho (soup) stands, tea shops, fruit, fish and vegetable markets; an old man arrived on bicycle with a box and within minutes a mirror hung on a tree and a chair unfolded into a barbershop. The key makers, the tire fixers, the lottery stands, the mobile hardware stores selling nails, brushes, dusters, screw drivers all unfold in the same unmarked spots everyday, then fold up again at night and flow back into the recesses of Can Tho, or any city in Vietnam.
The floating market was a logjam of wooden skiffs, buyers and sellers. The rustic live-a-boards—they are the wholesalers—were more firmly anchored than the smaller craft. When the boats had to make way, mooring ropes would loosen, the extended props would lift from the water and a skinny wedge would open for pirogue-bound buyers to edge through. It was like swimming through a parting school of fish.
Many vendors advertised a fruit salad of products—dragonfruit, pineapple, lichee, jackfruit, durian (the Limberger cheese of fruit), mangosteen, coconut, star apple, rambutan, plum, mango, grapefruit, and oranges—hung on a decorative string from a makeshift mast. The market ladies’ mastery of product presentation borders on Madison Avenue brilliance, always stacking items—tomatoes or whatever—in neat rows, shapely humps or picture-perfect pyramids, splashing them with droplets of water like sparkling rubies, and slicing open the ideal specimen to display a fresh,juicy core. Bunches of grapes hung from leafy vines as if you were plucking them straight from the orchard. Sticky rice, fish and pork were packaged in banana fronds and tied in a bow with a string of bamboo.
Barking dogs jinked about the boat decks as several fishwives hoisted stringers of basa and tra catfish onto portable scales, suffusing the whole market with their odor. A grocery boat beeped its horn nonstop, weaving in and out of the squeezed armada, selling ruou thuoc (rice whiskey), nuoc mam (fish sauce used in almost every dish in Vietnam), sugar, chili sauce, noodles, quail eggs, and 100-year-old eggs, a delicacy in which the egg is steeped in ammonia until it turns black like gummy charcoal.
Before mid-morning, the floating market began to scatter like an ice floe breaking up in all directions. I boarded the Pope Mobile II for a final sprint to Saigon. Tuan, the boat captain, was an affable 30-year old who has a sister living in the States. Tuan’s father had worked for the Americans during the war.
His father burned incriminating documents when the communist victors reached his doorsteps, avoiding the re-education camps. Tuan wanted to buy more Pope Mobiles to make a regular run to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, and “maybe in a couple of years have a few in Laos.” He envisioned a Pope Mobile empire.
We sliced through a couple of long arroyos linked to the other main branch of the Mekong, better known as the Tien Giang in Vietnam. The banks were lined with the usual fecund sweep of fruit orchards fronted by water hyacinth, its shadows haunted by fish. Drift nets flanked the canal’s main channel staked on long bamboo poles rising like goal posts from the shallow water.
Along the populated banks, tatty delta homes—thatched, whitewashed, or painted in tropical peach, buff yellow and sky blue—backed up to the water, often with a street bounding their fronts. Beneath one of the many hogback bridges, a reptilian-eyed barge was stuck in the channel with a full belly of rice, waiting for a higher tide.
At a ferry crossing, a wave of schoolgirls on bicycles wore flowing white ao dais—the traditional form-fitting long dress and matching trousers. On Thoi Son island, a favorite stopover between Saigon and Can Tho, pet gibbons shrieked in the trees above the drooping branches of dragon fruit. Cobras and eels were displayed in side-by-side cages as top delicacies.
From a distance we spotted the gilded arches of one of the Delta’s many Cao Dai cathedrals. Founded in 1926 in the delta, the eclectic religion once commanded a formidable anti-communist army in the south. Their numbers have diminished as a result of the intolerance of the communist regime, but there are still a few hundred thousand devotees, mostly assembled near the Cao Dai headquarters in Tay Ninh province. There, I once watched a noon prayer service conducted by female cardinals and a look-a-like pope, who often invoked the names of Cao Dai saints: Dr. Sun Yat Sen, Trang Trinh, a Vietnamese poet, Victor Hugo, Joan of Arc, Winston Churchill, Buddha, Confucius and Christ.
We arrived in My Tho around noon to refuel and for Tuan and his sidekick to have lunch at the appropriate time, a ritual normally followed by the Vietnamese siesta. Cutting the nap short in businesslike haste, we were back on the water within an hour, passing vast forests of coconut palms, and encountering barges brimming over with the fibrous husks, used for making ropes and mats. Nearby, a factory broadcasted the invisible but noxious stink of the fish sauce.
Before long, we saw the first of the colorful shrimp boats—red, blue, and green—chugging in from the sea. The grayish-brown water of the Mekong melded into jade, then a sea of aquamarine, an estuary, the mother of watery hourglasses: filling the shores of Vietnam with sandy silt from the top of the world in Tibet.
Two ebony-tinged fishermen kept the sun off their heads with black headbands. They were checking their nets and collecting black fishing markers, adorning their fishing scow with them like prayer flags.
The Ty To mountains hulked above the coastal city of Vung Tau through a liquid haze of heat. Surf-tipped waves creased the sea, traversed by the silhouettes of fishing scows trailed by clouds of gulls. We had first joined the Mekong almost 1,500 miles before in a Dai village in China. Now we were at the Dai Gate—a coincidence of unrelated names—which led into the South China Sea, one of the nine mythological estuaries of the Mekong. With the Pope Mobile bobbing as trivially as flotsam lost to the sea, Simon and I waxed lyrical about our journey for a few minutes: from hill tribes and pack horses to trawlers and gulls. After popping a couple of imagined champagne corks, we proceeded dutifully on to Saigon for some unfinished culinary business.
Skirting the white sand beaches of Vung Tau we headed inland, networking through a couple of tributaries—the Long Tau and Thieng Lieng—before joining the Saigon River. Soon, the glassy new high rises of Saigon loomed into focus. The river filled with freighters hoisting registry flags from Shanghai, Singapore and Panama. A forest of gantry cranes crisscrossed the water like daddy-long-legs loading and unloading containers. Opposite downtown Saigon, a neon wall curtained the water’s edge advertising foreign products—Mercedes-Benz, Hitachi, Suzuki, and Siemens.
We unloaded on the pier next to an imperious statue of Tran Hung Dao. The 13th century Vietnamese commander and mythologized kicker of Chinese ass stood in the center of a busy Me Linh Square beneath the shadow of the towering new Renaissance Hotel. Dressed in warrior garb, he pointed a threatening finger downward. Saying goodbye to Tuan, and also to Simon briefly, I took a cyclo, or bicycle taxi, along the waterfront, passing the colonial Majestic Hotel before cycling ahead to the former colonial customs building. In 1866, the French expedition up the Mekong had taken two years on their epic journey to reach China. In less than a month, we had just finished our own jaunt.
After dropping my bags off at a nearby guesthouse, I took a cyclo through the back streets of Saigon’s District 1 before turning in front of the Continental Hotel, site of many scenes in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Circling behind the municipal theater, a petite but sublimely sculpted Saigon hooker on a street corner motioned for me to join her in the Club 97 karaoke bar. Her footwear was a telltale reminder of our return to modern civilization: she wore heels she could not walk in. Touching as her invitation was, I kept on riding to Mogambos, a restaurant and guesthouse where Simon was staying. After greeting the proprietor, a Vietnamese woman named Hoa, I asked her to call Gary Dale Cearly, a girthsome friend from Arkansas who is a regular there. Hoa quickly obliged. She has time on her hands, spending most of her days flopped on a long banquette couch like a banked fish, thrashing to life at intervals to feed and to school with customers.
Five well-bellied Caucasians sat speechless at the bar across from Hoa, taking up eight seats in an all-day beer-drinking seance. I call such adherents Buddha Bellies. Two acquaintances slipped away from the holy alliance, and walked over to say hello, but they didn’t seem to notice our Cambodian tans, much less the mystical layers of spiritual and social silt that we secretly believed must have shrouded us like monks’ cowls. When we told them we had just arrived from China via the Mekong, in a ho-hum gesture Frank-from-London didn’t find the idea of the journey interesting enough to ask a question, going on to tell us about a new product line of sports memorabilia he was marketing. Johnny-from-Australia was even less interested. “Hmm, oh really. Well, good to see you mates,” he managed to say, and walked out.
The Buddha Bellies are a familiar order in Hanoi and Saigon. Drinking is an indoor event, so their color is always pasty. Seasoned Buddha Bellies sport noses laced with fiery spiderwebs. Mostly talkers, not listeners, their origins are usually steeped in myth and mystery. They are no Asian Argonauts; they are far from home but don’t really like traveling. They have journeyed to Vietnam for the affordable, carefree lifestyle and female adulation. Their mission is best expressed by a manifesto I saw scrawled in the john of their Hanoi sanctuary, The Spotted Cow, “If you have tried and failed everywhere else, try Hanoi.”
We weren’t at Mogambos pining for a parade, only a good hamburger and some barroom banter. While I looked over the menu, pleased to see there were no banana pancakes, Hoa, having emerged from her vinyl reef, handed me a cell phone, whispering that Gary Dale was on the other end. “Hey Gary Dale, Phil Karber here. Simon and I traveled from China down the Mekong and just arrived in Saigon. We were wondering what to order here at Mogambos. Any suggestions?”
Like a seasoned doctor, Gary prescribed the right medicine: “Phil, get the bacon cheeseburger with chili-cheese fries on the side.” We talked a few minutes, but he asked nothing about our epic journey. The burger, however, answered my query faultlessly: pure U.S. Angus beef, marbled ground chuck with a meat-to-fat ratio of 3:1, piled with a half rasher of fresh cooked bacon, sliced tomato, rings of white onion, well-melted cheddar cheese; and served on lightly toasted white bread buns, slathered in American mustard and most critically, garnished with at least four round slices of dill pickle. At the end of our 1,500 miles it was manna from the Mekong gods.
I went to bed fat and happy as any Buddha Belly. Simon of London enjoyed a sublime shore leave, prowling Saigon’s dark corners for the next three nights.