Riches of the Mekong and the Vietnam War

Riches of the Mekong and the Vietnam War is an eight-day river cruise running from Siem Reap, Cambodia to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, August 9–16, 2027. You sail aboard AmaWaterways’ brand-new AmaMaya — the only AmaWaterways ship operating on the Mekong — and travel with a military historian from Mat McLachlan Battlefield Tours for the full eight days. The cruise pairs luxury Mekong sailing with exclusive battlefield excursions covering the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge era: the Battle of Ap Bac, the Lower Mekong sites along Highway 1 to Ben Tre, and the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh.

The Mekong is where Southeast Asia’s last century happened. The Khmer Rouge. The Vietnam War. The Brown Water Navy. The Tet Offensive in Ben Tre. The Ho Chi Minh Trail’s southern terminals. All of it played out on or near this river. If those names mean something to you — through reading, through service, through family — this is a way to see those places with someone who can explain what you’re looking at.

You sail aboard the AmaMaya, AmaWaterways’ brand-new Mekong ship and the only one they operate on this river. French Colonial décor, twin-balcony staterooms, the kind of food and wine you’d expect from a luxury cruise line. The cruise runs one-way from Siem Reap in Cambodia to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, which means every morning is somewhere new. A military historian from Mat McLachlan Battlefield Tours is with you the entire week, leading the dedicated battlefield days and giving evening seminars between dinner and a nightcap.

The two battlefield days are the ones you can’t do on your own. The Upper Mekong Battlefields Tour goes to Ap Bac — the January 1963 battle that exposed the limits of US helicopter-borne tactics and is still studied at staff colleges. The Lower Mekong day follows Highway 1 to Ben Tre, the town Vietnam War correspondents made famous with the phrase that defined the war, and to the sites of Nguyen Thi Dinh, the female general who led the Ben Tre uprising. These tours aren’t on the standard AmaWaterways excursion list. They were built for this cruise.

Cambodia is where the Vietnam War overlaps with something darker. In Phnom Penh, you’ll spend a morning at the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, and an afternoon at the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. There is no easing into those last two — they are exactly what they sound like. Pol Pot’s regime killed roughly two million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979, and these are the places it happened. Your historian will give context the night before. You’ll spend the evening on the ship watching a Khmer classical dance performance in the Saigon Lounge, which is the kind of pairing that only makes sense once you’ve done it.

The non-war days are some of the best parts. Angkor Ban is a Cambodian village the Khmer Rouge somehow left intact, and you walk it with the head of the household at one of the homes. Oknhatey — Silk Island — has traditional weavers and a local elementary school you can visit. The Buddhist blessing ceremony at the Oudong hilltop monastery is one of those quiet experiences that travelers remember for years. In Vietnam, Sa Dec was where the novelist Marguerite Duras grew up, and the market there is exactly the kind of place that gets photographed and put in coffee table books. Cai Be has rice paper and coconut candy workshops if you want the cultural side of the river that day instead of the battlefield side.

This is the rare itinerary where two completely different trips — a serious military-history pilgrimage and a luxury Southeast Asia river cruise — are running simultaneously, with the same historian and the same ship and the same wine list. You don’t have to pick a lane. Some days you’re on a battlefield. Other days you’re on a tuk-tuk or watching the sun set over the river. By Ho Chi Minh City, you’ve done both.