My Protanopic Life

So there I was, back in the bathtub in my room at the Chains First Eden Hotel in Hanoi Vietnam. I was drinking a Tiger beer and had just used up all the hot water washing away the sweat from a long day of hiking and boating in Ha Long Bay. The photographs from the last 24 hours were importing from my D300 into LR2 and were instantly being backed up to my external hard disk where they would be safe in the event that my laptop got stolen.

The hotel room was different from my other one which was directly across the hall. That one had a view of the downtown park out its window. The window here could be opened about 2 inches before it hit a hot water pipe. I guessed I wouldn't be getting anything like the sunrise awakening I got today on the 5th floor of the Bach Dang.

This morning when I woke up there was sand and a bunch of rocks where there used to be water, and I remembered that we were on the Pacific Ocean. The tide had gone out. I got ready, went downstairs and ate my breakfast with the parisian couple, caught up on some online stuff and then we headed off for the boat. On the way I saw an image of a bay with a speed boat circling another boat. A minute later I saw that same bay and the same speed boat circling two rocks sticking up from the water where the 2nd boat had been. I wondered why on earth in a place with such blatant and obvious beauty did somebody feel the need to embellish with a composited image. Advertising spits in the face of true beauty.

As we were going to be outside all day long I put on a bunch of sun screen, and I managed to find and buy a hat with the bartering help of one of the VN mothers who is on my tour. I got a good price on it, something like $2. This is especially nice because when I was shopping with Tien for hats I couldn't find one that fit, and this one fits perfectly. It is emblazoned with the Vietnamese flag and the name of the country, my first souvenir and a functional one at that.

When I got on the boat I found the tour guide and got down to business. I was in debt to him a healthy 5,131,000 and had to come up with the money in the next day. I forked over 4 millions on the spot and told him I'd get the rest to him later. I thought about "Coming to America."

We headed out across the wide bay on a junker style boat, an open upper deck and a covered gallery below, no handrails on the front end by the stairs and one mast that is clearly not used for sails. The sky was hazy and provided a diffused shield from the sunlight, which was very nice. Unfortunately as soon as I noticed this it went away and we were attacked by direct sun rays.

Everybody began taking photos on the upper deck even though the cliffs were still a few miles away. It continued, however, until the cliffs were right there, and then it wasn't so ridiculous. The cliffs are great... they're strange. They remind me of the cliffs by my house in Almont, except completely overgrown and with an ocean at the bottom. They were immediately impressive and I can see exactly why this place is being nominated for one of the 7 natural wonders of the world.

There were little groups of boats and floating houses that were tied together. We stopped at one that had little square openings in a floating deck, holes where different kind of sea life were swimming around. Crab, shrimp, all sorts of stuff I didn't recognize. There was a man with bloody hands chopping up a fish. There was a man pouring boiling water onto two large fish in a large pot. A man took a fish out of the water and clubbed it three times before it quit flopping around and died.

We got back on the boat and kept going. Some other folks that weren't on our tour were on the boat and one of them was a camera nut. He had an old nikon film cam with a 28mm ƒ/3.5 lens and a modest external flash. He was taking pictures of his family on the boat. We talked a little about photography through the only other english speakers on the tour. It always bugs me when people ask how much my gear cost. I always think back to that time where these two guys were trying to hustle me in SF.

We slowly circled counter clockwise and northward until we got to a place called Surprise Cave. I never found out what the surprise was, but we sure as hell found the cafe. It was really big, way bigger than I expected. The caverns stretched maybe 100m or so into the rock. It looked like something out of Half-life 2 and I kept looking around for head-crabs and corpses with spare supplies. It was the other two english speakers and I walking around and we had lost the tour but we quickly found them with the sonic assistance of a wailing spoiled brat. We talked about how awful that kid was. We agreed that he is a monster. We finished the tour of the cave and headed for the boat.

The day was incredibly hot at this point and I was pretty much showering in my own sweat, so I bought a cold drink off a vendor and took it back to the boat. As we pulled out of the dock we talked about weather, hot and cold. The girl was talking about how cold NYC was on new years. I told her that if she had the right clothes she'd be almost fine with the cold. She said that even with the right clothes her face would still be cold. I told her that there's no cold a bottle of whiskey can't help you withstand. She said that she doesn't drink. She was wearing a t-shirt that said "just add cocktails."

Next stop was a man-made beach. There's no natural sand in Ha Long bay so they had to bring in sand from other places. Since the waves are so small I imagine they don't have to refill the sand on the beach very often. It was a nice beach and we spent an hour on the island. I climbed up to the top of the precipice and took a bunch of photos. I was kicking myself for not bringing my tilt/shift lens with me. It was too heavy to bring, but the views from the top of this place would've been ƒ *amazing* in TS. I will just have to come back again.

Ice cream was never so good. I sat at the bottom of the cliff in the shade of a hut and ate an ice cream cone while the sweat shower I had taken on my way up the mountain evaporated. I looked at the ticket for the tour and saw that it cost 40,000 dong. That's about $2.50. The relativity of wealth is staggering.

We headed back to shore, got on the bus and started driving.

I saw a girl on a bicycle talking on her cell phone while the girl on the back held a parasol above their heads. I saw this again a few hours later.

I saw four adults on a 110 cc scooter.

I saw a man on a bicycle with a stack little cages with colorful birds inside.

I saw a little girl sitting in front of her dad on the scooter, sleeping with her head on the dials.

I saw cows grazing in a cemetery.

I saw a woman on the sidewalk cutting a block of ice with a table saw.

Judging by the commonality of models, the Honda Wave 110 is the most reliable scooter.

We stopped at a little pottery place where girls were hand making and hand painting pots. They made all sorts of clay things, from lions to ducks to cups to chopsticks to pots to vases. They were pretty girls, quiet and attentive to their work. It was amazing to see them so smoothly stroke out the designs they were doing. I thought that they could make much more money being artists in America. They asked me to exchange $10 for them, so I gave them a good deal at 100,000 dong. They deserved it, I wasn't going to buy any of that novelty stuff anyway, even if it was skillfully made by hand.

We continued driving. Vietnam countryside is almost entirely rice paddies. Fields and fields of beautiful green rice with roads running through them. The people here are real farmers. They don't just drive farm equipment, they do the farming. They walk out in that field and cut that rice by hand. They wrap it into a bushel by hand, pile it into a package and wrap it by hand, then put it on a bicycle and ride it back to town where they they do whatever it is that they do to make it into small grains, and then they sweep it up and put it in bags. They also burn a lot of stuff, I don't know what that's all about but there were fires and smoke everywhere.

Seeing these fields I was reminded of the drive between Colorado and Texas, which I've done more times than I can count. I used to hate that drive, and I wonder how bad it would be right now because I don't get tired of staring out the window at rice paddies, listening to music on my iPod. I'm sure I will though.

In America, homeless people gather under bridges. In Vietnam, everybody does. A bridge provides shade from the sun, and you will see people selling drinks, bread, pho, anything you can imagine under a bridge in the middle of the country.

I saw a circle of houses around a large depression, a hole in the earth that had a pond in the bottom of it. I wondered if it was a bomb crater from the war.

We stopped for dinner and even though it was nearly sunset, it was blazing hot. So hot that as soon as somebody put ice in my glass it immediately started spinning around as it melted. It was gone before I had finished my first glass of tea. My second glass was warm. The meal was good though. I don't know why they have to serve fish with the head still attached. Everything I chose to ate was good, right up until the end. There was a soup which I later found out was spinach and crab meat soup, but when I tasted it I could've sworn it was dirt soup. It was absolutely terrible. It literally tasted like eating dirt, and I do know this from experience because one time when I was running from the police I tripped on a fence and ate a mouthful of dirt, then just lay there still in the field hoping they wouldn't see me, so I got a good long taste of dirt. This soup tasted exactly like that, except it was liquid.

I excused myself and went outside to play with the nicer kids. I had brought my hacky sack and tried to teach them to play. The boy picked it up quickly, but the girl fell into the problem of trying to kick too high. I couldn't get her to kick low, and her brother kept treating it like it was a full contact sport so she soon left. The father of the brat came over and he, another guy and I had a good game and all ended up once again showered in sweat. We piled back into the van and headed back to Hanoi.

Because there are so many scooters in Vietnam there are also a lot of helmets. People express theirself through their choice of helmet. Some helmets look like baseball caps. Some look like cowboy hats. Some look like military hats. Some look like girly sun hats. They have some pretty rad helmets here. I'm pretty sure they're not DOT approved though so I'm not going to bother buying one.

We made it back to the hotel and I made it to my room, which brings us to now. I'm sitting on the floor, a single protected wifi signal within sight, a little bit of beer left in the can, wondering once again if I should go out and make the best of Hanoi.

This is the same problem I've run into in America. Do you leave your comfy bubble where you can simply be lazy and go out into the big bad world and experience something exciting, or do you stay indoors where you're safe and cozy? Tonight, I'm not sure... I may stay in and develop the 300 or so photos I took today. Bleh, never enough time, even on vacation, if that's what this is.