Without an H

Photography from south-east Asia by Jon Sanwell

Posts tagged ‘portrait’

The Devil of Mandalay and other pictures

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I don’t have many regrets about my autumn trip to Myanmar, but I do wish that I’d spent a little more time in Mandalay. The pictures here are some of my favourites from the trip, but there are too many others, not shown here, where I just didn’t quite capture the mood. Still, at least it gives me an excuse to go back another time.

This will be my last post of the year, so I’d just like to say a big thank you to everyone following the site. I know I’m not very good at replying to comments, but that doesn’t mean they go unnoticed or unappreciated. Thank you, and happy new year, everybody.

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The Devil of Mandalay

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Betel

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Chewing betelnut (actually a combination of betel leaves and areca nut, Wikipedia tells me) is a major part of the culture in Myanmar. Betel provides a mild stimulant, but also stains the chewer’s teeth red and is a major cause of cancer. This series of pictures from Mandalay shows the areca nuts being sliced and sorted; the betel leaves being arranged in baskets for sale at the market; a street stand selling parcels of nuts and leaves; and a betel smile.

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In Mawlamyine

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I’m a big fan of sleepy, gently crumbling riverside towns in south-east Asia. Kompong Cham and Kratie in Cambodia, Savannakhet in Laos – these are some of the places that I’ve most enjoyed visiting over the last few years. To that list, I can now add Mawlamyine in south-eastern Myanmar. It’s not a place with any really jaw-dropping sights – the town itself is the attraction, with its weathered colonial-era buildings, its pagodas, mosques and churches, its dockside market and its friendly, curious people.

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A bicycle made for two

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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.

Island life

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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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Autumn

151022-171-editedThis 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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