Essential Vietnam and Cambodia

Transfer to Kampong Cham to board the RV Apsara. Later, delight in an Insider Experience.

Enjoy an immersive tour of Angkor Ban on a walking tour. Return to your ship and continue sailing towards Oknha Tey. Disembark and board a local tuk tuk for a village tour. Leave your local transport and continue on foot for a more in-depth exploration of the village.

Cruise to Phnom Penh then travel by coach to Oudong, the former capital of Cambodia. After an Insider Experience here, continue to Koh Chen and explore the open-air copperware workshops. This afternoon is free to explore.

Explore the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which recalls one of the darkest moments of the 20th century. Later, take a tour to visit the Royal Palace. See the  Silver Pagoda located within the Royal Palace complex and admire the Emerald Buddha carved from Baccarat crystal. After dinner, perhaps step out for an evening walk.

Spend today on board as your ship cruises to the Vietnamese border. This afternoon, you might like to attend a fruit-carving demonstration by the ship's chef while border formalities are carried out and you cross into Vietnam. Tonight, watch a documentary film about Pol Pot as your ship cruises towards the small Vietnamese town of Tan Chau.

After breakfast, transfer to a small boat and travel along the Mekong's tiny tributaries, observing the stilt house villages. Go ashore for a tour of Tan Chau by rickshaw. Known as one of the largest silk-weaving centres of Vietnam, visit the fascinating local artisan workshops to learn more about the history of the craft.

Take a boat ride to the charming colonial town of Sa Dec for a tour. Visit the former home of Huynh Thuy Le. Le’s one-time lover, French writer Marguerite Duras penned her best-selling novel, The Lover, about their affair. After lunch, step aboard a local boat and journey to Cai Be to see the French Gothic cathedral. Go ashore to visit a local rice paper manufacturer to learn how rice paper is made. After, visit a coconut candy factory to see how the local sweet is created. Enjoy a final dinner on board your ship.

Disembark at My Tho Port today and travel to the Cu Chi Tunnels. Finish the day in Ho Chi Minh City.

Romantically referred to by the French as the Pearl of the Orient, Ho Chi Minh City today is a super-charged city of sensory overload. Motorbikes zoom day and night along the wide boulevards, through the narrow back alleys and past vendors pushing handcarts hawking goods of all descriptions. Still called Saigon by most residents, this is Vietnam's largest city and the engine driving the country's current economic resurgence, but despite its frenetic pace, it's a friendlier place than Hanoi and locals will tell you the food—simple, tasty, and incorporating many fresh herbs—is infinitely better than in the capital.This is a city full of surprises. The madness of the city's traffic—witness the oddball things that are transported on the back of motorcycles—is countered by tranquil pagodas, peaceful parks, quirky coffee shops, and whole neighborhoods hidden down tiny alleyways, although some of these quiet spots can be difficult to track down. Life in Ho Chi Minh City is lived in public: on the back of motorcycles, on the sidewalks, and in the parks. Even when its residents are at home, they're still on display. With many living rooms opening onto the street, grandmothers napping, babies being rocked, and food being prepared, are all in full view of passersby.Icons of the past endure in the midst of the city’s headlong rush into capitalism. The Hotel Continental, immortalized in Graham Greene's The Quiet American, continues to stand on the corner of old Indochina's most famous thoroughfare, the rue Catinat, known to American G.I.s during the Vietnam War as Tu Do (Freedom) Street and renamed Dong Khoi (Uprising) Street by the Communists. The city still has its ornate opera house and its old French city hall, the Hôtel de Ville. The broad colonial boulevards leading to the Saigon River and the gracious stucco villas are other remnants of the French colonial presence. Grisly reminders of the more recent past can be seen at the city's war-related museums. Residents, however, prefer to look forward rather than back and are often perplexed by tourists' fascination with a war that ended 40 years ago.The Chinese influence on the country is still very much in evidence in the Cholon district, the city's Chinatown, but the modern office towers and international hotels that mark the skyline symbolize Vietnam's fixation on the future.