Vietnam and Cambodia

Authentic Vietnam and Cambodia: A Journey

“We who have seen war will never stop seeing it. In the silence of the night, we will always hear the screams. So this is our story, for we were soldiers once, and young.”—Joseph L. Galloway

I felt a quiet apprehension entering Vietnam for the first time. Would the Vietnamese still carry resentment toward Americans? After all, more than two million of their people died in a war waged under the banner of American freedom and democracy—meant to halt the spread of Communism. But history has since revealed a different story. The U.S. failed to understand that the Vietnamese were not merely pawns of an ideology. They were fighting, fiercely and stubbornly, for their own independence—against centuries of Chinese, then French, domination.

Was the war always doomed to be a brutal and pointless chapter—divorced from real survival or moral clarity? In The Vietnam War, the powerful documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, a U.S. Undersecretary of Defense reflects with rare candor: the ground invasion in 1965 was “70 percent to avoid humiliation.” A Marine officer goes further, saying, “You’re killing people to protect your male ego.”

That war still haunts the American soul. Without it, there would have been no draft, no protest movement, no Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, no hippie counterculture. Perhaps just a lot of disillusioned youth experimenting with LSD and rebelling against their parents in quieter ways. In the same documentary, a North Vietnamese veteran offers a piercing insight: “People sing about victory, about liberation. They are wrong. Who won the war and who lost is not the question. In war, no one wins or loses. There is only destruction. Only those who have never fought like to argue about who won and who lost.”

As an Israeli, I can’t help but wonder—is war our fate too? Is it inescapable, woven into the fabric of our national identity? Are we truly doing all we can to challenge that assumption? I often lean toward the view that war is Israel’s tragic destiny—that no real alternatives have yet emerged. But like the Americans in Vietnam, perhaps we, too, are misreading the story. I want to believe we can be wrong—and that being wrong might one day lead to something better. I wish, with all my heart, that Israelis and Palestinians could look at each other the way the Vietnamese and Americans do now: not with hatred, but with a strange, hard-earned kinship.

The Fascinating—and Frightening—Flow of Hanoi

Hanoi is a thousand-year-old city, shaped by layers of Chinese and French influence, each a remnant of past invasions. Yet today, it pulses with the intensity of rapid modernization. Everywhere, motorbikes fill the streets like schools of darting fish, weaving and honking in every direction. Very few drive cars. Buses thunder by. Crossing the street as a pedestrian feels like stepping into a living river of steel and rubber. You don’t wait for a break in the flow—you just walk slowly and steadily, letting the current of motorbikes adjust around you.

There’s something almost philosophical in it. A quiet trust. A sense that life, even in chaos, finds a rhythm. It made me wonder if this is how the Vietnamese approach life in general: not by controlling the flow, but by stepping into it, trusting that movement will shape its own harmony.

Where the Dragon Descends into the Sea

Halong Bay is Vietnam’s majestic wonder, a seascape of limestone karsts, hidden caves, and jade-colored waters. Its name means “where the dragon descends into the sea”—and it does feel mythic, like a place dreamt into being. Spread across Halong and Bai Tu Long bays, more than 2,000 jagged islands rise from the water, their cliffs shrouded in green. I had the gift of spending a few days here, sailing between the formations on a small cruise boat. It reminded me why some places, like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat, become timeless icons. Not because they’re famous, but because they pull something ancient from inside you—something wordless and true.

On Quan Lan Island: The Two Burials

In a quiet corner of Bai Tu Long Bay lies Quan Lan Island, where I came across a graveyard unlike any I’d seen before. It was there I learned about the Vietnamese custom of double burial. After a person dies, their body is buried once. Then, three to five years later—depending on the family and the size of the body—it is exhumed, the bones carefully cleaned and reburied. This second burial is an act of devotion, a way to honor the dead and ensure their spirit is truly at rest. There was something deeply moving in this ritual, in the reverence it carried—not just for death, but for continuity, for memory, for the unseen bond between generations.

Cua Van: A Floating World

About 20 kilometers from the harbor lies Cua Van, the largest of four floating villages in the bay. It clings to the edge of limestone cliffs like a whisper of human presence on a vast sea. Around a hundred families live here in brightly painted wooden homes, bobbing gently on anchored platforms. For generations, they have lived this way—fishing, mending nets, raising children above the tides. There is no pavement, no grid, no traffic—only the lapping water, the low hum of boats, and the steady rhythm of life shaped by the sea. In places like this, time loosens its grip. Life becomes simpler, and somehow, more whole.

Sapa: Where Culture Threads the Mountain Mist

The Vietnamese government recognizes 54 ethnic minority groups, each with its own language, rituals, and visual language. Some tribes number only a few hundred; others, over a million. Geography plays a quiet role in shaping these identities—borders with Laos, China, and Cambodia bring influence and distinction.

In the mist-shrouded hills around Sapa, especially near Mount Fansipan, the Hmong people have made their home. Originally from China, they are known for their handwoven clothing, often crafted from hemp. Each Hmong subgroup—Red, White, Black, and the vividly adorned Flower Hmong—wears garments that reflect centuries of tradition. Tassels, beads, and headbands transform daily dress into a form of storytelling.

Walking through Sapa’s terraced fields and market lanes, I felt as though I was stepping into a living museum—except this was no performance. This was life, unfolding as it always had.

Bac Ha: Where the Mountains Burst with Color

We continued to Bac Ha on motorcycle—me riding pillion, wind brushing my face, music in my ears, and rice paddies rolling out like topographic waves. There’s something elemental about traveling this way. The freedom. The exposure. The silence between songs.

Saturday brought us to Bac Ha market, where hill tribes from across the region gather. The market isn’t just for trading goods; it’s for reaffirming identity. I stopped trying to frame the perfect photo and just let the colors wash over me—dyed fabrics, woven baskets, raw spices, silver jewelry, and the deep purples of freshly harvested root vegetables. It felt like watching a thousand stories unfold in one crowded square.

Ha Giang: A Land That Time Didn’t Touch

Ha Giang province, brushing against the Chinese border, is Vietnam’s last frontier. Nearly 90% of its people belong to ethnic minorities. To visit, foreigners must obtain a permit—a faint echo of the political caution that still lingers here. While much of Vietnam has galloped into the 21st century, Ha Giang has remained timeless, caught between beauty and silence.

The jewel of this province is the Dong Van Karst Plateau, a UNESCO-recognized Global Geopark. Its sharp, ancient peaks, shaped nearly 400 million years ago, rise from the earth like the spines of some buried creature. Few tourists make it here, and I was grateful to be among them.

Ghosts of 1979: The Unspoken War

This land remembers. In February 1979, some 200,000 Chinese troops surged across the border into northern Vietnam, punishing the country for invading Cambodia and ousting the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge. Two months earlier, Vietnam had intervened to stop the atrocities of Pol Pot’s regime—massacres, purges, and raids that claimed over two million lives.

While the conflict with China lasted only a few weeks, its legacy is unresolved. Official silence surrounds it, but tensions simmer, especially over the South China Sea. Riding through these hills, I felt a quiet weight in the air—not spoken, but known.

Riding the Edge: Motorcycling Through Northern Vietnam

The road from Dong Van to Bao Lam is not for the faint of heart. It twists and narrows, bumps and disappears altogether in places. More trail than road. My driver, Mr. Mguyen Khac Minh, used to be a cook. Now he guides the occasional traveler through this landscape a few times a month. His English was rough but warm, and he gave the journey a layer of meaning I would have otherwise missed—explaining local dishes, ancient customs, and the subtleties of village life.

At one point, a family waved us down from their porch, inviting us in. We drank local moonshine and beer, exchanged stories, and shared laughter with only fragments of common language. They wanted me to stay. I wanted to stay. But the road called—we still had 120 kilometers ahead. Somehow, after that stop, the ride felt even more alive.

Where Stories Bloom: The Flower Hmong and an Ancient Courtship Custom

We passed through several Flower Hmong villages, their people radiant in bright embroidered clothes. Along the way, I heard of an old, still-practiced tradition: wife snatching. When obstacles block a union—economic, familial, or social—a young man may stage a symbolic abduction, with the help of friends and relatives. It’s meant to be ritual, not coercion; the woman can refuse. But even so, the custom reveals much about the tensions between tradition and modernity, between personal choice and community expectation.

It was 2013—my first time leaving the U.S. after my divorce. I didn’t fully grasp it then, but looking back, I see how much I was in search of something beyond landscapes or history. I was searching for rhythm. A new one—for my soul, my life, my future. It was a tender time. I was traveling alone, and I wasn’t communicating much with anyone back home. The silences were wide. I think I needed them. They gave space for something else to rise—something quieter, more honest.

Crossing into Cambodia felt like stepping further into that space.

Angkor Wat: Stone, Time, and Sunrise

“When Angkorian society began, Paris and London were not much more than elaborate villages. Europe was crawling with barbarians, and here were the Khmer engineering sophisticated irrigation systems and constructing the biggest temple in the world.” – Kim Fay

Angkor Wat is staggering—in scale, in ambition, in spiritual gravity. It’s the largest religious monument in the world, and today, one of the most visited. In Khmer, Angkor Wat means “City Temple.” Built in the early 12th century by a Khmer king, it began as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu and later became a Buddhist shrine. Like Cambodia itself, it carries multiple identities layered through time.

Over 300,000 workers and 6,000 elephants labored to build it. Still, it was never truly finished. By the 15th century, the Khmer kings abandoned it and moved the capital to the coast, founding Phnom Penh. What remains is an enduring testament to a civilization that once eclipsed much of the Western world in architecture, engineering, and spiritual imagination.

I first met Ahmad—a tourist from New York—on a boat in Halong Bay. Somehow, we ran into each other again in Siem Reap. We joined forces and hired the most spirited tuk-tuk driver in town: a man who called himself “Mr. Batman.” His laugh was contagious, and his driving fearless. He whisked us through the temple’s layers: the outer causeways, the inner courtyards, the bas-reliefs and galleries that spoke of gods, demons, and celestial dancers.

We joined hundreds of people before dawn to watch the sun rise over the silhouette of Angkor Wat. I’ve never been so eager for the sun to rise. It was absurd and hilarious—waiting in hushed reverence with a crowd of strangers, cameras raised, as if something eternal might suddenly reveal itself.

👉 Angkor Wat: A Closer Look

Kampong Phluk: Life on Stilts

About two hours by boat from Siem Reap lies Kampong Phluk, a floating village suspended between sky and water. The houses, balanced on 16-foot stilts, seem to hover in defiance of gravity and logic. In the rainy season, water laps at their wooden floors; in the dry, they rise like surreal structures from a dream. It reminded me of a circus—unexpected, precarious, alive.

This is a life entirely dictated by the mood of the lake. The villagers harvest shrimp, fish, and adapt daily to the ebb and flow of the seasons. The narrow canal eventually opens into a vast lake, and we ended the day floating in silence, watching the sun disappear into soft amber clouds.

👉 Inside Kampong Phluk’s floating village

Koh Rong: Paradise and Solitude

After an overnight journey on a “sleeping bus” that didn’t quite live up to its name, I arrived in Sihanoukville just after sunrise. A local driver suggested a remote island two or three hours away. I double-checked with a couple of fellow travelers, then boarded the boat.

The ocean was rough. People vomited, clung to rails, and got drenched. When we arrived, I understood why we came. Koh Rong felt like a postcard dream: long, empty beaches, hammocks swaying in the breeze, colorful villages perched along turquoise bays. As The Lonely Planet put it: “This is paradise the way you dreamt it… It seems too good to last.”

It was romantic, though I was alone. Instead of romance, I pursued adventure—completing five deep-water dives and earning my Advanced PADI certification. A small international tribe worked on the island—bartenders, dive instructors, drifters. They shared a scent of freedom, youth, and possibility. Among them were young Israelis, and we lit Hanukkah candles together in a beach hut. It felt both distant and oddly close to home.

On the way back, our boat’s engine stalled mid-journey. The sea grew choppy again. We bobbed helplessly for nearly two hours until another boat arrived to tow us in. Another unpredictable chapter in Cambodia’s unfolding story.

Phnom Penh: The Royal and the Ruined

In Phnom Penh, the royal palace gleams with gold spires and manicured gardens. Built in the late 19th century, it still houses Cambodia’s king—a symbol of national continuity amid a tumultuous history. After visiting the palace, I couldn’t help but feel a split in the Cambodian spirit: part serene, part shattered.

That fracture would become clearer at my next stop—The Killing Fields—where the past refuses to rest

The Banality of Evil: The Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields

“I remember my mother taking me as a very little kid to the roof of our home in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to look at the bombs exploding in the distance. She didn’t want us to be scared by the booms and the strange flashes of light. It was her way of helping us to understand what was happening.”—Tammy Duckworth

There are many myths surrounding the Khmer Rouge—stories of unfathomable cruelty and blind obedience. But at S-21, the infamous prison and torture center later known as Tuol Sleng, myth gave way to something far more chilling: reality. The Killing Fields were not imagined horrors. They were systematic, methodical, and very real.

Between 1975 and 1979, Cambodia became a graveyard. Under the Khmer Rouge and their maniacal leader Pol Pot, nearly 1.5 million people—about a quarter of the population—were killed. Some were executed outright; others died from starvation, exhaustion, or untreated disease. No one was truly safe. Wearing glasses, speaking a foreign language, having soft hands—any of these could mark you as an “intellectual,” and thus, a threat to the regime’s brutal agrarian fantasy.

Pol Pot’s vision was to empty the cities, erase the past, and rebuild a new society from the ground up. But that vision was rooted in paranoia and soaked in blood. Families were torn apart. Children were trained to inform on their parents. Entire villages vanished. The Khmer Rouge’s slogan, brutally clear, was: “To destroy you is no loss; to preserve you is no gain.”

For me, this phrase is the distilled essence of what Hannah Arendt once called “the banality of evil.” She used that term to describe Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who orchestrated death not out of monstrous passion, but out of obedient, bureaucratic efficiency. Like Eichmann, many Khmer Rouge officials weren’t ideologues—they were functionaries. They filled out forms, drew up lists, followed orders. And in doing so, they became agents of annihilation.

Arendt’s insight—that evil often arrives dressed in the ordinary, cloaked in the language of duty—echoes hauntingly here. Reading Cambodia: A Stricken Land by Henry Kamm gave me the historical framework, but standing at Tuol Sleng and later at the Killing Fields, I felt something deeper than understanding. I felt grief. Not just for what happened, but for how easily it can happen again.

Confronting Cambodia’s recent past, I found myself returning to more personal histories. The trauma and silence in my own family, shaped by the Holocaust, often rise in places like this—where memory resists forgetting.

👉 Read more about that journey here

Hoi An: Timeless Charm and Boutique Stillness

Hoi An is a city of whispers. Once a bustling port, it now feels like a living museum—with lantern-lit streets, preserved wooden houses, and narrow canals that wind like veins through the old town. Recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, Hoi An has turned its historical soul into a gentle rhythm for modern visitors.

Strolling through its cobbled lanes, I felt as though time had unraveled around me. The town itself felt like one large boutique—a curated space of silk tailors, handmade lanterns, and tiny cafés tucked behind yellow walls. I rented a bike and spent hours wandering aimlessly, Morcheeba playing in my ears, the present moment stretching out in all directions.

👉 Uncover Hoi An’s Hidden Corners

Da Nang: Serendipity on Two Wheels

While waiting for a train in Da Nang, a spontaneous motorbike ride unfolded. I climbed on, unsure of the destination, my backpack wedged between me and the driver. Sometimes, the most unplanned moments become the most memorable.

We rode to the Marble Mountains—five limestone peaks rising out of the city, each named after an element. I wandered through pagodas carved into stone and found myself lingering at the base, where hundreds of marble statues stood in silent testament to the region’s craftsmanship. They were delicate yet solid, echoing the patience and precision required to carve permanence from raw rock.

Hue: Power, History, and Echoes of Empire

Hue is a city of ghosts and grandeur. Once the imperial capital of Vietnam, it rests near the former Demilitarized Zone—close to the fault line that split the nation. From 1802 to 1945, it was the seat of the Nguyen Dynasty. Today, it stands as both a reminder and a warning.

I hired a guide and visited sites etched in the pages of Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow and A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan. As we drove through the countryside, the jungle looked deceptively innocent, yet I knew it had once concealed armies, trails, and battles. The military bases are gone. The war is technically over. But the land remembers.

These books helped me understand not just Vietnam’s resistance to foreign rule, but also the arrogance of power—whether colonial, imperial, or ideological. It’s a lesson that echoes through history, yet is rarely learned in time.

Khe Sanh: Siege and Survival

Khe Sanh was a name I knew long before I arrived. The battle that unfolded here in early 1968 was one of the most intense engagements of the Vietnam War. Some 5,000 U.S. Marines were surrounded and shelled for eleven weeks by an estimated 20,000 North Vietnamese troops. Against the odds, they held the base.

Today, the outpost is gone. A few rusted helicopters, tanks, and broken aircraft linger on the site like discarded memories. The real power of the place lies in its silence. Standing there, it’s hard to believe this land once shook with bombs, screams, and the chaos of war. It was all part of a broader plan: to distract American forces from the Tet Offensive’s real goal—striking Vietnam’s urban heart.

The Vinh Moc Tunnels: Beneath the Earth, Above Fear

“Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.”—Kurt Vonnegut

Near the old DMZ lies the village of Vinh Moc—a place that refused to die. Between 1966 and 1972, U.S. bombers targeted the village, believing it was sheltering North Vietnamese fighters. The villagers responded not with surrender, but with shovels.

They dug tunnels, first to 12 meters, then deeper as bombs evolved. Eventually, the network reached 23 meters underground, with living quarters, maternity wards, classrooms—an entire parallel world beneath the soil. And miraculously, every single villager survived the war.

Walking through those tunnels, I felt an indescribable mix of awe, sorrow, and respect. It wasn’t just engineering—it was resilience made manifest. A testament to what people will do to protect life, dignity, and home.

👉 Inside the Tunnels of Vinh Moc

Conclusion: Wounds and Wonders — What Vietnam and Cambodia Taught Me

Traveling through Vietnam and Cambodia felt like crossing a threshold—not just between countries, but between centuries, ideologies, and ways of remembering. These lands hold more than beauty. They hold stories etched in jungle soil, riverbanks, temple stones, and underground tunnels. They hold trauma—still visible, still breathing—and resilience that refuses to be buried.

From the timeless boutiques of Hoi An to the ghostly silence of the Killing Fields, I carried with me not just a backpack, but the weight of history. Yet, what stayed with me most were the human moments: the candlelight on Koh Rong, a tuk-tuk ride with Mr. Batman, a villager offering moonshine in the northern hills, and the quiet gaze of a child who may never know what war once passed through their land.

I didn’t come seeking answers, but I left with a deeper question: How do nations heal when memory and myth coexist? I don’t know. But I do know this—walking through these landscapes reminded me that history isn’t just something we read. It’s something we walk through, breathe in, and, if we’re open enough, carry forward with more humility than certainty.