Bits and pieces
Hue, central Vietnam, May 2012
View of Hanoi from the top of My Dinh tower, October 2012
In Lenin Park, October 2012
In Ta Phin village, near Sapa, north-west Vietnam, October 2012
Posts from the ‘travel’ category
Photobook: Portraits of Vietnam
My photobook, Portraits of Vietnam, is available now. Hotly anticipated by members of my immediate family, it’s a collection of seventy-odd portrait pictures taken over fourteen months in various locations in Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City / Saigon, the Mekong Delta, Dalat and the central highlands, Hanoi, and the north-western province of Lao Cai. I’ve taken other kinds of picture and been to other countries over that period, but portraits are the pictures that I most enjoy taking, and Vietnam has been my been my home for most of the last five years, so Vietnamese portraits seemed like an obvious theme for a book.
Portraits of Vietnam is available to buy here for £33 (about 50 USD). You can see a preview of the whole thing for free (exactly 0 USD) by clicking here. The 96 page, 8×10 inch softcover book is self-published through blurb. I realise it’s not cheap, but I’ve tried to keep costs down as much as I can, and I promise not to be offended if nobody buys a copy.
October all over again
This blog has been a little quiet lately, mostly because I’ve been back home in England (for a little longer than planned) where it’s been too cold, grey and wet to take any photographs. Anyone eager to see pictures of the Sussex countryside in winter will, I’m afraid, have to look elsewhere.
I have, though, dug out some more pictures from my October trip to north-west Vietnam, which I’m posting here.
In other news, I will soon be unleashing my first photobook on an unsuspecting world. It’s a collection of portrait pictures taken in Vietnam over the last year and a bit, titled – unless someone can come up with something better – Portraits of Vietnam. Watch this space for further details, and seriously, please let me know in the comments section below if you have a good idea for a title.
So long Saigon
One day I’ll write a blog post that eloquently sums up the joys, disappointments, pleasures and frustrations of living in Saigon. But not today. Instead, here are some pictures taken over a couple of days in December, as I was preparing to come back to the UK for Christmas.
Cosmopolitan (potw #42)
In order to avoid doing my packing this afternoon, I went for a wander with my camera. I’ve not taken that many pictures in Saigon recently – these pictures of the week have tailed off quite a bit – but I’ve taken a few that I like over the last couple of days. Here’s one of them to be going along with. She sells magazines in District 1.
Later today, I’ll be flying home for Christmas and the New Year. I have five weeks in the UK before coming back to Saigon – briefly – in January. After that, I’ll be heading off to the next place, though I’m not entirely sure where that will be yet. First I plan to travel through some other parts of south east Asia for a while. So this is a kind of farewell to Saigon, but maybe not to Vietnam.
Postcard from Hong Kong
This isn’t really a postcard from Hong Kong, since I’m back in Saigon as I write this, but I always send postcards late, if I send them at all, so let’s call it a postcard from Hong Kong.
Anyway, I spent last week in Hong Kong, where I met up with some friends from home. Nobody told me how much like London it would feel. Hardly a motorbike in sight, traffic that stays in its lane, people waiting patiently at the lights to cross the street, unapologetically expensive bars, ostentatious displays of wealth, identikit shopping malls, and double decker buses. There are differences, of course – Hong Kong has better weather, street food that won’t give you botulism, and an underground that doesn’t make you wish you’d stayed at home – but it certainly felt more similar to London than to Saigon. So I suppose that, in some way, it was good preparation for going home for Christmas.
Unusually for me, I was visiting a new place in the company of other people. Of course, I like people – some of my best friends are people – but I don’t normally travel with them. A lot of time was spent was spent catching up, deciding where our next fix of dim sum was coming from, and drinking in those unapologetically expensive bars. All this human interaction is all very well, but it’s not really conducive to taking pictures, which for me tends to be a solitary activity. I take my best pictures when I’m on my own and I have the time and space to move about, or stay still, and think, or not. But I did take some, and here they are: obligatory city skyline, skyscraper detail, bird houses, human houses, tiny tombs, reflections, a mini Mao, masks, many small buddhas, and one big buddha.
Another monk portrait
Here’s another from the archive, taken in Phnom Penh in January of this year. I should really have included it in this post, as I think they make quite a nice double act.
Outtakes
This is a collection of Saigon street portraits from the last year or so, which I had previously overlooked, or which didn’t fit into earlier posts.
Over and under the bridge
On Long Bien bridge, you see urban Vietnam: motorbikes, tired colonial architecture, views of narrow houses and tower blocks fading into the smog. Under the bridge, the island, where you find a slither of rural Vietnam: fishing villages, farmland, brave Red River swimmers.
When I lived in Hanoi, it was one of my favourite areas to go and take photographs in. These pictures are from a brief visit in October, when I stopped over in Hanoi for a few days on my way further north.
Travels with my sister
It’s easy to become jaded and cynical about a place after you’ve lived there for a while. One of the great things about visits from friends and family is that you get to look at familiar sights with some fresh perspective. Things that you might have started to take for granted become interesting again. So nine days in Vietnam with my sister, as well as being an opportunity to spend some time with one of my favourite people, was a chance to remind myself about what drew me to Vietnam in the first place.
These pictures are from the few days that Kate and I spent in Dalat and Hanoi.
Without an H 