hanoi | Without an H

Posts tagged ‘hanoi’

Meat

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The title says it all, really. In the interests of balance, picture #3 also features some vegetables.

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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.

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Rush

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Construction workers on Long Bien bridge work – and rest – while the rest of Hanoi rushes past by bike and train.

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Autumn

151022-171-edited 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.

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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.

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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.

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More from the other side

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A few more pictures from the other side of the Red River, taken in Bat Trang ceramic village.

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The other side

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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.

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Spinning wheels

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A couple of pictures from Bat Trang, a ceramic and brickwork village a little outside Hanoi.

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The thieves’ market

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The thieves’ market in Hanoi is nowhere near as sinister or unwelcoming as the name suggests. It’s a network of narrow lanes and alleys in Hai Ba Trung district, packed with open-fronted shops and ramshackle market stalls, offering machine parts, car parts, bike parts, wires, cables, chains, locks, springs, pipes, lights, screws, rivets and countless other mysterious (to me, at least) pieces of metal and plastic. It has a reputation for being the place where stolen vehicle parts and electronics turn up – hence the name – but I didn’t experience any aggression or suspicion as I wandered around with my camera, just a bunch of busy people going about their day-to-day business of buying and selling stuff made of metal. As is so often the case in markets in south-east Asia, very similar stalls are tightly clustered together – a row of electricity meter merchants here, a stretch of hub cap vendors there – apparently unconcerned by the close proximity of direct competition. Some of the shops are little more than booths, just a few feet wide, where shopkeepers sit in tiny, cramped, cluttered spaces, surrounded by their wares. Take a wrong turn (or a right turn, or maybe a left) and you end up in the nearby fish and poultry market. If you need new sprockets for your motorbike and a freshly slaughtered chicken for your dinner, this is the neighbourhood to come to.

I hadn’t originally intended to present these pictures in black and white, but I like the contrast between the dark, dirty shadows of the shops and the soft afternoon sunlight filtering through from outside, and I think the black and white treatment brings this out better than colour would.

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Hanoi misc.

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A slightly random selection of pictures from the last few weeks. No particular story or theme here – just some images of Hanoi that I like.

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Chat

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I don’t normally take pictures of people from the other side of the street, as I don’t like feeling like a sniper. But I’ll make exceptions now and then; in this case, I wanted to catch the stillness of the chatting women and the movement of the passing traffic.

Without an H

Photography from south-east Asia by Jon Sanwell