Crossing Divides Into Cambodia

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 12.01.04 | 5:50 PM ET

Tom Haines’ ambitious Boston Globe travel series “Crossing Divides” continued Sunday with a story about his journey through Laos and Cambodia. The story opens along Cambodia’s Mekong River. “[M]any living above and below the falls have witnessed the end of any illusions they may have had, not of colonial conquest, but of what to expect from life,” Haines writes. “A journey from Cambodia through the falls to Laos intersected time and again with this reckoning. An awareness of death was as vivid as life in a hilly jungle hamlet, below a thundering cataract, in a riverside temple, and in the farming village home of the sleeping newborn.”