Buffalo

During our lunch breaks, while our Vietnamese colleagues were absorbed in Korean soap opera (passion, tragedy, a lot of driving around in posh cars), we used to go for a walk around the village or the fields. On one such walk we encountered this buffalo having a good wallow in the ditch and watching us with relaxed curiosity. There were some cows around too, but they ignored us. Maybe they'd have moved if we'd actually bumped into them...

Black water

The other day I mentioned the improved Hanoi drainage - even in a Big Rain, the streets are fairly clear of floods nowadays. Well this is where it comes out. The river branch at the top of the photo contains run-off from the city. The left branch comes from upstream of the city and is the red colour it's supposed to be. Note the floating vegetable gardens in it. Downstream of this junction, the water is entirely black, although it wasn't a few days before the photo was taken. The water level has been deliberately lowered by closing a gate further upstream. This is done so that people can pump excess water out of their fields in order to prepare for the next crop. But the result is that the only water flowing out of the city is water emanating from the city. So you realize that this black stuff is in fact always there, it's just hidden when the water level is high! It smells, is covered in oil slick and has gas bubbles plopping up from the depths. There is a kind of fish that can live in this, amazingly enough. It's called ca ro. We were given some for dinner a few days later - my colleague was unable to eat it and I just prayed that it had been caught further upstream! We did see some people fishing, also chickens pecking about in the mud by the "water's" edge and, most horrifyingly, we were told that some people depend on the river for their own water supply.

Village alley

These alleys run more or less parallel to each other from the main street back towards the rice fields. Note the remnant of decoration on the arch - suggesting that it once looked much finer. Also the ramp cut into the steps in order to bring the motorbike indoors has left a gaping hole under the door.

View from the roof

Mr L of Khuc Thuy has extended his house upwards. It's the only way to go when residential land is so scarce. This is the view from the roof terrace on top of the third floor. North Vietnamese villages are generally surrounded by a bamboo hedge - a thicket that would have been impossible to penetrate in days when local defence was needed. These days they're a bit patchy, so the roof offers a view of recently harvested paddy fields and the lines of eucalypts in the distance planted for timber along all the roads and main irrigation ditches. Self-sufficiency is the name of the game - everyone has fruit trees, pigs and chickens, a haystack for cooking fuel and a well. Whatever can be fitted into your plot of land!

Sifting milled rice

A village trader sifting her milled rice before bagging. Anything that still has the husk attached or is otherwise too large to get through the open-weave basket gets set aside. This particular woman trades brown rice of a glutinous variety that is used for the manufacture of rice alcohol (aka firewater!).

Farm couple, Hai Duong

Here are the owners of the pigs in the previous photo, standing in front of that year's crop of cooking fuel. I have noticed that Vietnamese farmers are happy to greet visitors in their work clothes, but invariably put their good clothes on over the top for the photo. We were visiting because Ms X is part of a basket weaving collective that sells basketry to an export company in Hanoi. We had visited their place of work and Ms X invited us to her home. Basket weaving isn't a highly remunerative occupation, but it helps to keep them going between rice crops. Looking after the livestock is also women's work. Men, on the other hand, have a lot more leisure time.

This little piggy...

These two were very friendly. I thought they deserved to have their photo taken, though I admit I stood a bit far back - they had such wet gooey snouts and their house had an odour that was a bit hard to take. They lived in a village in Hai Duong province, but it was 4 years ago so I guess they've gone to the butcher by now.

Tail end of the storm

Typhoon Damrey passed over in late September 2005 - somewhere between Katrina and Rita if I remember correctly. It was not only late in the season, but the worst typhoon in nearly a decade. Crops ready for harvest were destroyed. Unlike New Orleans, the Vietnamese were well prepared and troops were out sandbagging and evacuating people well before the storm hit. By the time it reached Hanoi, which is about 120 km inland, it was just a rain depression. We had heavy rain for about a week. In past years when it has rained like that, the city drainage system couldn't cope and floods were everywhere, but in the last 5-6 years the drainage system has improved so much that streets in the centre of the city that used to go a foot under water were clear all week.

French lady

I have no idea where she came from, but she is obviously not Vietnamese. There are similar figures draped over a couple of colonial-era buildings - most notably the People's Committee in Saigon. I found her incongruously parked outside the Hall of Mirrors in the former Lenin Park in Hanoi.

Smart part of town in the rain

When I took this I'd just finished an expensive and not very good lunch at the Met Pub, which caters to foreigners in Ngo Quyen behind the Metropole hotel. Across the road is the Au Lac cafe which is better, but was too wet that day as it is an outdoor place, and the Press Club - also expensive, but with very good wine. This is the old French quarter of tree-lined boulevards where the streets, since Independence, virtually all bear the names of Vietnamese heros who defeated the Chinese. Ngo Quyen was the one who ended the 1000-year Chinese occupation in the 10th century. Looking at this photo, I'm reminded that the very first privately registered Mercedes I saw in Hanoi was less than a decade ago.

Dong Trieu ceramics

Dong Trieu is a district town on the road from Hanoi to Ha Long Bay that specializes in ceramics production. The producers sell most of their output to middlemen who come from Hanoi and other big towns. But many of them live quite a distance from the main road down narrow alleys that are not wide enough for a motor vehicle. They have to hire cyclists to transport their goods and supplies to and from the delivery vans up on the main road. I would guess each bicycle load is about 50 kg. The cost of a bicycle trip is about 15-20 cents, which means that it adds substantially to the costs borne by the producers and squeezes their profits. The local administration has suggested setting up a roadside market place to make collection by the long-distance transporters more efficient, but it wouldn't reduce the transport costs of producers. It's the ancient layout of the village that's the problem. People who have sites near the main road are eventually going to cut the more distant producers out of business - unless someone does some radical cutting and pasting of local landholdings.

The giant 'tea pots' in the picture are used for traditional medicine.

Ho Guom

Also known as Hoan Kiem Lake, the Lake of the Returned Sword. The legend is similar to that of King Arthur: the Emperor Le Thai To received a sword from the turtle that lives in the lake. He used it to defeat the invading Chinese and then returned it to the turtle. Sightings of the turtle(s) are rare and make the front page of the newspapers, though many people believe they are mythical too. The water in the lake is very polluted, since it's in the centre of Hanoi, so some people think there must be a secret entrance that gives the turtles access to a cleaner environment somewhere. The species is known to exist elsewhere in northern Vietnam, but nowhere else close to Hanoi. They grow to a large size (I recall reading that an American tourist said she thought the flipper that appeared above the water surface was a shark's fin!). There is supposed to be a couple of very old ones in the lake, but nobody has ever seen any baby turtles. Certainly there's nowhere on the lake shore where a turtle could lay an egg. So unless they've got that mythical escape passage, I guess they will eventually become part of the legend anyway.

The pagoda on the island connected by the pretty red bridge is, from memory, called Ngoc Son (pearl mountain?) and is not related to the turtle story.

Village graveyard

Same village as previous post. More mien hanging out to dry in the distance.

Noodle works

The village of Cu Da in Ha Tay province specializes in the manufacture of a type of noodle called mien - a translucent vermicelli. I think it is made from tapioca which comes from up in the mountains. It isn't grown around here anyway. While wandering around the village we walked into a couple of these places - the people were invariably friendly and quite happy to let us have a squiz. There is some kind of ingredient added to colour the noodles - which come in white, pale gold and a deeper gold colour according the the amount of this stuff added. I've never seen the gold ones on the table though. Half the households in Cu Da are in this business and the noodles are hanging out to dry all over the place. They make the village look very cheerful, but the smell is pretty horrid!

Hang Non, Hanoi

Pho Hang Non (Non Street) is in the old quarter, the so-called '36 streets' which go back to an age when artisans serving the court clustered in the area near the citadel. Each street is named after one of the crafts - in this case the Non is the conical hat worn these days only by women. Other streets are named Chicken, Jute, Silver, Tin, Paper votary, Cloth, Bamboo, Leather and so forth. Often the streets remain highly specialized, but usually not in their original trades. Cloth Street (Hang Vai), for example, is noted for its bamboo ladders and Tin Street (Hang Thiec) still produces metalwork, but mostly in galvanised iron. Hang Gai (jute) was, in the 1990s, known by foreigners as Silk Street since it was a veritable supermarket shelf of silk cloth and clothing - now it has a lot of other souvenir and art shops as well. Hang Bong (cotton) was the place to go for pirate CDs and it's still fairly musically oriented. Hang Dao (peach) was called Silk Street by the French colonials and in the '90s became a huge clothing store. Another street is full of spectacles and another has clocks and watches. Others, like Hang Non are mixed. The specialization has become a lot less noticeable since the 1990s.

Floating village, Red River

Part of a small cluster of houseboats and others moored in the northern outskirts of Hanoi. The families who live there (about 10 households) have the right to fish between the Thang Long and Chuong Duong bridges. It's not a very profitable occupation as the river is severely over-fished. They do a sideline in taking day-trippers out to Bai Giua, the long flat island in the middle of the river (in the background of the photo), in their small boats and bringing them back for a meal on the houseboat afterwards. Some friends and I went out on what turned out to be a hunting trip for the guys. They killed a heron which makes quite a good barbecue when cut into cubes and grilled at high temperature. I loathe hunting (and was glad to see them miss several), but the trip was otherwise lovely. The island has vast white sandy beaches at the western tip. The meal was tasty too - grilled fish, sour fish soup.

Dinh at Khuc Thuy

The village dinh (communal house) at Khuc Thuy is a very fine one, reflecting the village's former prosperity. These days it could do with some restoration, though I hope it wouldn't be done in the garish colours that decorate the pagoda down the road! Anyway the dinh is where the village elders used to meet to decide the affairs of the village and it remains the centre of 'traditional', but non-religious business, the biennial village festival being the main example. I don't know why they only hold it every second year (money?), but it celebrates the founding of the village about a thousand years ago. Until late in the colonial era Khuc Thuy was a prosperous silk trading village, but most of the traders left for Hanoi and the local economy declined. Rice cultivation is now the main occupation. There are some fabulous old buildings - chiefly domestic architecture - from the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the village was rich. This front gate of the dinh probably dates from that era too.

Ladies' dance troupe

In Hanoi you keep bumping into TV crews. Vietnamese TV is very local and, by global standards, anodyne. These women were no doubt performing for some cultural program with an emphasis on the importance of including older people in the loop. I'm not sure whether they're dancing, or doing some kind of exercises with fans - either way, this kind of synchronized callisthenics is very much promoted in the official culture. One of the nice things about it, is the way that such programs are not reserved for professional performances - the masses are participants as much as merely consumers of entertainment.


The backdrop is the Botanical Garden, a rather lovely patch of green. It used to have a small zoo. The cages are still there, but the animals were moved during the war in case the Americans bombed Ho Chi Minh's nearby house and the tiger escaped. There is also a very small hill or mound, on which, nearly a thousand years ago, the emperor stood and, surveying the surrounding plain, declared the site for his capital of Thang Long. Nowadays you can't survey anything from the top of that hill except the trees and nearby houses.

Village yard, Red River delta

I took this photo while sitting in the cramped living quarters of a village rice trader and her husband who is a construction worker. L began trading in 2004; previously she was a poor farmer. The couple's one-room accommodation has been divided off from his parents' house - it is their bedroom, living room and warehouse and is about as big as my kitchen in Sydney. The outbuilding is the kitchen and bathroom block. That's my moto parked in the corner, but they do have one too, parked behind the piece of sacking that keeps the sun out. For transporting rice she uses the xe tho, the modified bicycle with a platform built on one side to carry a few bags and an arrangement of poles for steering and maintaining balance as you walk alongside. They use this to collect paddy from the villagers. For transport to her main customer - a wholesaler a few villages away - she hires a tractor-trailer with a capacity of just over a tonne. It is small-scale stuff, but much better than being a farmer. Maybe in a few years they'll be able to build their own house.

Evening constitutional in Lenin Park

This photo was taken in mid-winter (January 2003) - hence the misty atmosphere, part-pollution, part-humidity. The park has since been renamed something memorable like "Hanoi Public Park", while the little square in front of the old citadel where the statue of Lenin still stands is now called "Lenin Park". For me, however, the name Lenin Park is still linked to the much larger green space in the southern part of the city centre. In the early 1990s, when I first went there, the Park was also home to the remains of a B52 bomber, but that has also been removed - possibly to preserve it from gradual demolition by souvenir hunters. (The B52 museum in Can Doi street is worth a visit - it also has a MIG fighter and various other interesting means of destruction). Otherwise, the Park has some fun rides for kids, a Chinese restaurant with a very good reputation (whenever I've tried to go there it has been closed!), open spaces for badminton, football and callisthenics, and a lake with a two kilometre diameter that is very popular with joggers and walkers. In fine weather the lake is also crowded with little boats, especially foot-powered paddle-wheelers. The park also has musak, broadcast from numerous loudspeakers hung around the trees. At night, when it is closed, it is also a major hangout for the city's working women.

Cooperative housing, Hanoi

This was the view from my balcony. It is fairly typical of the old cooperative housing blocks. Even before they were privatised, people built cages outside their windows to give a little extra space. Now these cages have often turned into half a room. Inside they can be quite pleasant, if somewhat cramped - at least nowadays there's usually only one family. But the cooperatively owned parts of the buildings are usually dank and run down. The stairwells, for example, rarely even have a light bulb. When I asked a colleague of mine who lives in one of these buildings why they don't even replace the light bulbs, she replied that the bulbs would just be stolen for people's own apartments. Nobody is willing to pay for a coat of paint, etc. However, I have seen people on the roofs keeping the gutters clear of debris. Apparently they do want to keep the water out!

I think this tells something about the individualism that has run rampant in the wake of communism. Cooperative organisations have lost the trust of the population to a massive extent and people won't pay to support them. I guess trust in such organisations will come back in time, when people start to become affluent enough that stealing a light bulb doesn't seem worth the effort, or when the buildings start falling down around their ears... But by that time they will come about by demand, not imposed from the top.

Hoa Quynh

I've spent quite a lot of my life in Vietnam over the past 15 years. I have hundreds of photos and I had the idea of posting one of them every day (or almost every day). Let's see how it goes.

The first one is a Quynh flower (hoa quynh). This one was given to me by a friend who grows them in his garden. They have a wonderful perfume and they only flower at night - the flowers never surviving for more than a few hours. This night we sat around the dining table and watched it opening, then he gave it to me to take home. Another very odd thing about this flower is that it grows directly out of the 'leaf' of the plant which, I guess, is a succulent of some sort. I'm no botanist.