A week ago I was sitting next to this landscape with Laura and Matt Parker of The Exodus Road having lunch and learning more about the work they do throughout Southeast Asia. We had the night before gone out with undercover investigators to a red light district to visit brothels and talk with sex workers, an initial introduction into the mechanisms of the industry of sex tourism. That phrase alone without any context is somewhat gruesome, but seeing it up close is even more repulsive: the flashing lights and dark corners, the numbered, blank-faced teenage girls standing half dressed next to stripper poles waiting to be waved over by a foreign white man who has traveled thousands of miles to buy their bodies.
This low tide panorama was a much welcome reprieve.