Exploring

Another day of illness, another day spent house-bound and trying to work. An achievement today has been that I have updated my gallery for the first time since November with photos from the past few months, primarily from my journey up and down Vietnam with Chris and my visit to the Angkor temples, both of which took place in December. I try to be very selective with the photographs I add to the gallery as it is a way for me to work my way through my favourite photographs from my travels in the hope that by the end of my time here I will have fifty photographs ready for my presentation evening in August. I noticed that I have been using my camera less and less in my daily activities and I will have to reverse that trend as it is the best way for me to capture the realities of life here, and perhaps make for some useful and interesting photography.

On days such as today, when I am home alone and working on my project, I tend to go out for a walk in the early evening, when the weather is comfortable and the sun has not yet set. But as my neighbourhood is quite small and boxed in by main roads, I find myself treading the same ground. Today I took to Jessica's bike and explored a little further afield, crossing a main road to reach another neighbourhood similar to my own. The road led me to the river bank and all of a sudden, with the main road behind me and few people around, it was unexpectedly peaceful. The setting sun was reflected in the water and I reminded myself again that I must carry my camera around with me. Along the bank a new housing estate was in construction- on one side of the road the pearly white and uniform detached houses were nearly complete; on the other, they were not yet plastered and were an unwelcoming brown-grey, the skeletons of their brothers on the other side.

Around this area there is a lot of empty, overgrown land, some of it in huge areas, and in other places in gaps between a row of houses where nothing has been built yet. Some of this land is reclaimed by local Vietnamese people who appear to have taken the space for private allotments. In fact, near my house is a derelict patch of land such as this, where a woman has claimed a modest vegetable patch and secured a bamboo fence around it. I have seen her before, hunched over and beneath a conical hat, tending to the land. I'm not sure where she comes from; no doubt she doesn't live here. Perhaps she travels here from over the river, or she could be the wife of one of the construction workers in the area. A new block of flats is being built here; a recently completed one is beginning to acquire residents. I'm sure that in five or ten years much more of the abandoned land in the neighbourhood will have been consumed by new housing and apartment blocks as rural-urban migration continues and the affluent middle-class of the city swells. It is remarkable to consider, when walking or cycling around the blocks, that none of this would have been here thirty years ago, when the newly re-unified, post-war country was crippled by inflation and a backward, collapsing economy. So much has changed in that time. Such is the subject of the book I have been reading, Vietnam: Rising Dragon, and which I hope to have written a review of within the next few days.

I really enjoyed my cycle ride and my exploration of new territory. I am often happiest when on a bicycle (or the back of a motorbike). It's really the simple pleasures in life that are the most rewarding.