Cruising the Mekong River in Vietnam and Cambodia
Stuff.co.nz | 14 September 2014
Jo McCarroll
OVERGROWN: An ancient tree grows through an
even more ancient building in Angkor Thom, which gained modern fame as a
location in the Tomb Raider movie
Jo McCarroll
FUTURE HOPE: Despite a tragic modern history,
Cambodia's people remain upliftingly positive and friendly; these
children are on a roadside in Angkor Ban
Reuters. Cambodia's famous Angkor Wat temple is seen at sunrise.
Asia
An overnight boat cruise - the only way to do the Bay of Islands!
The ruins of Angkor Wat were famously discovered by the French
explorer, Henri Mouhot, in the mid-19th century. The word "discovered"
is used rather loosely here, of course - at the time the lost naturalist
stumbled upon the ruins, Khmer people were happily living among them -
but Mouhot's descriptions of the vast size, soaring towers and elaborate
carvings certainly put Cambodia on the gentleman explorer's to-do list
and Angkor Wat remains firmly on the bucket list of modern-day
adventurers.
I visited the ruins in the final days of an expedition of my own; a
550 kilometre, 11-day trip along the Mekong Delta, from southern Vietnam
to Cambodia's Siam Reap, travelling on a riverboat, the Cruiseco
Adventurer.
So from the moment we board the Adventurer in My Tho, a port town
just out of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), there are other boats
around us, tiny fishing sampans, larger trading boats which whole
families live in (often with a television dish attached to the roof) and
flat dredges loaded with river sand.
We get off the boat a lot, too, every day decanting onto smaller
long boats for at least one "excursion" (cruise ship speak for an
off-the-boat activity). Cruiseco prides itself on the calibre of its
excursions; the company's owner, Steve Lloyd, who joins us for the first
half of our trip, still sources a lot of them himself and looks for
ways to connect tourists with genuine family businesses and real cottage
industries.
In Vietnam we visit a factory where eight members of one family make
candy from coconut milk - we eat a piece that's still warm (it's quite
nice, like a coconut-flavoured soft toffee). They turn out 8000 pieces a
day, each one wrapped by hand.
We see the woman who makes rice paper at work, effortlessly creating
one translucent sheet after another. One of my fellow passengers is
prevailed upon to try to make paper. She is rubbish. The rice-paper
maker laughs and says something to our Vietnamese guide, Thinh. She is
46, he translates, and has been doing this job for 35 years.
At the same place we are given a shot of snake wine - yes, that is
simply wine in which a cobra has been macerating. Snake wine (and what I
extrapolate must be scorpion wine, lizard wine and baby crocodile wine)
is available for sale. "Snake wine is very good for you," says Thinh,
translating for the winemaker. "It makes you like a cobra in the night."
Then the family patriarch grins at us toothlessly and makes an upward
gesture with his forearm which needs no translation at all.
In Sa Dec that afternoon we walk through the food market beside the
river, where locals buy fresh fruit, veges, fish and meat. There are
eels, still alive in shallow bowls, and snakehead and elephant ear fish,
both famous Mekong delicacies.
There are frogs, some of which are still alive, some of which have
already been skinned, and some of which, I realise rather squeamishly,
are both alive and skinned at the same time. There are the carcasses of
Mekong kangaroo, aka the delta rats. "We do not eat the city rat, for it
is very dirty," Thinh says. "But the delta rat, it is very clean."
We visit the town of Cai Be where floating markets have been held
since the 19th century. Cai Be translates as floating timber and is a
reference to the wooden trading boats. Wholesalers moor up and flog
fruit and vegetables to smaller traders in their more manoeuverable
wooden sampans with painted eyes on the front to scare away attacking
sea monsters.
The markets take place in the shadow of a vast cathedral built by
French settlers in the 1930s. French rule ended in both Cambodia and
Vietnam in 1954, but their influence can still be seen everywhere, from
the tall narrow colonial-style buildings and riverside promenades to the
excellent baguettes for sale at roadside stalls, alongside fried
crickets and tarantulas. And in the Catholic religion which is still
evident in the south of Vietnam.
"Along here is still very Catholic," Thinh says with a shrug. "We
mainly earn our living by farming. And if you are a farmer it pays to
have a very strong belief in God."
Eventually the Adventurer crosses the border into Cambodia. In the
centre of the country's capital, Phnom Penh, we moor up for the night.
Tourism is a rapidly growing industry in the self-styled Kingdom of
Wonder: Last year Cambodia had 4 million foreign visitors, up from
around a million 10 years ago, and they expect to welcome more than 8
million a year by 2020.
And the visitors are already changing the destination. Just a few
years ago, our new guide - a Cambodian called Sokun - tells me, there
were three bars beside the river. Now there are dozens, most of which
have a sign in the window advertising for English-speaking staff.
We visit one of the most venerable of them, the Foreign
Correspondents Club, opened by a British lawyer 20-odd years ago
immediately after a tentative ceasefire was declared, which bought an
end to years of bloody fighting in Cambodia. The lawyer, Steve Hayward,
is said to have run into a couple of soldiers in the United Nations
advance party, who told him that in just a few months there would be
20,000 UN peacekeepers arriving in Phnom Penh, each one with a per diem
of US$100.
Realising this was something of a business opportunity, he founded
the Foreign Correspondents Club or FCC, so named because it was a base
for diplomats, expats and (of course) the many reporters covering Pol
Pot's final stand.
Phnom Penh is where the Cambodian king, Norodom Sihamoni, lives in
an elaborate complex of buildings known (unsurprisingly) as the Royal
Palace. About half of the area, the bit in which Sihamoni actually
resides, is off limits, but you can visit the Temple of the Emerald
Buddha, commonly referred to as the Silver Pagoda because of the 5329
pure silver tiles that make up its floor, and wander through the stables
where the queen's elephant used to be housed (the royals stopped using
elephants a while ago, Sokun tells me, they decided a limousine was an
easier way to get around).
Throngs of international visitors are taking selfies in front of the
304-metre mural that decorates the temple compound's walls, painted in
1903, which tells the life story of King Rama, whose wife, Sita, is
abducted by the demon king, Ravana, at which point Rama joins forces
with an army of monkey soldiers to win her back (that Pixar movie
practically writes itself).
The murals are damaged at the top, Sokun tells us, because the roof
collapsed during the Cambodian civil war, the three years, eight months
and 20 days between 1975 and 1979 that the country was under the rule of
Pol Pot and his army of boy soldiers. For much of that time, Cambodia's
previous king, His Majesty Norodom Sihanouk, lived under house arrest
in this very palace.
It is that dictator's bloody legacy that accounts for the other
major, albeit sombre, tourist attractions in this city. Just 16km
southwest of Phnom Penh are the so-called Killing Fields, one of 388
sites which the Khmer Rogue used for mass slaughter, where an estimated
20,000 men, women and children were executed and buried in 129 mass
graves.
The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, housed in what used to be the prison
known as S21 and before that was a high school, is right in the centre
of town. More than 17,000 prisoners passed through S21 over the course
of the civil war and the history books record that only seven adults
survived (one of whom, Chum Mey, now 84, is selling his autobiography at
the gate when we visit).
This is recent history and so many of the Cambodians we meet tell us
their own stories from that time. In Siam Reap, our tour guide,
Bunrith, was 4 years old when Pol Pot seized power. His father, a
government soldier, was killed immediately. His sister died of
starvation and his mother died some years later of what Bunrith
describes simply as "excessive suffering".
Sokun, who was born during the period and grew up in one of the
floating villages near Kampong Cham - "I was a fish boy," he tells me,
"I used to swim to school"- lost all of his uncles and aunts. As a
14-year-old boy, he had his own AK-47 to defend his family from attack
by Khmer Rogue soldiers.
That is not to say the Cambodians we meet are not positive; they are, extremely so. In fact, they are often upliftingly so.
We visit a school where we donate pens and exercise books (school in
Cambodia is free but not compulsory and the cost of the school
materials is prohibitive for many) and the pupils sing a rousing chorus
of If You Are Happy And You Know It for us.
We stop at a monastery where we are blessed by monks, and two
Buddhist nuns, aged 84 and 90, are hugely amused by how fat some of the
cruise ship passengers are (they keep poking the more rotund members of
our party in the tummy and then dissolving into laughter, while one of
them grabs hold of my breasts and honks on them repeatedly).
We get a chance to wander around Angkor Ban Six, where the local
farmers and fishermen sleep in houses on stilts but spend most of the
daylight hours they are at home in the cool space underneath the house.
Because the river is high, we disembark the Adventurer in Kampong
Cham and travel by bus to Siem Reap, the gateway to the Unesco World
Heritage site of the Angkor Archaeological Park.
Stretching over 400 square kilometres, the area includes the ruins
of many temples built between the ninth and 15th century, including the
Bayon Temple, with its 216 carved faces of Buddha, every one different;
and Angkor Thom, where the trees grow through the walls, built in the
late 12th century by King Jayavarman VII and which owes most of its
visitors to the fact that Angelina Jolie filmed several scenes of Lara
Croft: Tomb Raider there.
And then there is that bucket-list worthy Angkor Wat, which we visit
at sunset, where we are awed by its size and grandeur, like (I imagine)
the 19th-century Mouhot must have been.
Now I do not claim that my journey parallels Mouhot's own travels in
absolutely every particular. I am not sure if 19th-century Frenchmen
went in for karaoke, for instance, which was a big part of several
evenings on the Adventurer.
Mouhot wrote in his diaries that he was worried his little dog would
be stepped on by an elephant or eaten by a wild tiger while he explored
the tributaries of the Mekong River and I can honestly say these things
did not concern me at all.
But like Mouhot, I have been amazed by some of the places I have
seen and people I have met. Like him, I have been on an extraordinary
adventure.
The writer travelled as a guest of Cruiseco.
FACT FILE
The Cruiseco Adventurer's 11-night itineraries start from either Ho Chi Minh City or Siem Reap. Tours includes two nights at the Hotel Caravelle in Ho Chi Minh City, seven nights on the riverboat the Cruiseco Adventurer, and two nights at Raffles Hotel D'Angkor in Siem Reap. The cruise runs between July and April but the optimal time to go in terms of the water and weather conditions is between September and November. New Zealand passengers can expect to pay $2925 (on a twin-share basis) for most departures through to March 2015. These prices do not include flights. But most meals are included as is beer, soft drinks and local spirits. Wine is available with lunch and dinner. The Cruiseco Adventurer has a capacity of 60 passengers in 30 staterooms. All cabins have polished timber floors, en-suite facilities, floor-to-ceiling French windows, a private balcony, and a private seating area with outdoor furniture. Additionally, the ship offers two suites and two deluxe suites; both of which have a separate living area and a sofa bed. More information cruising.com.au
- Sunday Star Times
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