karl levy's Blog

Collapsed trees lay where fallen, their dirt-filled stumps rising higher than a man. Telephone and electrical wires drooped down, touching road level, stretched and frayed from sun and neglect. Wrecks of cars and trucks rested sunken in mud, stripped of their wheels and axles and now used for oxcarts and Ho Chi Minh sandals. The wood panelling removed from the vehicles had been used for building and burning, the doors ajar and windshields missing; vinyl and stuffing from crumbled seats exposed

'And they then began to kill everyone'   Outside the city, casting final glances back, the people saw buildings and trees fall into a black silhouette against an orange sky burning itself out into grey lifeless cinders. Millions of people paused to eat, spread along the roads and adjoining fields, and lit hundreds of thousands of cooking fires, a sea of fireflies with families huddled beside every one.     Travelling further, the roads changed to dirt, then sand and finally broke into rough

  Chapter Four - Scream Bloody Murder    Sinarth, who had not looked in a mirror since taken from his parents, pushed forwards. He stared at his reflection, barely recognising and not trusting its apparition. A large dried green pampus grass beside him brought out his sun-darkened skin, the blue sky framing it all. His hair was askew, matted in places, sitting above his dirty and grimy face. The new grubby torn sack did not even sit straight, skewed up on one side. His bare chest sunk, with

    Chapter 1 - Cambodia   Cambodge … On those long endless days When you may feel hollow, With that strange desolate melancholy For no apparent reason.   A feeling of loss that lingers, So vividly, It could be snatched From the surrounding air.   Time slows, While fleeting grasps of memory, Of déjà vu, Hover suspended, Flickering in and out of reach.   Imagine for a moment, That time Was not rigid But pliable, Like a stopped clock, And beginning to tick backwards, This entrapment released.  

Prologue Three: Ancient Cambodia Angkor, circa 1295   A young Chinese diplomat named Zhou Dagnan had a life destined to pass unremarkably as a footnote in history, but this idea quickly evaporated in the thirteenth century, when he boarded a great junk leaving south-eastern China. He sailed down the two thousand kilometres of coastline of what was to become Vietnam, turned up the mighty Mekong Delta and followed its Tonle Sap river tributary heading up into Cambodia’s heart. Here he found

Chapter 11 Meeting Death   Bang Malea temple sat seventy kilometres north-east of Siem Reap, appearing as though a huge concussion wave from a B52 strike had caved in its square-kilometre grounds, before rebounding again and collapsing everything into a ruin. Its sandstone blocks lay in huge piles of jumbled carved stones in impossible puzzles, with its Aspra looking quizzically at the sky. Jungle trees had taken the opportunity to regain their territory, their roots weaving spider-web nets that

Chapter Five - Vietnam   In late 1978, the ‘Reunification Train’, symbolising the union of the old capitals of South and North Vietnam, began its journey in Saigon’s stinking humidity beside the Mekong Delta. Departing Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, it took two days, sometimes three, even four, on a leisurely northern journey of some sixteen hundred kilometres, to arrive at the capital of Hanoi, built on the Great Red River where the air cooled and the sweat from the oppressive southern

  Preface   In early 2012, while riding a bike in Vang Vieng, Laos, with a fellow traveller, a Canadian girl by the name of Natalie Rock, I conceived the idea for this book. Stopping my bike on one of the dusty roads leading out of town, Natalie circled around while I picked up my mobile phone and called Sinarth, whom I had met several weeks before at the Cambodian War Museum in Siem Reap. He responded to my offer to write his biography by saying that he was thinking exactly the same thing and,

Prologue One: Laos   If you fly into the thousand-year-old city of Vientiane, the city of sandalwood in Laos, resting on a long, slow-rolling curve in the great Mekong River, touching Thailand, time appears to slow down, settling just above a stall. You cannot help but slow as well, with Vientiane sweltering under the sun, leaving the tension and stress of life behind, casting aside a great weight carried through your life, unnoticed until now.   The wide, lazy French streets feel, no matter how