Jake Catlett Photography

A Weekend in Ben Tre (part 1)

New Year’s is not my favorite holiday.  It never has been.  In my experience, New Year’s Eve seems to be this holiday where every idiot under the sun figures they have an excuse to go out and be loud, drunk and obnoxious in celebration of what is really just an arbitrary date which no longer even correlates to the lunar cycle, thanks to the Gregorian calendar.  I don’t usually make special plans for NYE, and this year was no exception.  I was at home alone, and went to bed about 5 minutes after midnight.  Whoopee, it’s 2010, goodnight.

About a week before the auspicious date of January 1 arrived, however, my friend Adam invited me to go down to the Mekhong Delta for a few days with him and a group of his friends.  I hadn’t been out of the city in months, and the quiet and fresh air were sounding really, really nice, so I decided to take a couple of extra days off of work and head down there with them.  Thank God!

We set out from Saigon about 10:30AM on the morning of the 1st.  I was feeling well rested and energetic and ready to hit the road.  The same couldn’t be said for my all my traveling companions.  Being New Year’s Day it should have come as no surprise that more than a couple of people were nursing moderate-to-severe hangovers, and some lingering drunkenness was even apparent.  Cold beers were purchased and brought into the mini-van, and shortly after setting out one of the guys demanded we pull over on the side of the highway to buy some homemade rice whiskey.  I was getting a good idea of what the weekend was going to be like.  I was determined to preserve my sobriety long enough to get some decent photography done though!

The ride down was pretty uneventful, and it took us about 3 hours to reach a little hamlet called Vinh Hue in Ben Tre province, from where we would be boarding a boat to go to our bungalows.  We were dropped off in a little decaying town square with a mostly vacant market in the middle of it.  The town had a feeling of transition, like it was in the middle of being forgotten, yet still clinging to existence.  Even the old nursing station had been boarded up and forgotten, meaning the people living there now have very limited access to medical care.

As in most poor villages I’ve visited in Vietnam, the people were friendly and welcoming, and I enjoyed a slow hour wandering around, looking for interesting things to photograph and talking to the locals.

Our “taxi” finally arrived, a long, flat, slow wooden boat that was apparently going to take us to the far side of a small island in the Mekhong River.  My buddy Adam is a pretty avid photographer as well, and the two of us spent the boat ride trying to get shots of the boat driver and his 3 cute kids that came along for the ride.  These boat rides always sound like a lot of fun, but the reality usually winds up being that they’re quite loud, and you’re breathing in thick diesel fumes the whole time.  So much for enjoying the fresh air.

Also, trying to shoot in overcast weather, on a moving object with 100 speed film while your boat is going under, through and out of thick, overhanging vegetation is a bit of a pain in the ass.  It’s situations like this that I *almost* miss shooting digital.

Needless to say, I was relieved when we finally arrived at our guest house, if you can call it that.  We were situated inside of a grapefruit orchard, a series of 5 or 6 little bungalows, some with double beds inside, others with bunk beds.  We had fans and electricity in the rooms, but shared detached bathrooms.  There was a great big covered common area, with a bar, large tables, and even a TV area, built just a few meters from the banks of the Mekhong River.  It was the only accommodation on the island, and our group of friends were the only people staying there.

By the time everybody got settled into their rooms, cleaned up and ready to start drinking it was already getting to be quite late in the afternoon.  It had been a bit grey and dreary most of the day, but just about an hour before sunset the clouds broke and we started to get some sunshine.

Adam and I set off hoping to find a good spot to get some sunset photos, but only made it to the end of one dirt trail that eventually just trailed off into the brush.  No good evening shots to be had this day, but I did get one shot I really like of some backlit leaves during the last few minutes of sunlight on our side of the island.  With that, our shooting light was gone, and it was time to call it a day.  Well, we did stay up quite late, but the rest of the night was filled mostly with eating and lots and lots of drinking, and this blog is supposed to be about photography, not beer.