Mekong 360°
The Riverside Guide to The Mekong
Pick a Mekong river city below and begin your 360° journey on one of Asia’s greatest waterways.
Xieng Kok | Laos
Huay Xai | Laos
Pak Beng | Laos
Luang Prabang | Laos
Vientiane | Laos
Tha Khaek | Laos
Savannakhet | Laos
Pakse Port | Laos
4000 Islands | Laos
Stung Treng | Cambodia
Kratie | Cambodia
Phnom Penh | Cambodia
Cho Lach | Vietnam
The Mouth of the Mekong at Thua Long
Be sure to us the shift and control keys on your keyboard to zoom in and out.
Zooming out will improve the quality of the viewing experience.
Travel upstream and downstream from links in the bottom left and right of the iFrame.
This is a full screen QuickTime presentation covering a distance of some 2,100kms from one of the nine dragons tails at the mouth of the river to the northern territories of Laos.
Add your river to Mouth to Source – contact feed[at]mouthtosource[dot]net
Mouth to Source | For the greatest journeys on Earth.
Mouth to Source // Heritage // Angkor Archaeological Park
Born from the glacial head waters of Tibet and the extraordinary hydrology of the Mekong Delta. Angkor Wat stands today as a celebration of this environmental phenomenon and as a totem of total and rampant consumerism.
A clash of essential heritage preservation and profit driven private partnerships who as custodians of Angkor appear only interested in their own financial gain while stifling scholarly engagement from all over the world.
The ancient Khmer culture is so much bigger than the surrounding temple complex near Siem Reap town.
There remains much more to be discovered and studied but Angkor still stands as one of mankind’s greatest achievements.
Thanks to the unique characteristics of the Tonlé Sap river. Often referred to as the lungs of Cambodia ebbing and flowing over the annual lunar cycle.
The great muddy waters of the Mekong and it’s many tributaries contribute to the Tonlé Sap rivers annual reversal of flow.
The resulting great Tonlé Sap lake (it’s really an internal freshwater ocean) being one of the most productive fisheries on the planet providing as much as 90% of the daily protein requirements of the Khmer people.
Rice fields flood with nutrient rich water and recede with migratory fingerling fishes spawned in inches of paddy warranting Cambodia the honour of being the only true water kingdom on Earth.
It is an incredibly delicate hydrological mechanism. Acting as a biodiversity incubator it supports an even greater number of flora and fauna than the Amazon river basin in South America.
Angkor is a lesson in religious celebration, environmental planning and disaster.
It now stands as a living monumental metaphor to the environmental and climatic issues that face this delta region today.
It’s life or death, all over again.
Take a deep breath and inhale.
Online Mini Tour ‘Le Grand Tour d’Angkor – An Interactive Guide to the Temples of Angkor’
With words from Heritage Watch International and panoramas and imaging from Mouth to Source, the download contains a history of Angkor in English, French and Khmer and lots more from every temple on the Grand Tour. Take the mini tour before you download and see if it’s right for your remix.
Download ‘Le Grand Tour d’Angkor – An Interactive Guide to the Temples of Angkor’ here (320mb).
Includes over 120 high resolution panoramas.
This work, ‘Le Grand Tour d’Angkor – An Interactive Guide to the Temples of Angkor’ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon our work non-commercially, as long as you credit us and license the new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute this work just like the by-nc-nd license, but you can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on this work. All new work based on this will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.
Surprise us and please show us what you make. We’d like to link back to your work.
In the underpaid digital economy, flowers, comments and thanks are gratefully received.
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Mouth to Source // Forestry // Prey Lang | One Forest, One Future
As a watershed Prey Lang forest plays a significant role in the water cycle within northern Cambodia by generating rains in central Cambodia and in supplying water in the region through adjoining tributaries to the Mekong and Stung Sen Rivers. The role that both the dry evergreen and swamp evergreen forests play in regulating water flows also serves to prevent sedimentation of the Tonlé Sap Lake.
Take a peek at the award winning video documentary from film makers Ben and Jocelyn Pederick.
Photos, video and panoramas from this unique and unprotected forest on the west bank of The Mekong in Northern Cambodia.
Visit the last evergreen forest in South East Asia.
‘Prey Lang | One Forest, One Future’
Add your forest to Mouth to Source – contact feed[at]mouthtosource[dot]net
Mouth to Source // Editorial // Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
From Wikipedia:
Formerly the Chao Ponhea Yat High School, named after a Royal ancestor of King Norodom Sihanouk, the five buildings of the complex were converted in August 1975, four months after the Khmer Rouge won the civil war, into a prison and interrogation center. The Khmer Rouge renamed the complex “Security Prison 21″ (S-21) and construction began to adapt the prison to the inmates: the buildings were enclosed in electrified barbed wire, the classrooms converted into tiny prison and torture chambers, and all windows were covered with iron bars and barbed wire to prevent escapes.
From 1975 to 1979, an estimated 17,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng (some estimates suggest a number as high as 20,000, though the real number is unknown). At any one time, the prison held between 1,000-1,500 prisoners. They were repeatedly tortured and coerced into naming family members and close associates, who were in turn arrested, tortured and killed. In the early months of S-21’s existence, most of the victims were from the previous Lon Nol regime and included soldiers, government officials, as well as academics, doctors, teachers, students, factory workers, monks, engineers, etc. Later, the party leadership’s paranoia turned on its own ranks and purges throughout the country saw thousands of party activists and their families brought to Tuol Sleng and murdered. Those arrested included some of the highest ranking communist politicians such as Khoy Thoun, Vorn Vet and Hu Nim. Although the official reason for their arrest was “espionage,” these men may have been viewed by Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot as potential leaders of a coup against him. Prisoners’ families were often brought en masse to be interrogated and later murdered at the Choeung Ek extermination center.
In 1979, the prison was uncovered by the invading Vietnamese army. In 1980, the prison was reopened by the government of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea as a historical museum memorializing the actions of the Khmer Rouge regime.
Tuol Sleng is now registered by UNESCO as Global Documentary Heritage as of September 2009.
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum | Phnom Penh
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum: Corner of Street 113 & Street 350; Entry Fees: $2.00;
Opening Hours: Open everyday, including holidays, 7am–11:30am, 2pm–5:30pm.
The Building – an urban story of Cambodia | Bophana Audio Visual Center
The Municipal Apartments at Bassac river front/ Tonle Bassac/ White Building or just “the Building”, as it is more commonly known, was part of an ambitious city planning scheme from the 1960s for a new Phnom Penh. Today, these origins are contrasted by what the Building has come to represent in contemporary Cambodia. It is both a symbol for the city’s social issues – “development”, dispossession, exclusion and landlessness – as well as home to active community members, artists and ordinary city dwellers.
Contact Khmer Architecture Tours for architectural tours of the city of Phnom Penh.
Mouth to Source // Heritage // The Bassac Theatre – Now Demolished
From AFP
Constructed in 1966, the 1,200-seat Bassac was designed by Vann Molyvann, Cambodia’s most famous modern architect, as a monument to Cambodia’s thriving performing arts scene. It is not hard to imagine the capital’s elite, dressed in elegant evening wear, gliding through the Bassac’s imposing triangular foyer and up the cantilevered staircases suspended over shallow pools of water, about to view a performance of the Royal Ballet.
The Bassac was one of dozens of gems built by Vann Molyvann, whose wide boulevards and stunning public buildings transformed Phnom Penh from a tiny backwater into a graceful capital during Cambodia’s short period of prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s.
The era, known as the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, or Cambodia’s “golden age,” also spurred on a strong revival in performing arts, with the Bassac at its heart. “During the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, the government considered the theatre a part of our national heritage,” an angry Vann Molyvann says. “Heritage cannot be sold, changed or denied-now they are destroying it. Now they’ve sold our national heritage to a famed businessman.
Khim Sarith, secretary of state at the Ministry of Culture, says the site had been leased to Cambodian tycoon Kith Meng, who plans to develop a “cultural building”. In an earlier deal struck in 2005, Cambodia’s culture ministry ceded land around the Bassac on the condition that the theatre be renovated, retaining its original name and architecture.
Kith Meng was to get an undisclosed amount of property around the theatre in exchange for building a conference centre and office blocks. But Khim Sarith explains that the government is unable to afford the “millions of dollars” it would cost to restore the Bassac. “The theatre will be knocked down because it is burned and is old,” he says. “There is nothing there,” he says, adding the new theatre that Kith Meng has agreed to build elsewhere in exchange for the property “will be better than the old one”.
Sadly, we have seen no replacement so far.
In loving memory.
Contains directional audio samples from 1966. The year this building opened to the public. Be patient and/or have plenty bandwidth. Let it drop.
Sex Workers Home Interiors
A selection of panoramas of home interiors of sex and former sex workers. A commission from OXFAM, Hong Kong.
Sex Workers Home Interiors | Phnom Penh
Advocacy // Mouth to Source | Environment Week 2009
Ramsar Site 999 on The Mekong.
It’s the region just south of the Laos border and Stung Treng in Cambodia. Contains ambient audio, directional audio, hotspots and Google map integration in FLASH.
This is also the most northerly part of the Mekong Discovery Trail. Visit The Mekong Discovery Trail Online
Download the exhibition catalogue here (7mb | 64 pages)
If you have a river story you would like to blog on Mouth to Source then please contact feed[at]mouthtosource[dot]net.
Our goal is to be able to navigate the entire globe via the river and water systems, so every river is important to us.
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