Wednesday, October 9, 2024

A HOLIDAY IN CAMBODIA

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.


YEAR ZERO
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
OVERSEAS ADVENTURE TRAVEL

© 2024 by Gregory Dunaj


                                       Dead Kennedys / Holiday In Cambodia

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