Westworld Alberta
Issue link: http://westworldmagazine.ama.ab.ca/i/40418
We stopped in Kampong Tralach, a tran- quil village where locals led us, driving crude oxcarts pulled by leggy cows, to a nearby wat. "After the Khmer Rouge, having a cart like this was like having a Lexus," our guide informed me. In such a placid setting, it's easy to forget that one of the most horrifi c pogroms of recent history took place here just decades ago. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot's communist regime, the Khmer Rouge, wiped out some two million Cambo- dians in waves of murder and starvation that targeted the intellectual elite. After a half- dozen visits to Cambodia, this still strikes me as the real conundrum of the place: that a country with such a turbid recent past is now so peaceful and friendly. At Wat Kampong Tralach, fading, 150-year-old paintings depicting the life of the Buddha covered the inside of the tem- ple. The scenes mirrored the countryside we'd been passing through for days, with a patchwork-like quilt of rice paddies and farms and a broad, snaking river arcing through the background. "There aren't many paintings like these left in Cambo- dia," our guide said as we rode our carts back to the river. "If the weather didn't destroy them, the war did." From the Mekong, the Jayavarman eased onto the Tonlé Sap River, which links the capital, Phnom Penh, to the second largest freshwater lake in Asia by way of a narrow, 97-kilometre-long throat of waterway. Dur- ing the summer monsoon, the Mekong becomes so bloated that it reverses the fl ow of this tributary, pouring water into the shallow Tonlé Sap Lake. By September, at the height of the wet season, the river rises nine metres and the lake quadruples in size, replenishing the fish stocks and flooding the surrounding plains with nutrient-rich silt. As we crept upriver, a tangle of greenery carpeted the shores, with curls of ivy nearly touching the ship's bow and islands of water hyacinth clogging the water. When the banks widened, we drifted into Kam- pong Chhnang, a dozy little market town where whole neighbourhoods drift with the water's annual ebb and swell. The village looks like any other Cambo- dian town, except all the homes stand on pontoons and waterways separate the grid of buildings instead of streets. Vendors in small boats trawled the canals hawking produce, bags of chips and automotive parts. Like the unhurried current of the Tonlé Sap, life here seemed to advance at a meander. 26 WESTWORLD >> SEPTEMBER 2011