Ba Chuc, a Vietnamese community in the Mekong Delta, sits just across the border from Cambodia. On April 18, 1978, Khmer Rouge soldiers entered the village from Cambodia and massacred 3,157 men, women, and children — almost the entire population. Today the skulls of many of the victims are on display in an outdoor memorial. Statistics, […]
Expanding Awareness Of Geography Through Travel
One morning on Ko Chang, Thailand, while sitting by the sea and preparing to breakfast on a pineapple pancake and a pineapple shake, I read a puzzling line in Simon Winchester’s book Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883. Winchester pointed out that the 1969 film Krakatoa: East of Java contains a glaring geographical error in […]
What Fortune-tellers Cannot Predict
In his book A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East, Tiziano Terzani recounts a scene in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in which he is at a fortune-teller’s house, sitting in a dark room lit by an oil lamp. Over the door and written in chalk (and presumably in Khmer) is, “Carnal passion, jealously, […]
You Are Living Only Now, Now And Now And Now
There are no icebergs in the Gulf of Thailand, but at any given moment there is, in this and many other seas, someone thinking about the Titanic — or at least about Leonardo DiCaprio. I almost didn’t take this photograph. For most of three hours I had been lying on a bench on the ferry’s deck, […]