What do you do after spending 14 plus months
renovating/reconstructing/rebuilding your house? I should mention that we house-hopped the entire time – 5 months with one friend, 5 months with another, 3 months with another, 2 weeks house sitting in an air stream, 3 weeks with my dad who lives an hour away.
I know, I know…CRAZY.
There is so much I would do differently now that I’m on the other end, so much. Even down to the trip we took after we moved back into the house.
“Relaxing trip to Vietnam” is what were we thinking. What we really needed was a few weeks in the Yucatan, swimming and sipping margaritas on the beach. What we did was an adventure trip covering the breadth of the developing country of Vietnam.
What was the thinking behind this? Well, it went like this:
Both my partner and I have traveled extensively; between the two of us, we have covered somewhere around sixty different countries. We both wanted a location we’d never visited before (this was tough…think Nepal,Antarctica)…plus it needed to be affordable. Scratch Australia, New Zealand, China, then we thought Southeast Asia. Not enough time to get to Laos and Cambodia; Thailand maybe too touristy…we landed upon Vietnam. Totally affordable, beautiful and the food culture there…AMAZING.
It was all that, truly, but from the minute our feet touched land in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City),it was an over-stimulated, multitasked, completely scattered journey.
Vietnam has to have one of the most visual cultures I have ever photographed, right up there with the old City in Delhi.
Life in that country is truly lived on the streets
and the people…such amazing faces, such beauty. The food possibilities there are endless, endless. All the food stalls on the streets are present from the north in Hanoi to Da Lat in the mountains and Nha Trang on the coast all the way to the south in Ho Chi Minh City. These street foods can reveal so much about the history and the culture of this beautiful country. It was like photographing a circus, the Super Bowl and a food festival all at the same time.
Try doing that for two weeks. I needed a vacation from my vacation.
Above are some of my favorite images from the trip. I tried to limit the number of photographs I posted, here’s where a good photo editor goes a long way, but honestly it’s Vietnam…seriously, you can’t show that country in a few photographs…
