Episode 1 The Mekong River with Sue Perkins

Argh! I'm not very good at steering! OK. Oh, OK.

SUE LAUGHS

It's hard work!

'This is the Mekong. The Mother of Water.

'The greatest river in south-east Asia.'

These are the best noodles ever!

'It brings life to millions. From the paddy fields of Vietnam,

'to the mountains of the Tibetan Plateau.'

Look at it! Look at your office!

Of course you believe in God!

'I'm travelling nearly 3,000 miles upstream.

'Exploring landscapes and lives on the point of profound change.

'The hill tribes deep in the forest...'

-Two.

-Two.

-Three.

-Three.

LAUGHTER

'..and some of the most beautiful and endangered wildlife on earth.'

You could lose the entirety of your arm.

Up! Oh, yeah!

Hoo-hoo-hoo!

SHOUTING

'This is the last chance to see the Mekong of old.

'Massive dams are being built to harness its power,

'changing traditional ways of life

'that rely on the ebb and flow of this magnificent river.'

I'm a great fan of green energy,

but if it's at the expense of nearly 50 million people,

you've got to wonder where the balance is.

'God knows why they asked me.

'I guess Michael Palin was busy.

'But they did, so here goes.'

I have absolutely no idea what's going on,

but it is completely magical.

I think we might be engaged to be married now.

So I'm now on the Mekong, which is a river

I've had great romantic views about in the past

and those have all now been totally shattered.

I thought we'd be on a narrow street,

puttering through some rice paddies.

And instead, you can see how many people are interfacing with it.

It's not something remote and pastoral.

It's dirty, it's brown.

They are washing clothes in it,

they are using it to transport things from A to B.

They're living off it, it's irrigating their fields,

it's feeding their cattle.

It's an incredibly vibrant place.

It's south-east Asia's version of the M25, essentially, I'm on now.

I sort of feel like the classic sort of idiot English woman abroad.

I've got the hat, I've got the sort of sweaty, puffy face

and the terrifying day-glo white skin.

I'm looking around, going, I don't understand anything,

I don't speak the language.

I'm just going to throw myself into it

and not worry that I don't have my creature comforts.

And I quite like that. I'm looking forward to more chaos.

'This bubbling brown waterway will take me

'nearly 5,000 kilometres north,

'through the rich and ever-changing landscapes of Vietnam, Cambodia,

'Laos and China, up to its source high in the Himalayan glacier.

'But the story begins here,

'in the south of Vietnam on the vast Mekong Delta.'

I'm just heading out to Can Tho, which is the largest city on the Mekong Delta.

Home to about 1.5 million people

and also the largest floating market.

At the centre of the floating market is a woman called Si Hei,

who is Queen of the Noodle.

Seeing as I've met Queen of the Cake,

I might as well carry on meeting other queens of other foodstuffs.

So she's going to teach me how to make noodles

and then I'm going to sell the hell out of them.

I love what she is wearing. She looks excellent.

I've got to remember this now.

SUE SPEAKS VIETNAMESE

I think I messed that up.

I think I just said something awful, probably.

Nice to see you. Mwah! Nice to see you.

Your mother? Amazing! Nice to see you. Hello.

90?! 90 years old?

You're doing something right. Is that noodles?

I think so. I think it's noodles.

Yeah. I don't look that good now, let alone when I get to 90. Amazing!

'Si Hei lives in this wooden shack perched on stilts above the water

'with her mother, husband and assorted members of her family.

'Eight grown-up children and countless grandchildren.

'It's the most precarious piece of real estate I've ever seen.

'At the height of the wet season, basically, now,

'the waters of the Mekong literally flow through their house.'

So, is this the highest the water has ever been this year?

So, in ten years, your bed will be here?

And then here. And then here.

LAUGHTER

Yeah. You'll be on the roof eventually.

You'll be sleeping on the pitch of the roof.

'Ever since her husband was injured in an accident,

'Si Hei supports her family by selling noodles.

'The market opens for business at first light,

'so I'm bracing myself for a horribly early start.

'Si Hei tells me to come back before dawn and she'll show me the ropes.

'Dawn? What's that?'

So it's 4:30 in the morning

and that's a sentence I have never said before.

At least, not consciously.

This it the time that foxes should be awake, not humans.

But it's incredibly beautiful and noodles wait for no man,

so I'm basically trying to get across the water

because Si Hei has already started making broth.

If I'm not there, there'll be trouble. A lot of trouble.

Whoo! Hey-hey-hey!

Good man. Look at this!

'Si Hei's been up for hours already preparing her dishes.

'Noodles, broth, some grey meat,

'orange meat, more grey meat

'and a bewildering array of condiments and garnishes.'

This is very much the sous-chef position.

I'm just learning. In training.

Yeah?

Oh, yeah, get a little bit of that one. Yeah, I got you.

'She gives me a blisteringly quick crash course

'in the art of aquatic noodle soup production.'

OK.

'Still none the wiser. And we hit the market.'

THEY SHOUT

It sounds like a cry for help,

which it might be, if I get cooking, to be honest.

'Cai Rang is the Mekong Delta's biggest floating wholesale market

'and has been the centre of commerce here for centuries.

'The Delta is one of the most intensively-farmed regions in Asia

'and produces an astonishing variety of exotic fruit and vegetables.

'Thousands of boats have travelled here

'from the far-flung corners of the Delta

'laden down with mangoes, pineapples and dragon fruit.

'Now tourist boats weave in and out of the chaos.

'Fair game for a predatory noodle seller

'and her frankly undertrained assistant.'

Noodles! These are the best noodles ever!

We're in business!

Best noodles you've ever had!

-How much?

-25,000 for you, my darling.

Cheap at half the price.

Oh! Oh!

Something terrible has happened. I'm in trouble now.

I won't get wages for a week.

We're going to crash now.

Argh! Ha-ha-ha-ha!

This is the way she gets people to buy her noodles.

She basically ram-raids them so they're so terrified.

She's like a sort of noodle pirate.

It's an insane atmosphere. It's a brilliant atmosphere.

It's really fun to be on the water. It's like a gastronomic flotilla.

Everywhere you look, there's people shouting, trading,

bartering, selling.

SHOUTING

'The noise of all the engines is deafening, so the traders

'have devised an ingenious way to advertise their produce.'

So that basically says, greengrocer.

You've got your pumpkins and your cabbages,

a bit of beetroot and stuff.

I don't want to see the butcher's mast.

I dread to think. Really, I dread to think.

'The market is still busy with farmers and traders,

'but its heyday is behind it.'

'Vietnam is changing.

'Emerging from a communist past into a shiny new capitalist future.

'In the mid '80s, the government began a series of reforms

'called Doi Moi, or Renovation.

'They embraced the free market, reintroduced private ownership

'and encouraged their people to go into business.

'It has one of the fastest-growing economies in south-east Asia

'and a new urban middle class

'with money to spend on the latest consumer goods.

'Vietnam now exports everything from food to electronic goods and oil.

'Its biggest trading partner is, you guessed it, the United States.'

Ooo! My buttocks!

-LAUGHTER

-Oh!

I want to thank you for letting me into your house

and showing me how to make the noodles and being so lovely.

I really appreciate it. You are the queen!

-She said you are number one.

-Hey! No, you are the number one.

You are the queen, you are the queen.

-You are the queen. Definitely.

-Thank you.

Thank you, darling. Thank you, sweetheart. Thank you.

Tam biet!

Tam biet!

She's such a brilliant person.

I was really sad to say goodbye to her.

Supports her entire family after her husband's accident.

Eight kids, I think 19 grandchildren.

Up at the crack of dawn, works all day and has a smile on her face.

What a lesson, actually.

What a lesson and what a slice of perspective.

I loved her! Loved her!

'The majority of Vietnam's 90 million people

'live out in the countryside,

'farming and fishing in the waters of the Mekong.

'And I wonder to what extent the capitalist revolution

'is changing their lives.'

We've moved away now from the city, as you can tell,

and we are in the agriculture heartlands of the Delta.

This is one of the most intensely-farmed areas in the whole of Asia.

It's essentially the rice bowl for the whole of the region.

It's an area that's shaped, over millennia,

not just by human activity, but also military activity.

This area was dumped with tons of Agent Orange during the war.

Basically, as is classic in Asia, they have triumphed over adversity.

And now rice is grown here in abundance,

which is known as white gold.

There is loads of mythology that's sprung up around it.

Including, if you pray hard enough,

an enormous bowl of rice will descend from the heavens,

which is how I'm actually hoping to get my tea this evening.

'I'm going to visit a farming family

'who've lived and worked here for generations

'and are adapting to life in this fluid world.'

Xin chao!

Xin chao! Hello!

Hi.

'This is Thuc and Huong.

'They live here with their two young sons, Dam and Dang,

'and Thuc's elderly parents.

'They've agreed to let me stay for a few days and to show me

'a little of life down in the paddies.'

I eat rice five times a week,

but I do not know what a rice plant looks like.

I will really try and be a good rice farmer.

I will really try.

'Oh, God, this is absolutely awful.

'It sounds like I might be about to do

'the first honest day's work of my entire life.'

Oh, that is great! Thank you.

If I'm honest, I've wanted this since I arrived, but, you know...

I'm delighted.

OK.

Grab and cut.

Apparently, the trick is, you grab a big bunch

and just where the greenery starts to give way to brown,

you just use your sickle, and there you go.

People pay thousands for that. It's like a spa treatment.

How do you cope with this mud?

OK, I'll have to do a proper job.

All right, well, let's do a proper job, then.

'Rice is taken very seriously here.

'It's a staple foodstuff and a mainstay of the economy.

'Vietnam is the world's second-largest exporter of rice

'and 80% of the Delta's 17 million people grow it for a living.

'It provides a small but steady income for farmers like Huong.

'The government buys the harvest at an agreed price.

'The scale of it is staggering.

'And it's all done, all of it, by hand.'

It is...back-breaking, this work.

And the idea of doing nothing but this for six hours...

Just 8,000 miles away, people pay £150 a month to go to a gym

because their work involves them

sitting on their backsides for eight hours a day.

I can barely breathe in the heat, but still, she is going.

So if you have an office job,

or, you know, you like to grumble about your life, whatever it is,

come here. Really, just come here.

Because for me, I'll never complain again.

Huong, do you want your children to be rice farmers?

But if the better jobs are in other areas,

then your sons will have to leave.

Would that make you sad, that they will leave the area?

'An ancient threshing machine separates the rice from the storks

'in what is the only mechanised part of the process.'

And we're done.

All those people working flat out for hours this morning.

Here's the rice. I have never seen a process more labour-intensive

and we've all managed to produce a bag-and-a-half.

It's jaw dropping.

Do you think I'm built to be a rice farmer?

Oh, the pity! The pity in the eyes is extraordinary.

I've never seen pity like that close hand.

She's saying I'm weak. I'm weak.

-Did the word weak come up?

-Yes.

LAUGHTER

'I'm staying at Thuc and Huong's place.

'Dinner is fish, rice and crab,

'all steeped in the unmistakable tang of Mekong gravy.'

Ooo, hello! Ho-ho-ho-ho!

Cheers, as we say in England. Very good health.

This is just... I love you! I love you!

LAUGHTER

So, Thuc, what would your dream be?

If you could have anything in the world, what would you have?

Ah, I see. And what is your dream?

If you could have anything in the world, what would you like?

-She'd like my job?

-Yeah!

If Thuc could have anything in the world, he'd have a tractor,

which is basically the ultimate symbol of a farmer.

So you can imagine the sort of communist ideal.

And his wife wants to travel the world and be on television,

which is, I suppose, the ultimate capitalist dream.

And yet the two of them bob along nicely and...

It's that sort of interplay I find fascinating.

Those two worlds, the communist

and capitalist worlds sort of jogging along fairly harmoniously.

The idea that you can make some money,

but also enrich the lives of your community and those around you.

I suppose what the socialist government here ultimately is

aiming for is some kind of benign capitalism, if that's possible.

'This may look like a timeless landscape,

'but there are massive changes taking place beneath the surface.

'The land here is low-lying

'and incredibly vulnerable to climate change.

'The sea level is rising, slowly flooding the Delta with saltwater.'

This way, or this way? OK.

'Rice can't naturally grow in saltwater,

'so smart farmers like Thuc and Huong

'are embracing a new cash crop.'

How many do you normally catch in a day?

50 kilos? That's an awful lot of shrimp.

'Thuc and Huong can make an extra 7,000 a year from prawns.

'But this is capitalism with all its risks and rewards.'

Oh, that's good, that's good!

'They've had to borrow money to buy the prawn larvae.

'The ponds are intensively stocked,

'so need an expensive cocktail of chemicals to keep them healthy.

'Even so, epidemics can sweep through the paddies,

'wiping out whole populations.

'Farmers can lose everything.'

It's weird here because you feel like you're between two economies.

You've got the centuries-old planned economy of rice,

where the agricultural worker farms it, sells it back to the government

and it feeds the people.

And here, where you've got the push of capitalism,

the pressure from the West to get cheap protein.

Whereas the state will always buy their rice

and there's a guaranteed price, the price for shrimp fluctuates

and farmers have to take out loans to get the feed that they need.

If their business goes bust, they have to pay those loans back immediately,

which means selling their land.

So it's an extremely risky business for them.

Let's see what we got.

OK, not bad.

'Prawn farming, with its big cash profits,

'could free Thuc and Huong

'from the hardship and toil of the endless rice harvest.'

That is the most tenacious crab in the history of... Come on!

'Demand for prawns has never been higher.

'Exports are up 30% in the last five years.

'And Thuc is dreaming of his massive tractor.

'And Huong is dreaming of holidays abroad and a new life for her boys.

'And I leave them with chronic back pain,

'but wishing them the very best of luck.'

Thank you, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

I'll see you again, I hope! Bye-bye.

'I'm back on the river again, heading north, out of Vietnam.

'And my preconceptions have been severely shaken.

'The Vietnamese seem to have put the war behind them

'and are forging ahead into a new future

'with a single-minded intensity that is frankly exhausting to behold.'

Huong, particularly, was just,

when I asked her, in retrospect, in what was a very patronising manner,

"What would you like?"

she just goes, "I'd like to have what you've got, thanks."

And you think, yeah, of course, why wouldn't you? I'm really lucky.

I can travel, I've got such freedom. She doesn't have any of that.

I really didn't know what to say to that. It was like, "Of course".

Because all my patronising Western conceits about,

"Oh, how lovely to be in the sunshine all day.

"What an honest day's work!"

Rubbish. Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish.

I have a better life and she wants it.

And I so sincerely hope that she gets it

and that her kids get it and they get everything they want.

She is so generous and so wonderful.

'The Mekong is a frenetic, dirty highway.

'An artery for trade and travel unlike anything I've ever seen.

'Next stop, Cambodia.'

I'm thousands of miles from home

and I'm still thinking of excuses for my passport photo.

I'm so used to saying, "I know, it doesn't look like me."

See, it just doesn't look like me. It never looks like me.

-OK.

-Thank you.

Oh, it's lovely and cool in here!

I'm jealous of your uniform.

Do you do your job mainly for your uniform?

Uniform. It's good!

You know it's good.

SUE LAUGHS

-It's good?

-Yes.

-Thank you.

Just the power shower and the delousing now and then we're done.

'As we motor upstream, the landscape begins to change.

'After the densely-populated paddy fields of the lower Delta,

'the country here seems quieter. Slower.

'You feel like you're travelling back in time.'

You think about many places you travel.

You think about India, you think about the Taj Mahal.

When you think about France, you think about the Champs-Elysees.

When you think about Cambodia, you think about Pol Pot,

you think about Year Zero, you think about grinding poverty.

I'm looking forward to not only finding out about that,

but hopefully, a counterpoint to that.

And to see how a nation, where a quarter of the population

was wiped out in recent memory, has recovered,

if indeed, it has recovered.

'Phnom Penh, Cambodia's chaotic capital,

'lies at the confluence of two great rivers.

'The Mekong and the Tonle Sap.

'It's a place of contradictions,

'where the very rich share endless traffic jams

'with the very, very poor.'

Everywhere you look, there are people on scooters,

tuk-tuks, buses, lorries. It is jammed.

It's almost impossible to think that just 40 years ago,

this capital city was totally deserted.

'The streets lay empty because of this man, Pol Pot.

'He came to power in 1975, just as the war was ending in Vietnam,

'and instigated one of the darkest periods of 20th-century history.

'The Khmer Rouge sought to return Cambodia

'to a rural peasant economy. What they called Year Zero.

'The family unit was dismantled and children raised communally.

'Educated people were tortured and executed,

'towns and cities evacuated

'and the urban middle classes forced into the fields to work.

'Up to three million people died in the genocide.'

Before he came to power, Pol Pot was a school teacher.

So it seems grimly ironic that he chose a school

to be his main detention centre.

It was here, S-21, that thousands upon thousands of people

were brutally tortured and murdered.

'The S-21 detention centre is a museum now.

'Only 12 people survived incarceration here.

'And of those, only two are alive today.'

Hello, Mr Chum Mey.

Good to see you. My name is Sue. Thank you for meeting with me.

'Chum Mey was working as a mechanic

'when the Khmer Rough came and brought him to this dreadful place.'

'Eventually, to make the torture stop,

'Chum Mey agreed that he did work for the CIA.'

'He believes he was kept alive

because his skills as a mechanic were useful to his captors.

'In January 1979, Vietnamese troops liberated Phnom Penh

'and the prison guards and torturers all fled.

'Chum Mey was forced to go with them.

'By extraordinary chance, as they left the city,

'he was reunited with his wife and baby son.

'Then the Khmer Rouge decided to kill their last prisoners.'

'His baby was also shot dead.

'In 2009, Chum Mey gave evidence to a war crimes tribunal

'and finally saw some of his torturers brought to justice.

'Now he spends each and every day at the prison,

'telling his story to anyone who will listen.

'It's hard to believe, but Chum Mey was one of the lucky ones.

'Once their false confessions had been extracted,

'most people were brought here,

'to an old Chinese cemetery outside the city.'

'I would like to thank you, first of all,

'for coming to the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre,

'known to many as the Killing Fields.

'I know this is not an easy place to visit, but we are grateful

'that you have come here today to see this place of memory and of healing.

'Under Pol Pot, as many as three million Cambodians died,

'out of eight million.

'Wherever you come from,

'imagine if more than one out of every four people

'in your country was killed, and by your own people.

'That is what happened in Cambodia.'

If you didn't know what this place was, you'd think it was beautiful.

It's got a sort of peace to it and then...

..of course, you apply the context,

and it becomes a place of total horror.

'The Khmer Rouge didn't shoot people here. Bullets were expensive.

'Victims knelt in front of pits that would soon be their graves.

'Then they were beaten and hacked to death

'with whatever was cheap and available.

'Soldiers grabbed babies by their legs,

'smashed their heads against it then tossed them into the pit.

'A generator provided power for the lights

'that illuminated the executions and for a loud speaker system

'that blared revolutionary songs in the day time.

MUSIC PLAYING

'But at night, the music was played

'to cover up the screams of prisoners being killed.

'The music blended with the noise of a diesel generator

'to create a true nightmare of sound.

MUSIC, ENGINE WHIRRING

'These were the last sounds the victims ever heard.'

The senseless, random brutality.

It's a sort of panorama of suffering really.

That starts off with intellectuals,

and moves to anybody with soft hands,

and anyone who wears glasses, and anyone who disobeys anyone

or looks at anyone.

It boils down to, if you look at me in strange way,

I'll kill you.

And the arbitrary, terrifying nature of it.

There's no ideology on the planet that can justify any of this.

There's...

No post-rationalisation can cover it.

It's pure horror and that has been made very clear today.

It's...

Yeah, I have no desire to ever come here again,

but I will never forget coming here, that's for sure.

So this is Tonle Sap Lake, which is the largest fresh water lake

in south-east Asia and the biggest inland fishery in the whole world.

To give you an idea of how full of water it is,

this sort of stretch that we're sailing down now is usually a road

outside the rainy season that connects one village to another.

Because you can see the tops of trees there.

The vegetation is sort of masking how vast this body of water is,

as far as the eye can see.

At this time of year, the end of the wet season,

something bizarre happens.

The volume of water flowing down the Mekong

is so enormous that the whole of the delta turns into a vast flood plain.

The Tonle Sap river can no longer drain away.

So, for a short period, the river reverses its flow

and its waters flood back into this great freshwater lake.

Tonle Sap, usually about the size of Gloucestershire,

expands to four times its normal size.

The surrounding land becomes inundated and these flooded forests

are transformed into one massive fish nursery.

The billions of fish that spawn here provide the people of Cambodia

with three quarters of their annual protein.

Tonle Sap is a very important lake.

This is the village of Kompong Phluk on Tonle Sap.

It's just the most beautiful village.

You can see houses on stilts

to accommodate the massive rise and fall of water

depending on whether it's the rainy season or not.

And just everyone's out and busy and on their boats.

It's easy to forget how much time people spend on boats here.

Whereas we'd go to the office, they just get onto the boat.

They fish from the boat, they eat on the boat, they chinwag on the boat.

It's just a spectacular day.

SHE GREETS HIM

'This is Mr Lee, the head honcho of the village.

'He's going to show me what life is like in this extraordinary place.'

-Bonjour. Bonjour, ca va?

-Oui, oui.

'It's not immediately clear who is who,

'because quite frankly, my French is on a par with my Cambodian,

'but what I can work out is that Mr Lee lives in this stilted house

'with a large extended family

'and the most beautiful grandchildren I've ever seen.'

Very nice!

You get big bed, eh? Grand lit. Gros lit.

-Trampoline?

-SHE LAUGHS

Would it be OK if I stayed here for a few days with you

and went fishing with you?

Thank you. Merci, monsieur.

The village of Kompong Phluk is home to about 3,000 people.

The monastery and temple are built on a small island,

but everything else is on stilts or floating.

Think south-east Asian Venice, without the overpriced ice cream,

honeymooning couples and dive-bombing pigeons.

And it smells even worse. I know.

Imagine!

Instead of roads and mopeds, there are canals and boats to get about.

Or, if you'd rather,

you can just swim round to see your mates after school.

This is just a really great village and just the idea that

he's going to take me around and meet everybody.

You just don't get that, you know.

When you come to my part of London,

people don't say, "I must take you round to the neighbours."

We live in such an insulated way.

It's such a relief to come to somewhere

where the doors are open and the hospitality is so awesome.

This one is trouble.

Mr Lee has rustled up a few dozen of the family

and offered to take me out to see the lake proper.

It's extraordinary to think

that when this lake starts to reverse, then all of this,

roads and dust tracks, and normal village life will resume.

There is a real serenity to Lee that's almost erotic, I have to say.

Totally Zen, totally focused on the job in hand.

I, on the other hand, giddy with excitement, prattling,

moving around so the boat keeps going like this.

Here we go.

So you come out of this boulevard of half-submerged trees,

you can see, opening out to Tonle Sap proper.

Absolutely vast waterway.

To give you the recognised standard measurement...

..this is four-fifths the size of Wales!

Mr Lee started fishing at 11, when his father fell ill.

There was no-one else in his family to provide food.

He has seen this lake change dramatically in the last 50 years.

Fishing is big business on Tonle Sap now.

The government has sold fishing concessions to wealthy businessmen

in order to exploit the lake's resources.

Large industrial boats crewed by itinerant Vietnamese fisherman

use huge nets to drag tons of fish from the lake.

The local fishermen, in their little boats, say they cannot compete.

What would you do?

And what would your family do if there were no fish in Tonle Sap?

Do you know about the dams that are planned further up the Mekong?

There are 11 hydroelectric dams

planned for the lower Mekong in the next decade.

While they will bring much-needed clean energy to the region,

no-one quite knows what effect they will have here.

Some scientists predict the near total collapse of wild fish stocks

as the dams block their migration routes.

We think we have heavy annual rainfall in Britain,

but the polite pissings we have in the UK

are nothing compared with this.

The heavens have exploded, they haven't just opened.

It's absolutely torrential!

It's happened just as soon as I've got back from speaking to Lee

and it's really put into context everything that he's said

about the vulnerability of the environment.

You can almost visibly see the lake swelling

with the volume of water that's being dumped on it.

I mean, it's impressive as a visitor,

but it could be catastrophic as a local, to be honest.

Tonight, I'm on it. I'm going for a night on the tiles.

I'm off to the centre of town.

Forget glow sticks and all-night partying, though,

this is a Cambodian Muppet Show that I'm basically going to see.

They've got some puppets going on there.

Um, so...

That's the way you do it, apparently.

I think this could be rather magical.

The puppeteers have travelled down from Siem Reap, 40 miles away,

to perform in the grounds of the village temple.

If this is shadow puppets, I'm going to be so annoyed.

If it's just some dude doing the rabbit thing.

Furious! I shall ask for my money back.

I travelled 8,000 miles just to see this show.

Grrr!

These are proper dudes. Rarr!

-What is your name?

-Sue, what's your name?

-Sue?

-Sue.

-My name is Malai.

-Malai?

-Yes.

-What is your name?

-My name is Enor.

-OK.

Do you know dogs? Like...woof, woof!

CHILDREN TALKING

Do you? What kind of music?

Yes. What kind of music?

-Cambodian music?

-Yes!

Or Gangnam Style?

ALL: Gangnam Style!

And what do you want to do when you are older?

Brilliant.

This traditional art form is thought to predate even

the ancient temples of Angkor Wat and is central to Cambodian culture.

The intricate puppets are carved from stiff cow hide

and brought to life with a roaring fire and graceful dancing.

Quite complicated, this. There's a lot going on.

In England, it's just sausages, crocodiles and wife beating.

I'm totally absorbed by it.

I might not understand it, but I'm totally fascinated,

I'm totally gripped.

Apparently, it tells a Cambodian version

of the classic Sanskrit poem, Ramayana,

an epic - and I mean EPIC - tale of love, loyalty and revenge

with a hero, a princess, some angry gods and an awful lot of fighting.

Like almost everything else of cultural value in Cambodia,

these beautiful puppet shows were all-but eradicated

under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge,

but are now beginning to emerge once more from the shadows.

Such a great atmosphere.

It's just so nice to be out in the open.

Beautiful midnight-blue sky, fire, fabulous dances.

Hello, I think there's a denouement approaching.

I've had the most fantastic time.

To come here and to receive that kind of welcome.

And the kids are so spirited and friendly and open.

They lack prejudice or cynicism.

There's no trace of the horrors of 40 years ago.

They're just freshly minted and looking forward to tomorrow.

I'm certainly looking forward to that finishing as well.

Because, I mean, I love a puppet show,

but after three-and-a-half hours,

even I am desperate to get on a boat.

Goodbye.

It's 6:25 in the morning.

If this were London, in about an hour's time, I'd get up,

have a cup of tea, mooch around, read the papers.

In Cambodia, I've been up since four,

I've washed my essentials in the river

and now I'm going to go and kill some snakes.

With the competition for fish so intense,

many of Tonle Sap's residents have started to hunt snakes

as a way of bringing in some extra cash.

I'm quite frightened of snakes actually.

The watery ones, I'm terrified of.

They sit somewhere for me between my fear of drowning

and my fear of John McCririck.

With John McCririck being the upper end.

Do these snakes bite?

While some of the snakes are eaten,

most are sold as feed to the area's thriving crocodile farming industry.

Crocodiles are bred for their skins

to make handbags and shoes.

Now the snake population is crashing too,

and concerns are growing that the fragile ecological balance

of this beautiful lake is being tipped permanently out of kilter.

It's been a beautiful morning, but a rather sad one.

Because the fish stock is so depleted,

the locals are having to get into other avenues of employment,

so they are now farming crocodiles and what do crocodiles eat?

Snakes!

So now this lake is the site of the biggest snake harvest in the world

and now the snakes are running out.

Somebody's getting very wealthy wearing very nice crocodile shoes.

I don't know. I really do hope that somebody learns something

fairly sharpish cos in 20 years' time this lake is going to be empty

with loads of tourists just pottering around on it.

Back in the village,

the local women are busy releasing the catch from their nets

by bashing them with rackets, in a ritual I've nicknamed fish tennis.

They asked me along for a game.

-I don't actually...

-THEY LAUGH

Hello, sailor...off you go.

-I think I've also got one slightly down my...

-THEY LAUGH

Bingo.

Do you feel that your life is very hard, the three of you?

They are, after all, fishwives, so I am hoping to get some local gossip.

When you do this normally, do you sit around and do you gossip?

Do you...chat about all the men in the village?

-THEY LAUGH

-Yes, you do!

So where does the most handsome man in the village live?

We're here at a very auspicious time of year.

The whole of Cambodia comes together to celebrate the water festival

of Bon Om Touk, which marks the end of the rains.

You're not warming up?

I'm the only one really taking this seriously.

I've done a lot of training. A lot of training.

I've never taken part in a sporting event

without weeing myself.

Genuinely.

I become so hysterical that I'm actually doing it,

I actually lose control of my bladder.

As part of the festivities,

traditional dragon boat races are held in the village.

And I've been given a place on one of the boats.

The time for laughter may be over.

And the time for wheezing and heart palpitations might have begun.

YELLING

'Yes, that's me. Black shirt, very unfit.

'Just shouting a lot to compensate.'

SUE YELLING

Keeps bashing me on the head with a massive pole!

I'm mad with concussion.

'Well, it starts well enough.'

You've got a massive pole!

'It very quickly starts to go about as well

'as all my other sporting endeavours'

Did we win?!

Did we win?

Well, I can tell you the Mekong smells horrible,

tastes horrible, made all of my skin go really weird.

What's that I can smell?

'I think it was me.'

So I can go home to England and say I've truly tasted the Mekong.

THEY LAUGH

No, not frightened. Not frightened.

Oh, you thought I was drowning.

Bon Om Touk is like a giant harvest festival,

without the tinned peaches,

where the people make weird and wonderful offerings and give thanks

to the gods for the bounty of their rivers and the fish that they bring.

'Did she just say defecate?

'I went IN that river!'

You have made me feel so welcome.

And it's such a pleasure to see you. So thank you.

Now I think we should go and say hello to the water god.

'And I'm going to pray that I don't get cholera.

'Did she really say defecate?'

Plub...

Plean. Plean, plub.

-Plub.

-Plub.

-Plub.

-Plub.

So we're just heading to the monastery to get a quick blessing

and then we are on our way out into open water

where we will give our offerings.

Lay them in the water and say a prayer

that all these brilliant people get loads of fish.

Each family has a boat and all the family have offerings in the boat.

There's loads of them. They're just materialising out of the night.

I think shoes off, probably, would be the respectful thing.

-ALL:

-Yay!

Let's see how many nuns and monks we can get into a boat.

And rock before it then sinks.

This boat is full of people being respectful,

but also there's a real laugh.

I think there might be a disco later.

SINGING

The monastery barge, full of chanting monks and nuns,

is towed through the village

collecting a flotilla of little boats like a Khmer Pied Piper.

Together, we all head for the open water of the lake.

I have absolutely no idea what's going on

but it is completely magical.

I'm so used to a man in a cassock telling me I'm evil.

To come somewhere where people are chewing gum and laughing

and prodding you in the back for responses

is A - fabulous.

B - genuinely so much more of a religious experience

than anything I've ever done before.

I've been given my own special offering,

which is some instant coffee,

some snack biscuits

and about six cigarettes.

I didn't know the water god was a smoker.

So each family are putting their offerings in.

That family's put candles in, praying as they do so,

to make sure they get a really good harvest,

to make sure that their family are well and healthy for the next year.

The more offerings they give, the more luck they'll have.

I pray that all your families are happy and healthy,

that you are well looked after by the gods you believe in

and that next year you may see a hell of a lot fish.

SHE REPEATS THE WORD

It's impossible to overstate the importance of this lake

and the river system to the people of the Mekong Basin.

Tonle Sap is the freshwater heartbeat

at the centre of Cambodia, its annual flood pulse providing protein

for millions of people across the lower Mekong.

The arteries and capillaries of the Mekong

reach into every corner of the land,

connecting it, feeding and watering it, bringing life into it.

If this fragile habitat is lost, the consequences for Cambodia

and Vietnam could be truly catastrophic.

Tonight's ceremony just bangs home how vital this river is

to everybody who lives along it. It's their home,

it's their recreation, it's their playground,

it's their food, it's their livelihood

and it turns out, it's also their religion.

You can't help but wish that every prayer they've put out to the lake

gets returned tenfold next year.

I just gave a water god cigarettes!

SHE LAUGHS

Next time...

She's saying someone's farted and they have.

TROMBONE NOISES

First, I've got to drink this jar and then I drink this jar?

-Yeah, yeah.

-Magic.

No, no, no. Ooh, not the groin.

That really was my bear necessities it was going for.

It's your mum.

She says, "Where have you been for the last 30 years?"

You might as well just stick a massive sign saying, "For Sale."

These people are so poor. I just feel really torn.

-FAINT WHIRRING

-You can hear chainsaws.