A quick shot from Mawlamyine in southern Myanmar. I spent four weeks travelling around the country in October and November, taking a ton of pictures which I am just now starting to sort through. So there’ll be more – quite a lot more – soon.
This is a belated sequel to this post from November 2013.
The title says it all, really. In the interests of balance, picture #3 also features some vegetables.
The island below Long Bien bridge in the middle of Hanoi’s Red River doesn’t feel like it belongs in the city at all. When I spent an autumn afternoon there, my first visit in far too long, I found wilting banana trees, bamboo construction work and naked swimming guys.
Construction workers on Long Bien bridge work – and rest – while the rest of Hanoi rushes past by bike and train.
This last week was the first of my five week autumn break. Tomorrow, I leave for four weeks in Myanmar, but this week was a chance to spend time in Hanoi without any tiresome work-based distractions. I’ve been spending my time taking pictures, reading, thinking about my upcoming trip and just enjoying being in Hanoi in the autumn, the season which I always think suits the city best. These are four simple street portraits taken over the last few days.
This will be my second trip to Myanmar, having spent three memorable weeks there in February and March of this year; I think I started mentally planning a return trip about three days in to that first visit. I’m looking forward to visiting Yangon and Mandalay again, but also to getting out of the cities and seeing more of the smaller towns and countryside. I have lots of half-formed ideas about places I would like to see, but no fixed itinerary. I’ll be travelling light: one camera (I only own one camera) and two prime lenses, a 35mm and an 85mm (plus clothes and toiletries and books and stuff). I’m leaving my laptop behind, so it will be a while before I post any pictures from the trip, but I have some Hanoi-centric posts lined up to keep the blog ticking over while I’m away.
Since I’ve been feeling positively disposed towards Hanoi over the last week, I’ve updated the slideshow on the homepage of this site, so that it now shows some of my favourite pictures taken in the city over the last couple of years. There are probably too many for one slideshow, but I’ve not been feeling very ruthless this week, and couldn’t decide which ones to cull. The previous occupants of the homepage, pictures from my 2013 Mekong trip, have been shuffled over to the gallery page.
In the summer of 2013, I spent four months following the Mekong river through south-east Asia. From the Xishuangbanna region in China’s Yunnan province, I travelled into northern Laos, crossed the river for a brief visit to Thailand, then continued down through the southern tail of Laos and into eastern Cambodia, before finishing my journey in the Mekong delta region in southern Vietnam.
My photobook, Downriver, is a collection of my photographs and thoughts from the trip, and is available through blurb.co.uk. The 136 page book is available as an 8×10 in softcover book or as a PDF download. Click here to order or to see a limited preview.
A few more pictures from the other side of the Red River, taken in Bat Trang ceramic village.
Like most Westerners in Hanoi, I spend the majority of my time on the west side of the Red River, where I live and work and drink coffee and wander about aimlessly. Recently, however, I’ve been driving over Long Bien bridge to explore some of the villages and neighbourhoods on the other side. Life is slower over there. You don’t have to go very far before your surroundings begin to feel more rural than urban.
These pictures were taken in the charmingly unremarkable Tu Dinh neighbourhood, home to a sparse market and an old but well-maintained Catholic church.
A couple of pictures from Bat Trang, a ceramic and brickwork village a little outside Hanoi.
Without an H 