In March, my wife and I decided to take a short trip to Vietnam. Our daughter had recently moved out for college and we hadn’t traveled overseas as a couple since before she was born. Unfortunately, with my work schedule, we were limited to two and a half days in-country so we had to plan well. The goal was not to relax by the pool. My goal was to take photos, and Akiko was focused on experiences, food, and shopping.
We flew into Noi Bai airport just north of Hanoi and after nearly two hours waiting to go through immigration we somehow managed to find the driver we’d hired amidst the chaos of people vying for our attention. Apparently he was in a hurry to get back to Ninh Binh after waiting for us for so long because he seemed determined to overtake every other vehicle on the road, constantly honking and changing lanes as he navigated the maze of scooters, cars, and busses between us and home. About half way through the drive I remembered to take out my camera, but I was too stressed to take many photos and Akiko couldn’t even speak. In the end, though, he did get us to the hotel in Ninh Binh, about 2.5 hours south of Hanoi, without incident.
We arrived at Mr. Loa Homestay in Tam Coc a bit shell-shocked, but any complaints we had ended with the driver. The bungalows were clean and well appointed, and the location between a towering limestone karst on one side and rice fields on the other (the reason I’d chosen this location when booking) did not disappoint. Though only about a fifteen minute walk from the lively restaurants and bars in Tam Coc (try the roast duck!), the bungalows were surpisingly mellow, and each night after dinner we sat in front of our bungalow drinking Saigon beer and listening to the frogs and assorted critter noise coming from the dark rice fields with only an undercurrent of bass-heavy music coming from the lights on the other side of the rice fields. The hotel pool looked beautiful, but it wasn’t on the agenda.
On the morning of the first day we rented a scooter and rode through several rice fields and around a handful of karsts to Nui Ngoa Long (Lying Dragon Mountain). We hiked up to the two peaks to catch the breathtaking views. While planning for the trip, I’d imagined getting to the top around sunset and getting views of warm, slanting sunlight cutting through the fog or rain enshrouded valley, but instead we took the advice of the manager at Mr. Loa Homestay and went early to beat the crowds, ending up at the top around 10 A.M. on a sunny, fogless day. So, I didn’t quite get the magical photos I’d hoped for, but the view was still inspiring, and by the time we were coming down the mountain, the crowd coming up had become a near continuous stream of selfie-stick wielding tourists that would surely push the density of the crowds competing for space on the summits to its capacity. From there we rode the scooter to Trang An to take a 3 hour boat tour on the river between limestone karsts and through a series of caves, coming into breathtaking valleys including one that was used for the filming of King Kong. By now it was after noon on a cloudless day, so not ideal light for landscape photos, but you can’t control the weather and when your plans involve other people, compromises must be made. I like to think that with age I’m getting better at accepting that. On the scooter ride back to the hotel we saw a small herd of water buffalo bathing in the river, so we stopped to check them out. They cooled in the river for a while, and then decided they were done and walked up into the road as cars and scooters swerved around them. Apparently it was a common occurence. I did think momentarily about the photos I could have gotten in early morning light, with the mist still hanging over the river, but I took a couple deep breaths and let it go.
On the morning of the second day we said goodbye to Mr. Loa Homestay and got a ride to the train station in Ninh Binh. This time the driver was mellow, maybe because it was just a twenty minute drive. We caught a Vietnam Railways sleeper car from Ninh Binh to Hanoi that we had reserved before going to Vietnam. We reserved bottom beds so we could look at the windows, but if the plan was to sleep, the upper beds might have been better. As it turned out, nobody else had reserved our sleeper car, so we had it to ourselves for the two hour ride. It was a much more relaxed trip than the first day’s taxi ride, and the glimpses of Vietnam life along the way were fascinating. I took a lot of slow shutter exposures (mostly 1/4 to 1/2 second) to add a sense of motion to the photos and highlight buildings and scenes. At one point, the train tracks came alongside the road, and I could focus on some scooter riders that were traveling at the exact same speed as the train, letting the background go blurry, and isolating them dramatically. It was interesting to see the change from country to city as we entered Hanoi, and a few kilometers from Hanoi Station we entered the famous “Train Alley,” where the shops along the train tracks are only a couple meters from the train. It was fun photographing the people photographing me.
We arrived in Hanoi in the afternoon, which gave us a few hours to walk around until we had to catch the bus to Noi Bai Airport for our midnight flight back to Nagoya. The streets of Hanoi are hyper-utilized, with things seeminly happening on every square meter, and little distinction between indoor and outdoor activities. We saw people on the streets washing vegetables, cooking pots of rice, talking with friends…I could easily have spent days exploring the streets of Hanoi with my camera, but I had to settle for one afternoon. Still, with a framable shot every direction you pointed your camera, I still came home with hundreds of photos to edit, snapshots from a moment in time of all the thousands of interactions that took place daily on those crowded streets.
After several hours of roaming the city, through street markets and narrow-aisled warehouses filled with goods stacked to the roof, eating banh mi and haggling over the prices of coasters and lotus tea and Vietnamese coffee, all-the-while trying to master the art of crossing streets slowly and at a steady pace as mopeds and bikes and cars sped around you, we decided to take a break. We went to the Cong Cafe, and sat in the little balcony on the second floor, looking down at the plaza just north of Hoan Kiem Lake. A never-ending flow of pedestrians, street peddlars, rickshaw drivers and motorized vehicles moved through the streets below us, fallowing arterial flows whose design I could not make sense of. The combination of moving and static elements fascinated me. I tried some thirtieth of a second pans, finding colorful people in the crowd to follow. I also braced the camera on the table for some half second shots in order to render the moving people as ghosts traversing the frozen crowds. Sitting in that little coffee house in the middle of Hanoi, anonymous and happy and free, I felt like my body and soul had finally fully arrived in Vietnam. It would have been nice to go with that flow for a few more days, but an hour later it was time to go. We flashed through the streets like a couple of locals and made our bus to the airport. If felt like more than two and a half days.
