A difficult time…
- Ruth Mcbride
- Oct 15
- 7 min read
Day 3 of our Mekong Delta River Cruise on the Avalon Saigon
How do you get to work? Many of us that lived near Toronto would commute via GO Train or Subway, with a few brave ones willing to risk rush hour traffic and sit in their cars for hours at a time.
Well today’s commute was a wee bit different to get to the village of Kampong Tralach!
Ox cart!!
Who knew there was a specific technique for getting into an ox cart? I could see that the first person onto the ox cart had to lean against the driver to balance the cart, so I asked Richard if he could get on first. Once Richard was in place and balanced then it was my turn to crawl up through the dirt of his shoes, and rest against Richard.
So far, so good! Then we started moving! You have no idea how it feels to ride in an ox cart with hard wheels and no suspension until you’ve done it! OMG! On a properly paved road I think it might have been not too bad, but the driver must have hit every rut and muddy pot hole in the road on our way to visit a local farmer’s house.
Our ox cart driver spoke English so he told us that he was a farmer with a farm about 1km away from where the Avalon Saigon had docked. He freelances doing ox tours for Avalon!
The main floor of the farmer’s house The kitchen was in behind where our guide was standing. The house was ‘open air’.
Upstairs in the farmer’s house. The house was spotless upstairs and we removed our shoes to enter. Many of the homes on the Mekong Delta were exactly like this home we visited today.
After a short visit to the farmer’s home, it was time for us to walk to another home in another small nearby village called Konpong Louang.
This village had quite a few silversmiths who operate businesses out of their homes. The ground floor was the workshop and the villagers live above their shops. We were shown how the locals buy the block of silver and then melt it down to fabricate sheets of silver, and then produce silver trays or jewellery. Many of the items that were for sale in the shop were hand hammered and had designs or images of Angkor Wat on them.
The shop owner showed us that sometimes people will use brass instead of silver and they dip the brass in silver; so to ensure that the metal we were purchasing was really silver she rubbed a red paste on the silver to show that if it was pure silver and the silver finish would not rub off, as it would with brass.
After the demonstration we had the opportunity to purchase some silver items from the shop. A bracelet was $80USD and earrings were $35USD. I thought the prices were a bit steep and so I passed on purchasing any jewellery from the shop.
While we were on our morning tour our ship had repositioned a short distance away from the silversmith’s home, so we decided to leave the shop and walk back to the ship. The temperature again was a stifling 40C with a feels like temperature much higher because of the humidity.
As we were walking back to the ship some local girls with baskets of silver jewellery approached us and started showing us silver bracelets for $40USD. I negotiated $20USD for a silver bracelet and asked her to put the red paste on it and show me that the bracelet was actually silver. She rubbed the paste on and off and the bracelet did not change colours so I purchased the bracelet. I was also able to negotiate for 3 pairs of silver earrings for $20USD, which I also had her rub the red paste on to prove to me they were real silver. Her English was excellent and we complimented her on her English language skills, to which she said she had studied at the International school and that is why she spoke English so well.
Sometimes the ‘sanitized’, Avalon ‘approved’ places are not always the cheapest places to purchase souvenirs so I’m glad we waited and if we had missed the opportunity in this village we knew that we still had time in Phnom Penh, Cambodia where there was a large market and many vendors.
Floating homes on the small tributaries off the Mekong River.
Rice paddy in the Mekong Delta.
After we re-embarked the Avalon Saigon started heading towards Phnom Penh where we had originally picked up the ship a few days before after our very long bus ride from Siem Reap, Cambodia.
After lunch onboard, our afternoon excursion was a choice of visiting the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and one of the Killing Fields or going to the Central Market by tuk tuk.
As difficult as it was to visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum commonly known as Security Prison 21, we chose this tour.
Classrooms turned into prison cells
The prison was originally a secondary school which the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) imprisoned an estimated 20,000 people. Security Prison 21 as it was commonly known, was one of approximately 196 torture and execution centres established by the Khmer Rouge and the secret police known as Santebal.
When the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia they took over the prison and converted classrooms into prison cells. Electrified razor wire was installed around the perimeter of the property. Prisoners were tortured and coerced into naming family members and close associates who had been followers of the previous political regime and many of the prisoners were soldiers, government officials, doctors, teachers, students, factory workers, and monks. During the later stages of the prison, the Khmer Rouge party leadership’s paranoid turned on its own ranks and purges throughout the country saw thousands of party activists and their families brought to the Tuol Sleng and murdered.
Upon arrival at the prison, prisoners were photographed and required to give detailed autobiographies beginning with their childhood and ending with their arrest. After that they were forced to strip to their underwear and all of their possessions were confiscated.
Prisoners were shackled to the walls or the concrete floors and there were no mats, mosquito nets or blankets and silence was compulsory. Prisoners received four small spoonfuls of rice porridge and a watery soup of leaves twice a day. Most prisoners were held at S-21 for 2-3 months before being removed for execution.
I will not get into the methods of torture as the methods were inhumane. We saw many photographs on display of the prisoners that had been held at the prison, as well as the condition of how the prisoners were held and tortured.
Not all of the prisoners were from Cambodia with photos showing that there were Vietnamese, Thai, French, American, Australian, one Canadian and few other people from other countries that unfortuantely happened to land in Cambodia or be near Cambodia and were captured by the Khmer Rouge during their reign.
Of the estimated 20,000 people imprisoned at S-21, only 12 survived. We saw the 2 remaining survivors at the prison who had both written books and were selling them for the tourists.
When the Vietnamese Army invaded Cambodia in 1979 and overthrew the Khmer Rouge, they uncovered the prison and preserved it as a museum memorializing the actions of the Khmer Rouge regime which was led by dictator Pol Pot. UNESCO in 2025 has designated the site as a World Heritage Site.
Seeing the prison was a very difficult and extremely moving experience. Knowing that this went on during my lifetime when I was in high school made me wonder why the Khmer Rouge was allowed to get away with what they did to their own people? The Cambodian genocide resulted in the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people or nearly 25% of the Cambodian population from 1975 to 1979, and the West either didn’t know, or didn’t stop it. Horrifying. A country that is 98% Buddhist, with their simple means of life, it is unbelievable the atrocities the the Cambodians have seen, experienced or know of someone who was executed during their lifetime.
If S-21 wasn’t difficult enough to see, we headed back to our bus for a 45 minute drive to the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, more commonly called “The Killing Field”. Throughout Cambodia there are more than 20,000 mass grave sites for the 1.5 to 2 million citizens who either died from torture, imprisonment, disease or starvation out of a population of 8 million in the entire nation of Cambodia.
When prisoners were killed at S-21 in Phnom Pen, they were taken to the Killing Fields (Choeung Ek Genocidal Center) for burial. The Center was the extermination camp, after the prisoner had been interrogated at S-21.
The remains of 8,985 people were found bound and blindfolded and exhumed in 1980 from mass graves in the one-time longan orchard. A memorial STUPA was erected in 1988 with the skulls of the victims inside the Stupa on display. We both chose not to enter the Stupa as we could see enough from the outside of the glass building.
The grounds of Choeung Ek Genocidal Center were beautiful and have been preserved with the assistance of UNESCO as a World Heritage site. As we walked through the grounds we honoured the victims who were buried at the site with our silence.
I cannot tell you how moved I was to see the Killing Fields. It was a very difficult experience to walk through the grounds envisioning what went on at this very site.
Hopefully nothing like this situation will ever be repeated in our lifetime, but that is hoping that humanity is honoured and revered and unfortunately we know not every religion or race reveres life over death.
A very difficult day, and one we will never forget. From the difficulty of riding an ox cart, to the Extremely emotional difficulty of understanding how brutally treated the Cambodians were by the Khmer Rouge government during the war in Cambodia. It is really hard to put into words the emotional turmoil that I felt during the tour of S-21 and the Killing Fields, but now we have a better understanding of why the Cambodians just want peace and harmony and enlightenment which aligns so closely with their Buddhist religious beliefs
‘San-te-Pheap’….or ‘Peace’ in Cambodian
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