Doorways of Vietnam Gallery

Here’s a new set of photos that I took while traveling around Vietnam.  A collection of doorways, windows, and other things I found on and around old houses and pagodas in Laos and Vietnam.

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A girl covered in white powder and coloring during the Lao New Year celebrations

A couple of weeks back I went to Luang Prabang in Laos for the Lao New Year celebrations. If you’ve ever heard of Songkran in Thailand, it’s really similar to that. Traditionally all the Buddha statues and furnishings would be taken out of the temples and washed by the community during ceremonies and parades. Young people would also wash their elders hands in a symbolic show of respect. Nowadays it’s become a tourist attraction, more noticeably recognized for crowds of people standing in the street flinging water at everybody, often with food coloring mixed in, and also people rubbing and throwing something like talcum powder all over each other, and rubbing pot grease on each other’s faces. The Lao New Year festivities are far more relaxed and low-key than in Thailand, however they can still get a little hectic. There’s a big parade with hundreds of kids dressed up in traditional outfits, and everybody shares food and alcohol with everybody else. If you’ve never done it before, especially if you’re young, it’s a blast and an experience you’ll never forget. If you’re closer to 40 than you are to 20, sober, carrying several thousand dollars worth of equipment and trying to work it’s not so much fun.

This is what it looks like when a guy in a truck throws a bucket of water on your camera

April is a terrible month to shoot in Laos, it’s usually very hazy, hot as a furnace, at least this year it was raining intermittently, and when there was direct sunlight the light was so hard that it was even more difficult to work with. Now imagine my anxiety when somebody has thrown a bucket of water on my camera just moments after it got a fistful of mysterious white powder thrown on it, and I’m sitting there watching something that like looks like dough clump up and drip off of it. I must say, the experience was more work than it was play, but I got lots of material I’m really happy with, and that’s all that matters. I put up a new gallery for Lao New Year on my Laos Photo Library site. Go check it out.

After a week in Luang Prabang and another week working with my photos and working my day job I took a bit of time to wind down, and now it’s a four-day holiday here in Vietnam. Under normal circumstances you’d find me off somewhere else, but I’m going to take some time to work more locally and get some good Saigon material, and work more on marketing. While going through my material from the last 6 months or so I realized I’ve got a really nice set of shots of windows and doors, so I put together a new gallery of doors, windows, and assorted decorations on old houses and pagodas in Laos and Vietnam. For the near future I’ll probably be making shorter posts and adding more galleries of stuff I get around Saigon. So check back soon, I’ll make announcements for new galleries and other stuff I post!

A procession of people coming to pay their respects to King Hung Vuong

Saturday morning I woke up just before dawn.  The bed in my hotel room was right next to the window, so why I’ll was still laying there I leaned over and pulled the curtains aside to take a peek outside.  Thank God, I wasn’t disappointed in what I saw.  Clear blue skies, with strands of thin, wispy clouds, illuminated bright pink in the early morning light.  My friend was already getting dressed to go outside and shoot some stuff down at Xuan Huong Lake.  I decided to get another hour of sleep or so myself, figuring I’d be better off making sure I was well-rested before going to the festival.  After falling back asleep and then waking up I phoned my friend to find out where he was, and headed down to meet him for a coffee in the morning.

Dalat is a coffee town, and I’m a coffee guy.  Dalat was considered a hill station getaway during the French colonial days, and they left behind two pleasant legacies:  beautiful architecture and coffee plantations.  If you’re not hip to Vietnamese coffee yet, you  should be.  I’ve done a lot of traveling and I’ve drank a lot of coffee, but I’ve yet to find anywhere that has as tasty a cup of joe as Vietnam.  The cool, humid hills are also perfect for growing tea, and nice, fresh, hot tea is served pretty much everywhere you go.  In fact, if you order a cup of coffee, they bring you a pot of tea for free, also.  Whenever I go to Dalat I find myself starting and ending each day with coffee, tea or both, usually in some beautiful, leafy spot overlooking the town.  It’s one of the difficult parts of the job.

Tea - one of Dalat's finest products

So after a cup or 3, we hopped on our motorbike (a rental bike – the cops still have the one I rode up on) and drove about 10km out of town to Prenn waterfall, the site where the festival was taking place.  When we arrived the majority of the people were still arriving, and so we did the only sensible thing – we sat down to drink more coffee while waiting for the festivities to begin.  Buzzing from the caffeine and the collective excitement of all the festival-goers, we hiked up a large hill adjacent to the waterfall to reach the first of three pagodas which host the event.

I was not disappointed with my decision to come.  As we were reaching the first pagoda grounds we were greeted by several old men in bright yellow, blue and red traditional outfits walking down the path, and when we reached the top of the hill there was a crowd of older women dressed all in pink standing at the pagoda doors, holding large signs and banners.  Groups of people were walking up to pray and offer incense.  Many younger men were dressed in matching shirts, pants and hats made of red and yellow satin, and the young women were wearing thick black bands around their foreheads and beautiful patchwork dresses of many different colors.  The entire procession of people traveled from one pagoda down to a second, and finally to a third, praying and performing rituals at each one.

Old guys I met on the path

The third pagoda was where the party really started.  After the older people and the monks had finished all their ceremonies the games started.  Under a great big tarp they played a game of “human chess”, where two teams stood facing each other, each person wearing a hat with a Chinese symbol on it to signify their rank.  Older men actually sat playing on a chess board, while a guy with a megaphone shouted out their moves to the people standing on the human chess board.  Off in another direction, a huge wooden swing stood, designed for two people to stand on together, shifting their weight back and forth to get moving, trying to go as high as possible.  There were dancing games where couples would have to dance and jump to avoid having their feet smashed by bamboo poles that other people sitting on the ground were rhythmically smacking together and pulling apart, and another odd game where two boys carried a large clay pot with a fire underneath it between them on two poles, while a girl followed them around trying to shove sticks into the fire to keep the flames from dying out.  In the pots was cooking rice, and after 30 minutes or so all of them had to stop so a man could come and taste their rice.  The group with the tastiest, best cooked rice won.

The weird walking/cooking rice game

Before Noon I was ready to go.  Sure, I could have stuck around and worked all afternoon.  But my goal had been to get a set of really nice portraits of men and women, old and young, dressed in brightly colored traditional clothing.  Mission accomplished.  At that point, I couldn’t have cared less if it had rained for the next two days straight, if it was cold, nasty, whatever.  I got what I had came for, and that made it all worthwhile.  Forget it if it was cloudy for the rest of the day.

And it was cloudy for the rest of the day!  We still drove around, checking out the countryside and looking for more shots.  But it was a leisurely, relaxing afternoon, and the clouds actually did break up in the late afternoon just enough to get a few shots.  I’ve been working on getting shots of tree trunks recently.  On my Tay Ninh trip entry I posted a picture of oil palm trunks, and I worked on getting a few more shots on the Saturday afternoon in Dalat.  How do you take a good, interesting, eye-catching picture of tree trunks?  If you’ve never tried it, give it a shot.  It’s not easy.   I had to sit down and drink more coffee at a small, mountain-top café to work at it.  As the sun was about to go down we headed to an overlook above the town wher I got a few more good shots (see the first photo in Part 1 of this story), and then we called it a day.

Trying to get good tree shots...

The night was ridiculous.  I never thought of eating seafood in this mountain town, but there was a little street restaurant near our hotel and we decided to check it out.  Simply stated, I’ve never been so stuff with shellfish in my entire life.  We ate 13 dishes between the 2 of us, and you can see the wreckage from the photo above.  Yes, only two of us did that.  I’m a pig.  Don’t bother telling me, I already know.  It was just so damn good.  I could have eaten more, but I was already embarrassed by the pile of empty plates mounding up at our feet.  When the dinner was over I put them all back on the table for a photo op.  I think we ate more than the 3 tables closest to us combined.

Seafood dinner aftermath

The second morning was spent split between driving my mate around and looking for stuff he can use in travel brochures, and hanging out at the “crazy house”.  A daughter of one of Vietnam’s revolutionary heroes was apparently an architecture major, and she decided she was going to build a huge house that blended nature and architecture.  Well, the woman is a bit nuts, and as a result, so was her “eco-house”, or whatever the hell it’s supposed to be.  The place really needs to be seen to be fully appreciated.

"Modern" architecture at the Dalat Crazy House

The hallways are these winding staircase affairs, twisting and turning in and out of multiple buildings, leading to oddly-shaped rooms that usually contain large statues of strangely anthropomorphic animals.  The two meter tall kangaroo with red Christmas lights for eyes was a personal favorite of mine…  A few of the buildings are still unfinished, and a sign outside stated that she hopes to have it completed by the end of 2010.  For $1, it was totally worth the trip.

Crazy stairs at the Crazy House

Apparently they rent out the rooms to tourists, also – $25 for a single, $35 for a double.  However, tours start at 7am, so I would only suggest renting one of the rooms there if you intend to be awake, showered, and out the front door before 7 o’clock.

One of the luxurious suites available at the Crazy House

My friend needed some nice shots of garden restaurants and 5 star hotels, so we stopped off at a gorgeous restaurant overlooking the lake for a couple of coffees, and then headed down to an old 5 star French hotel with huge grounds and enjoyed a glass of wine.  He asked if he could use my wide-angle lens for a while, then he ran off shooting the hotel, and I just sat there enjoying the cool weather, the nice breeze, and my nice glass of red.  From there, off to a big lunch, and that was the weekend.  Clouds rolled in that afternoon, and they didn’t go away.  I spent some time in the market buying fruit for friends back in Saigon, and after another couple of coffees around town we settled down to an interesting dinner of deer, ostrich and porcupine.  Yes, the porcupine was delicious.  Seriously.  I was quite surprised.  It went down great with the beer, and stuffed to the gills I retired early and slept until 5am, when we had to get up to get ready for our bus ride back to Saigon.

And the trip basically ended as bad as it started.  I felt queasy from the moment I woke up, and it didn’t get any better.  Our bus driver was far more cautious and respectful than the guy we had coming in, but it didn’t matter. By the time we arrived in Saigon I figured I must have looked completely green, and I spent the rest of the day in bed sick as a dog.  I had to call in to my night job and miss another shift, and that wasn’t even the worst of it.  My friend was supposed to loan me another body to shoot with at Lao New Year so I wouldn’t have to worry about changing from a wide-angle to a portrait lens during the water-throwing madness that takes place there, and in my sickened state I completely forgot to contact him.

And again, that wasn’t the worst part – my buddy left the next day for Nha Trang, and wouldn’t be returning for a week.  I received a call from him after he had been in Nha Trang all day, and he was standing on the beach with his camera in his hand – and my wide-angle lens.  I never got it back from him after he shot the hotel in Dalat.  After a few days in Dalat I had no motorbike, no wide-angle lens, and was sick hell.  But I got my portraits!  And I have a feeling everything will work out for my trip to Luang Prabang.

The view from above Dalat - when the weather is nice

So, another weekend, another trip.  Saturday was the anniversary of the death of King Hung Vuong in Vietnam, and it’s a public holiday here.  Several years ago I took a short trip to Dalat on the same occasion, but at the time I had no clue it was a special day at all, and basically through dumb luck I stumbled upon a large festival commemorating the event at a set of 3 pagodas located on a hill above Prenn waterfall, about 10 kilometers outside of the town.  I wasn’t shooting seriously at the time, but I have vivid memories of large amounts of people, young and old, participating in the celebrations dressed in multi-colored traditional costumes, and participating in various rituals and public games.  So, when I found out that the holiday was coming up, I immediately decided that I wanted to drive up there and get a great set of colorful portraits to add to the stock I’m building at the moment.  The decision was made all the easier by the fact that April is the hottest month of the year in Saigon. Living in Saigon feels like living in a hot armpit just about now, and Dalat is renowned for being a cool, breezy, hilltop getaway town.  What better place to spend a few days working… and relaxing?

I asked a good friend if he wanted to go up with me for the weekend, and after debating for not very long he decided he could get some material there as well, and would also enjoy the break from the city heat.  So 5am on Friday morning I picked him up and we set off east out of the city.

Dalat - Vietnamese hill town with a French flavor

The first place you hit outside of Saigon is the city of Bien Hoa in Dong Nai province.  I absolutely hate driving through Bien Hoa.  It’s always terrible.  The highway runs straight through the center of the city, and the traffic slows down and becomes a chaotic, dirty, stinky mess.  Big, filthy, rattling trucks jostle for position with smaller delivery vehicles, taxis and three-wheeled carts while thousands of people on motorbikes weave and wind their way through them.  Add to this that there are markets right along the highway with people standing out in the road, and all along the length of the town people run in and out of the traffic and go sprinting across the highway, hopping over the concrete dividers to get to the other side.  God forbid you get into town when the schools are opening or letting out, because then you get to add hundreds of kids in uniforms and “ao dai” on bicycle and on foot running in and out of the street and clustering along the edges of the road.  By the time I get out of Bien Hoa I’m always hot and stressed out, with my eyes stinging from the dust and exhaust and about a centimeter of filth on my face and hands.  This time I figured that leaving so early would eliminate a lot of the craziness on the road, and at first it seemed like we would get through the city with a minimum of agony.  But then, as we reached the end of the town all the students poured out onto to the highway to go to school.  15 minutes earlier and we would have missed it completely.

We stopped for the obligatory breakfast and coffee break after slogging our way through Bien Hoa, and then we finally made our way through Trang Bom, the last town before the turn-off to Dalat.  As we were making the turn north towards Dalat I was joking to my friend… “We have it too easy here, you know?  Two weekends ago when I went to Tay Ninh I got stopped for speeding by two cops with new radar guns.  When they realized I was foreign they figured I couldn’t speak Vietnamese and just let me go.  If I were a local I’d have been paying a fine.  Anyhow, how am I supposed to know what the speed limit is?  There are no signs!”

This is true.  There are no speed limit signs.  Maybe there are specific national laws regarding speed limits through rural and populated areas. How am I supposed to know?  I don’t even have a license in Vietnam…

View from the bridge over Tri An Lake, near Dinh Quan village

About 30km or so north of Trang Bom the highway crosses a thin eastern arm of Ho Tri An, a large lake in the hills, formed by a hydroelectric dam on the west side of Dong Nai province.  The bridge there dissects a small community of floating houses in the lake, and we decided to stop and get some shots from over the water.  Standing there, enjoying the cool morning breeze and feeling the stress start to lift after getting off the main highway I got my first good shot of the weekend.  I turned to my friend and said “It’s going to be a great weekend, man…  we’re having a good day already!”

After setting off again we reached the town of Dinh Quan.  The highway leading into the town heads over a low ridge with rice fields and hamlets in it, stretching off towards gently rolling hills in the distance, and at this time of day the sun was hanging just above them.  The highway hugs some low, leafy cliffs on the left hand side and then turns into the village and past busy morning markets.  Up in the distance is a big, white Buddha statue on top of a small peak, with a scenic rock garden spreading out below it.  A smile forms on my face as I debate stopping there, and then…

Stop.  There’s a tan-uniformed cop in the road angrily waving a baton at me, telling me to pull over.  I give him a confused look – this time not feigning foreign idiocy, but seriously not understanding why I was being pulled over.  The cop walks up to me and says “Please sir, turn off moto-bye.  You go too fast – here can only go 40kph, you going 55kph.”  Not exactly perfect English, but far better than I expected.  As switch the bike off he says “I need see your driver card, your insurance card, your bike number card”

The Big Buddha - taken on a previous trip when I didn't lose my bike.

Insurance?  What?!  Insurance has never been required in Vietnam!  Well, guess what!  April Fool’s!  From the 1st of April all bikes on the street were required to have insurance.  For me, this is made all the worse by the fact that I DID have insurance, but it had just expired and I hadn’t bothered to renew it yet.  And, as I mentioned earlier, I seriously have no idea how I’m supposed to know what the speed limits are.  Before they acquired these new radar guns it was never an issue.

Speeding, no license, no registration, and no insurance.  Do you think I walked away with my motorbike?  Well, I certainly did walk away, but with three sheets of police paperwork instead of my bike.  They confiscated my bike for 7 days and sent me on my way, 120km from home.  I tried begging and pleading with the officer, telling him how far from home I was, explaining I need my bike for work next week, and finally telling him that next weekend I’ll be leaving for Laos and won’t be able to come and get my bike.  He smiled, nodded his head, and said “you drive with no driver card…  you lose moto-bye one week”.

Yep.  The trip is off to a great start.

My buddy and I stopped to get a coffee while I steamed and spat about getting pulled over by one of the few honest cops I’ve ever met in Vietnam.  But how pissed off can I really be?  It was my fault.  And if I’d been in the USA I probably would have had to call somebody to bail me out of jail.  After calming down a bit, we entered the worst segment of our journey – the mini-bus between Dinh Quan and Dalat.

Are you a thrill-seeker?  Do death, danger, and the feeling of imminent demise keep you coming back for more?  Does your idea of a good time involve staring death in the face, only to be miraculously snatched from it’s hands at the very last moment, and then to find yourself dangling within it’s grasp yet again?  Well, then, my friend, mini-bus travel in Vietnam is for you!  I can only describe our new-found driver as a sociopathic maniac with no regard for safety or respect for other people’s well-being, and a complete lack of understanding of cause and effect relationships – common traits on Vietnamese highways.  He seemed to drive in the oncoming lane simply as a matter of principle, veering back into our lane, barely averting disaster, while his ratty haired assistant leaned out the window and screamed mercilessly at the cyclists and pedestrians they narrowly avoiding wiping off the face of the earth again and again.  This “assistant” position is a legitimate job in Vietnam, apparently.  All psychotic bus and mini-bus drivers seem to employ somebody whose dual purpose is to smash as much human flesh as possible into a vehicle, and cuss and scream at people as they drive past.  Their mothers must be so proud.  As we careened up and down Bao Loc pass the driver insisted on screaming past trucks and buses at top speed around blind curves, while he leaned persistently on his horn.  This is why I prefer to take my own motorbike rather than public transportation.  I did my best to sleep all the way to Dalat… or keep my eyes closed at the very least.

The cloudy view that greeted us...

As the satanic death drive was heading into the final stretch before our destination, the clouds started to roll in, darkening the sky and killing the light.  After all the crap I’d gone through up to this point it was looking like I wasn’t even going to get to shoot some photos in the afternoon.  Whatever.  I was so happy to be alive when I finally got off the mini-bus at the station above the town that I didn’t even care, and I was thrilled to death to see the town of Dalat stretching down below as I took a cab down towards Xuan Huong Lake and the center of town.  Anyhow, my goal on this trip wasn’t to get town shots, it was to get portraits at the festival.  I’d have to wait until the next day to see if my bad luck was going to continue…

Main temple of the Cao Dai sect in Tay Ninh, Vietnam

Sunday morning, 5am… the alarm on my phone goes off.  I usually have an almost uncontrollable urge to destroy my cell phone when this happens.  When I was a kid I would spend summers at my grandparents’ house in Ohio.  My grandfather, a navy man in his time, used to sing this song early in the morning, often before the sun came up: “Oh how I hate to get up in the morning! Oh, how I hate to get out of bed!  One day I’ll find that dirty pup, the one that wakes the bugler up, and spend the rest of my days in bed”. It was supposed to be funny.  It was maddening.  He was lucky I loved him so much.  And that I was only 7 years old or so.

I’ve always hated early mornings, but they’re part of the job if you want to get decent photos.  But as much as I hate the first 30 minutes after getting up, I always wind up being glad I made myself get out of bed early.  And anyhow, on this day I didn’t really have any other options.  I had to get out to Tay Ninh Province before Noon in order to shoot a spread of photos for East West Magazine on the Cao Dai religious group.

I’m actually stretching the truth a bit, I could have left much later than I did, but that would have required taking the highway straight from Saigon to Tay Ninh.  Most of the route out there is busy, dusty, and not so beautiful.  However, I know the Secret Squirrel way to get there which cuts out across the western side of the city and then through a good chunk of Long An province.  This route crosses several canals and goes through a large area of rural farmland, and I knew I’d be able to take my time and get some nice shots for my blahg and have more of a story to tell.  Plus the ride would be much more pleasant and easygoing, and I’d simply enjoy myself more.

One of the numerous canals running from Long An province into Binh Chanh district in Saigon

Yeah, right.  My fond memories of a nice, uncrowded highway fronted by shady canals full of lotus blossoms next to quaint little countryside houses with old men fishing for their lunch was quickly shattered.  It’s been well over 6 months since I last went out that way, and in Vietnam these days that’s more than enough time for drastic changes to set in.  The canals along the road are all being drained and filled in with rocks and dirt and being flattened in order to widen the highway.  The result at the moment is that all through the districts of Binh Tan and Binh Chanh the roads are temporarily narrowed, and full of dump trucks parked across the lanes depositing rocks in the once-so-beautiful canals.  Buses are parked waiting to go past, and as you come around them the opposing traffic comes at you in the wrong lane, assuring that if you aren’t fully awake and caffeinated your Sunday morning will probably end with you laying on the pavement wondering how you got in an accident on this idyllic little stretch of road.

I soon began “detouring”, taking off along the other canals which cross the road, as opposed to going along it.  They’re not filling those ones in… yet!

Incense drying in the sun next to a small country road in Binh Chanh district, Saigon

Binh Tan and Binh Chanh districts are both full of incense factories, both big and small.  Every time I go out there I see slats of incense drying in the sun alongside the road.  It’s gorgeously colorful, and I always enjoying hopping off the bike and experimenting with different compositions and ideas.  You can get everything from row after row of bright yellow incense surrounded by rough, dirty, urban looking environments, to single slats of joss sticks in the sun in green, leafy, natural looking settings.  They both work for me as they convey a very different atmosphere and sense of how the stuff is produced.

The canals are very much the same.  Some areas look like black, polluted, sewage drains with dilapidated buildings of tin and particle board crowded against them and refuse scattered everywhere, while other areas have beautiful palm trees, fishing nets suspended in the air, multi-colored boats moored at little piers and quaint little houses made of thatch.  Some of the canals are unnaturally straight, stretching off into the distance, while others meander gently through the countryside, following the path of least resistance.

After a couple hours of going back and forth from the dusty trucks and insanity on the main highway and the quiet solitude of the countryside canals, I finally reached the border of Long An Province.  The traffic slows down here, the construction comes to an end (mostly) and the highway finally comes to an end.  From here it’s little twisting countryside roads until you meet up again with the main highway heading towards the Cambodian border and into Tay Ninh province.  Along the way there’s a plethora of local agricultural projects, from several different kinds of fruit orchards, to rice fields, corn fields, herb gardens, cassava plants, bamboo plantations, oil palm production, local duck breeding farms, small river fisheries…  Every season of the year offers different colors and opportunities for interesting shots.  I simply love this little part of Long An.  In fact, I love all of Long An Province.  There’s not much there in the way of tourist sites or “things to do”, but if you have a camera and like people in conical hats, boy, is it great!

A small plantation of oil palm trees in western Long An province

Another thing I enjoy about Long An is that it’s still very agrarian, and yet there’s a lot of foreign investment in industrial parks.  Alongside shiny new houses and modern-looking coffee shops you’ll find ancient tombs, quiet little roadside altars, quaint little pagodas and decaying remnants of the war.  If you keep your eyes open wide, there’s something interesting around each bend in the road.

Well, having not pushed myself to arrive early, I got to Tay Ninh in just enough time to get a hotel room, wash my face and hands, lie down for a quick 15 minute nap and get over to The Cao Dai Holy See just in time to catch the worshippers arriving for the Noon service.  There are public services at 6am, Noon, 6pm, and Midnight every day.  Cao Dai adherents are expected to attend service at least once a day, or at the very least pray at home during one of these times.  The serious guys do all four.

Shot at the end of the service from the balcony above the hall

I intended to write some funny stuff about the Cao Daiists, seeing how it’s easy to dismiss them as a weirdo cult, but in fact I’ve got a growing respect for them.  First of all, when does a “religious organization” stop being a cult and start being a religion?  If large numbers of followers is all it takes, Cao Dai qualifies.  Some estimates have 8 million followers world-wide.  It’s the third largest religion in Vietnam, with Buddhism first and Roman Catholicism second.  Cao Dai is a syncretic religion, meaning they have openly and consciously made an effort to take what they believe to be the best, most important aspects of all major religions and mixed them all together to be an all-inclusive, all-tolerant religion designed to be understandable and welcoming to all people of the world.

Freaky cultists or groovy new age spiritualists? Who cares?! They wear cool hats!

They believe that God speaks to them directly through different means, and that it was direct orders from God himself that caused the founding of the church in 1926.  At that time there were less than 300 followers, but the local populations in Tay Ninh and Long An provinces, as well as other areas of Southern Vietnam, quickly embraced the philosophy behind the religion.  Most foreign visitors, and even most Vietnamese, view Cao Dai to be a local anomaly, but a trip through the back roads of these southern provinces will produce a large number of smaller, more remote temples for the faith.

A smiling, welcoming gentleman waiting for the service to begin

The people at the temple are, for the most part, friendly and welcoming, and many English speaking followers are eager to sit down and have a chat, and are more than happy to answer any questions you might have about their faith.

A couple of the stranger facts about Cao Daiism:  They believe in saints, and their three main saints are Nguyen Binh Khiem, a Vietnamese poet, Sun Yat Sen, the leader of the Chinese revolution in the early 20th century, and the French poet Victor Hugo.  In the main foyer of the temple is a large painting of the three of them signing a pact with God.  The Cao Daiists claim that Victor Hugo and Sun Yat Sen were “disciples” of Nguyen Binh Khiem.

A high ranking member of the church, leaving the temple after the Noon service

They pray to a huge globe with a left eye painted on it, and they believe that during times of prayer God is looking at them through the eye, which causes the “light of the universe” to spill forth onto the worshippers.  As a result of this belief they never allow non-believers to stand directly in front of the altar, and there are always “guards” standing in the temple who stop people from walking into the center of the hall.  During prayer times they believe this light is so strong that it flows out of the temple and down a large open space in front of the temple, so they block the way in front of the temple with metal gates to stop people from walking in front of the building during prayer times.

The main altar - non-believers are not allowed to stand directly in front of the altar, so a straight shot isn't possible

If you want to know more about Cao Daiism, I’m writing an article for East West Magazine about the religion and the main temple that will be published in May.  There’s an online version available, so when it’s published I’ll definitely put a link on this site to the article.  In the meantime, if you’re really interested and you’re in Vietnam, take the trip out to Tay Ninh and check it out.  It’s definitely worth the trip!

Rubber Trees near Cambodia in Binh Phuoc Province, Vietnam

Have you ever wondered how rubber is made?  No?  You haven’t?  Well, I never really wondered about it much either until I realized that rubber plantations look really beautiful and are a great place to take photos.

Rubber, in case you didn’t know, is made from tree sap.  I think that chewing gum made from natural sources also has rubber sap in it, but again, I’m not positive.  The Vietnamese word for chewing gum is “keo cao su”, which literally means “rubber candy”.  So, it’s not a completely ridiculous assumption to make.

Rubber Plantation in Tay Ninh Province, Vietnam

Rubber plantations are plentiful in Southern Vietnam, and also in many areas of Cambodia and Thailand.  I’ve never seen a rubber plantation in Laos, though.  In fact, I’ve never seen one in Cambodia, either, but I’ve been told that there are extensive areas of rubber production in the eastern provinces of Mondulkiri and Rattanakiri.  That makes sense as rubber is widely grown in the Vietnamese provinces of Tay Ninh and Binh Phuoc, which are respectively near and bordering Mondulkiri.  Rubber is usually grown in areas with expansive, flat areas, however that’s not always the case.  Binh Phuoc is quite rolling and hilly, and rubber can be found across the province. Well, at least in the parts of it that I’ve been to.

A rubber plantation in Krabi Province, Thailand

The trees are tall, thin, with leafy tops, and they stink like latex.  Latex comes from rubber, so I guess that’s why.  The trees are grown in long, parallel rows, which offer great opportunities of pictures with a tunnel-like vanishing point.  These rows of trees often stretch on and on into the distance until you can’t really see where they go anymore.  The plantations are a really great place to take a girl on a quiet date for a picnic or something like that.  I mean, I’ve never actually taken a girl on a date to a rubber plantation, but the romantic in me tells me it would be cool, as long as she wasn’t allergic to latex, didn’t mind the smell of it, doesn’t mind sitting in the dirt or dead leaves with ants all over the place, or doesn’t mind getting dirt in her teeth and her eyes on the motorbike ride out there.  You may or may not want to mention to your date that condoms come from rubber trees, depending on whether or not she might think that you’re trying to say that you want to use one.  Or if she’d be interested in that at all.  I would suggest gauging whether or not she’s irritated with you for dragging her on a 2 hour motorbike ride from the city to sit around a bunch of stinky trees before making the decision.

Rubber Sap Extraction in Dong Nai Province, Vietnam

The rubber is extracted from the trees by cutting a spiral of bark about 6 inches wide out of the tree, extending down the trunk about a meter or two.  The white, smelly rubber sap slowly oozes down the lower groove in the cut on the bark, and a little spout is added at the bottom so it drips neatly down into a little ceramic bowl tied near the base of the tree.  After some time (I don’t know how long) somebody comes along and dumps all the little bowls of rubber sap into a bucket, and then takes it to a factory or something where I can only assume that they do some other stuff with it.  In Thailand I’ve seen villagers making big mats out of it that they dry in the sun and then sell on to rubber companies.  In Vietnam the plantations tend to be owned and operated by the companies themselves, and so it’s a far less common sight.  Either way, after that stage I don’t know what happens to it, other than it winds up being made into balls, tires, condoms, and probably quite a few other things.  The factories that process the rubber would probably be a hell of a lot less open to me just walking in and taking photos than the people on the plantations would be, so I’ve never really tried it yet.  Anyhow, the inside of the factory would probably be hot and ugly, and my imaginary date would definitely be pissed off if I tried to take her in there.  I figure by this time she would just want to go home and get the dead leaves out of her hair and shoes.

Cool Looking Lichen in Krabi Province, Thailand

Oh, another thing, these cool lichens grow on the side of the rubber trees and make weird little blotches and circles with neat shades of green in them.  I like those, too, so sometimes I photograph them, as you can see from the picture above.

So, now you know as much about rubber as I do!  Which isn’t very much, but it was probably more than you knew before, and anyhow you got to see some pretty pictures, so it’s probably best if you don’t complain about it.

The reservoir formed by the local hydro-elecric dam

After being back in Saigon for a couple of weeks without a single free day, it was time for a trip out of the city! I called in to work, canceled the entire weekend and Monday morning, and a good photographer friend and I decided to head out towards the northwest corner of Binh Phuoc province, along a stretch of what was once an authentic part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The first morning was unremarkable, at least as far as photos go. It was grey and overcast on the way out there, even raining heavily at times, so shooting was out of the question. Normally you’d hear me complaining about that, but I was so happy to be out of the city, and so glad the weather was cool instead of blistering hot that it didn’t matter. We took almost the entire day to get out there, stopping often to hang out/take cover in rubber plantations and at little coffee shops along the way. Roadside coffee shops in Vietnam usually have hammocks in them, so I took a couple of naps, and my friend and I chatted about food, photography, women, and all the other things that keep our minds occupied. At one point I turned to him, almost thought better of what I was going to say, and then told him “you know… I’ve had this motorbike for over a year now, and it hasn’t once had a flat tire.”

“Why the f*$@ did you have to say that to me? Don’t you know it’s just going to pop out in the middle of nowhere now?”

Well, I try not to be superstitious. I had to tell somebody sometime, no?

We finally reached our destination, a little town called “Thac Mo”, in the late afternoon. Before finding a hotel we drove around a bit, and found a road which went up to a small hydro-electric plant at a local reservoir. We got a few nice shots of a guy fishing in the reservoir before cruising off to the end of the road and finally realizing that we were in a restricted area we shouldn’t have entered in the first place. Best to head back and find a place to stay before some pissed of army guys tell us what time it is… We checked into a rather nice hotel, walked around town a bit, and had dinner and beers in the restaurant/amusement park/swimming pool across the street, and planned out our morning.

Aerial view of Thac Mo town with Ba Ra mountain

I slept a bit late the next day (6:15), but one look out the window at the little mountain in the distance with mist wrapping around it got me up and excited and I grabbed my tripod and my D3 and ran to the rooftop balcony to get some shots without even stopping to brush my teeth. After getting some nice shots there and then going to eat our breakfast, we wandered around town a bit, and came across an old US plane that was owned by the South Vietnamese Air Force that had been shot down over the province. War detritus and memorials are thick in this region due to it’s proximity to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Everything in the area is so nice and clean and the area is obviously developing at a steady pace, if you don’t pay attention it would be easy to forget that it was one of the most miserable parts of the country during the war.

Afterwards we headed up the local hill top to get a good look at the surrounding area. Western Binh Phuoc province doesn’t look anything like other parts of Vietnam I’m familiar with, the topography consists of low, rippling ridges, not high or rounded enough to be considered hills even, and the reservoir can be seen from atop the mountain, with it’s long, thin fingers sticking out and curling around the ridges in the landscape.

And old American plane used by the South Vietnamese Air Force, shot down over Binh Phuoc province

After coming down we drove to find an access road to the reservoir. Reservoirs in Vietnam are generally considered militarily strategic zones, and so not surprisingly we couldn’t find access to the waterfront, but we did find some interesting rose apple and black pepper farms where we stopped to take some shots.

"Remember, on January 4, 1975 an American bomb killed more than 300 people on this spot"

Driving around we came upon some road signs directing us to “Bu Gia Map” National Park, in a remote district called “Dak O”. After stopping again for coffee we were told by some locals that the park is very beautiful, and home to several different ethnic minorities. Enough said for me! We shot off down the road, heading 40km to a National Park neither of us had ever heard of. The first interesting spot we found, across the highway from the hydro-electric plant was a war memorial for 300 people that were killed by one bomb in January, 1975. Monuments like this are always sobering. It always strikes me the sheer numbers of people that died – basically every single town has it’s own memorial, usually with hundreds, even thousands of people’s names that died in the immediate area.

Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore...

As we traveled further and further down the road, the road deteriorated more and more. After a while we came to a sign which said “Frontier Area”. Until recently all frontier areas of Vietnam were strictly off limits to foreigners, as it usually meant that the government was still trying to secure complete control of the region and compliance of the locals. But these days things are different, and we decided to go in and explore. If we got kicked out, well, at least we tried.

And it wasn’t 10 minutes later that my back tire went flat. My friend didn’t find it too amusing at first, but I couldn’t help but laugh. We were lucky enough to be about 100 meters from a bike repair shop (they seem to be everywhere in Vietnam), and we dropped the bike off and went on a short walk while it was getting fixed up. 15 minutes and $3 later we were back on track. We made our way through the small town of Dak O, and eventually came to a fork in the road, one direction, still paved, leading up to a town called Phuoc Long, and the other fork, just a dirt track, really, heading into the National Park. We followed the paved bit up to Phuoc Long to have a look, and found that it was the end of the road. Unless you’ve ever been to one of these little frontier area towns you can’t really get a feel for what they’re like. They FEEL like a frontier. Dusty, small, slow… you feel like you’re on the edge of civilization.

After yet another coffee break we decided to head back towards the park and see what’s there. Unfortunately as we came onto the trail we could see rain clouds off in the distance traveling towards us. We decided to head in anyhow, and quickly came upon a small village of people belonging to the M’Nong ethnic group. Due to the gathering storm clouds the light was awful for shots of the village, but we did get invited into a house and get some great shots of some of the local kids.

The park, being big and wild, and having big threatening storm clouds hanging over it would have to be left for another trip. But the discovery and the trip out were great… it’s amazing to me how after spending so much time exploring southern Vietnam I can still be surprised to find places so different and new to me just a few hours outside of Saigon.

The ride back to town was beautiful and uneventful… stopped for a nap in a coffee shop in Dak O, and finally made it back around 3:30pm, tired and ready for a shower. After a delicious, beery meal we hit the sack early, and woke early the next day for our drive back.

Relief showing American soldiers being captured by NVA troops

Along the way we made two more short stops, one at a large memorial in Dong Xoai town with statues and reliefs showing soldiers and the local ethnic tribes people that helped them, and the at the end of the highway we came across a simple marker that was erected in 1975 showing where the main path of the Ho Chi Minh trail ended and dispersed into many small supply trails going down into Tay Ninh and Binh Duong provinces, and eventually down into the Mekhong Delta to support the Viet Cong.

And that wrapped up our trip along a southern stretch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Back to the city, back to the daily grind. After several months in Laos, this was the first time I was able to just go somewhere with a friend and shoot for fun instead of doing serious work. It was a short, but fun and relaxing weekend, and I’ve got ideas for a much more extended trip out there again.

Coming next: RUBBER! Oooh oooh oooh, get excited!