A LEAP OF FAITH |
| ANGKOR WAT - 5/24 |
Growing up during the
Vietnam War had skewed my view of ever visiting the country. It was a horrific
time for this young man and these United States. Decades later I still had
misgivings about a trip to Vietnam and it was a “leap of faith” (and a slap to
the back of my head by Janet) to agree to travel there.
I can report now, after
spending three weeks traveling from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City with several
stops in between that Vietnam was one of the better trips in my lifetime. The country
is beautiful, and the people of Vietnam are warm and friendly and genuinely
pleased that we would ever return to their country in peace.
The ominous history of
Vietnam was there, if you sought it out, and I have friends who fought in the
war who were skeptical about our travels. There were too many bad memories for
them, but overall, despite the past, the latter-day Vietnam left us with many
fond memories.
Cambodia was even more
difficult to consider as a vacation destination, given the history of the Khmer
Rouge and their frenzied genocide of the 70s. Pol Pot wanted to reset Cambodia to
“Year Zero” and an agrarian state free from all foreign influence. Some
estimates have the Khmer Rouge purging nearly 2 million people in four short
years as the regime targeted middle-class citizens and intellectuals. People were
rounded up by the military and sent to “reeducation” camps where they were
forced into labor, starved, tortured and executed. There is a colloquial term
for this: The Killing Fields.
WHERE PEOPLE GET THINGS
DONE
Although the Vietnam
conflict consumed our attention, the chaos of Cambodia was even more unnerving.
As the depraved murder spree by the Khmer Rouge was slowly revealed to the
world the quagmire of Cambodia became fodder for sensationalistic films and sarcastic,
derisive songs by punk rock groups. Watching the 1984 film “The Killing Fields”
was eye-opening and frightening. How could this happen? I remember watching a documentary
with the facts told from the Khmer Rouge’s viewpoint and was shaken to see the
chilling cold-hearted approach children took to killing their neighbors to
further Pol Pot’s revolution.
The Dead Kennedys took a
snide approach to it in their 1980 song “A Holiday In Cambodia” eviscerating over-privileged
college students who think they know it all and contrasting it with the brutal
reality of the Khmer Rouge.
Sure, it’s punk rock
and can be dismissed as such, but what happened in Cambodia was real.
POST-TRIP
 |
| APSARA DANCER |
It was into this swirl
of memories that we decided to tack on a post-trip to Cambodia with Overseas Adventure
Tours (OAT), a small-group tour company that we discovered in researching
Vietnam. OAT offered a pre-trip and this post-trip to Cambodia. Our trip to
Cambodia was particularly small with just another couple staying after the “Inside
Vietnam” portion of the OAT trip.
The five-day trip
included roundtrip airfare from HCMC to Siem Reap, which is the gateway to
Angkor Wat. This massive Buddhist temple was first built as a Hindu temple and
is depicted on the flag of Cambodia.
We stayed in one hotel
and made daytrips to Angkor Wat and several other temples, received a water
blessing from a Buddhist monk who was also an IT specialist, waded into the
revelry of Pub Street for a few drinks, haggled with vendors in the night
market for trinkets that we gained for astonishingly paltry amounts, cruised the
massive Tonie Sap lake to see a floating village, attended a show of Apsara
dancers, the traditional Cambodian art form, watched a family make rice noodles
which we had a chance to sample, and learned how to fold lotus flowers to make
an offering at a temple.
 |
| SIEM REAP PUB STREET |
It was a beautiful, relaxed
trip and the Cambodian people are wonderful. It would have been easy to forget
the past horrors of Cambodia, if not for the Stupa we saw that held the skeletal relics of those unfortunate souls. |
| Stupa, Siem Reap Cambodia |
Thanks for reading. |
| Cambodian future |
Love Janet and greg
