7. I had heard about a painter named Vann Nath, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge's most notorious interrogation and torture center, Tuol Sleng. Vann Nath had been taken from his village to the torture center and while he was there his inquisitors learned of his talent and put him to work painting portraits of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader. When the Vietnamese invaded Phnom Penh in 1979, his captors killed all but seven of the remaining prisoners in Tuol Sleng and Vann Nath escaped in the confusion. Today, he paints sporadically in a studio atop his family's restaurant in Phnom Penh. A man who has seen the worst of inhumanities, today he seems burdened by memory and sadness.

8. Deep in the Mekong Delta, Can Tho is the main commercial town. Here people from villages throughout the Delta come to buy everything from televisons to dragon fruit (Dragon fruit, for those who aren't aquainted, is an reddish-orangey orb about the size of a large orange with skin that has dozens of curling scale-like protuberances. the fruit inside is white and shot through with zillions of black seeds. it's positively yummy, a sort of tart sweetness, firm and refreshing in thundering heat.). And farmers bring their produce to the floating markets in narrow pirogues which they rope together along side new concrete jetties. Almost all the traders are women and their boats carry the Delta's abundance of fruit -- custard apples, longans, bananas, oranges, durian -- and vegetables -- scallions, spinach, onions, garlic, peppers. The freshness of the vegetables makes the Delta cuisine among the best I have eaten. And though the government is building bridges and roads, the dominant transport still remains the pirogues that wind through the lacing Delta waterways.

9. At the end of my voyage down the Mekong, I lingered in the Delta for several days, to savor the end of a year-long adventure, to reflect on what it all meant, to prolong the experience somewhat. In the evenings I would sit, often with a freezing bottle of 333 beer, on a dockside watching the pirogues head home, the lumbering big belly rice boats make for the grain silos, flights of herons looking for evening resting places. And the sun, dropping down into the waters, through the fringe of banana and coconut trees, always stirred a frisson of endings and new beginnings, a sense that this river had managed to bring me the stories of people on the edges of change, of recovery, sometimes of hope and sometimes not, of tales waiting to be told. The morning after this picture was taken, I left the Delta for the last time and set out to write down what I had learned.