Chocolate River to the Killing Fields

I've just taken a boat up the Mekong River (as in Apocalypse Now), and the one thing you really notice is the colour of the river. Because of the silt, all the water is a rich chocolate brown - it really does look like chocolate, not muddy water - and you half expect an Oompa Loompa to arrive.

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Before I reached Cambodia, and the Killing fields I had to snake my way down through Vietnam. I saw a pretty spectacular light festival in Hoi An. I've been to nine UN World Heitage sites in the last few weeks now.

Also went paragliding; on a parachute connected to a speedboat. The speedboat whizzed around a bay and I went flying off into the air. I went up about half a dozen stories into the air, and the view was pretty good.

I managed to slice into my leg again this week (anyone would think I'm into self harm or something) when I got rather too close to a motorbike. Not uncommon around here. Vietnam is notorious for traffic accidents and the whole country is a giant traffic accident waiting to happen. I've seen five road deaths in the short time I've been here. You can't really get away from the war here, although the tour guides, perhaps surprisingly, try to avoid talking about it all costs, so as not to avoid any Americans. It occupies the same sort of feeling in the popular consciousness as does the Second World War in Britain.

I'm trying to avoid being that caricature Giles Wembley-Hogg. To that end I've read nearly a dozen books now on Vietnamese history, mainly by American authors I should add. Its well known that the Vietnamese won the war and lost the peace, and the fact that so many - over a million - Vietnamese left their country after 1975 is testament to which country is preferable to actually live in. I'm not going to dwell on the humanitarian aspects of the war, suffice to say one side was punished pretty badly. What really interests me is the justification given for the Vietnam War, and the backing the US gave to the South Vietnamese military junta. The US argued it was all for freedom and democracy. Err ... except there were massive protests in the South about their lack of freedoms. Notoriously, Buddhist monks burned themselves to death in protest at the harsh treatment they were receiving from the US-backed regime. Not too free then. Was it democratic though? Err...no. In fact Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs, that not only was the regime in the south undemocratic, but he had not met anyone who thought that Ho Chi Minh would lose an election. Which blows the argument that the war was for democracy out of the water, as it acknowledges that not only were the people the US were supporting not democratically elected, it also points out that they were fighting against the very person who would win a democratic election. Whoops!

The idea that South Vietnam was democratic was a fantasy that no one really believed, and in reality it was a succession of generals who managed to gain power by force. One of the generals the US was backing stated he was a great admirer of Hitler, and that four or five Hitlers would do a good job of sorting out the country. Hmmm.

Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but perhaps the US could have chosen a better person as leader than someone who admires Adolf Hitler.