Author: Steve Barru

Photographer, bookworm, traveler, born in the United States in 1949, left the United States in 1987, spent years in China, settled in Vietnam in 2016.

Raw Rainy Day Morning, Tokyo

My Vietnam Airlines flight to Tokyo (Narita) left Da Nang at just past midnight on 8 October and arrived at 7:30 the same morning. There is a two hour time difference between Japan and Vietnam; flight time was roughly five and a half hours. Narita is some distance from Tokyo, and there are a number of options for covering the distance. Taxi or car service would have busted my trip budget before I checked into my hotel, so they were out. My choices boiled down to an express train taking 50 minutes for around $20 or a limited express train (i.e., a train that makes several fewer stops than a local train) taking about an hour and fifteen minutes and costing about $7.

I opted for the $7 ride, first because I am cheap about expenses like this, and second, during a trip to Japan I would rather spend my money on sashimi than spending an additional $13 to save 25 to 30 minutes on a train ride. A third not unimportant consideration: Whichever train I chose, I would be arriving at my destination in Tokyo a bit before 10:30am and check-in time at my hotel was 3pm. Three o’clock? A bit late in the day for a check-in time, don’t you think? But all of the three hotels I booked in Japan had check-in at 3pm and check-out at 10am. And the place in Tokyo would not cut me even a little slack. Four and a half hours wandering around the hotel’s neighborhood on a couple hours of sleep after an all-night plane ride made for one grumpy curmudgeon by the time 3pm rolled around.

By the way, have I mentioned it was raining? I have lived almost 35 years in East and Southeast Asia, and this was my first visit to Japan. Rain on the first day of that long-awaited visit was definitely not on my wish list. It was not a hard driving rain, but it was hard enough that I used an umbrella, among various reasons, because I didn’t want my new, well-engineered, expensive, water-resistant but not waterproof camera directly exposed to the rain as I walked around waiting for check-in time for my hotel room to roll around. And just to dot this particular “i”, holding a camera and composing a photo while juggling an umbrella is not really my idea of a good time. Grumpy curmudgeon indeed.

It rained on my second day in Tokyo as well. Though after that, with the exception of a bit of drizzle in Kyoto, the weather for my remaining 13 days in Japan was lovely.

Fiery Sunset, Hoi An, Vietnam

Hoi An was treated to a fiery, magnificent sunset last night. The brilliant colors of this sunset may just be serendipity for those of us who got to watch, or they may be a warning announcing the arrival of tropical storm Trami, which is somewhere in the East Sea heading for central Vietnam. Generally speaking, I am not particularly interested in weather and am not fluent in weather folklore, so I cannot say one way or the other. The exception to my general rule of being uninterested in weather is when big weather events are headed my way. And with top wind speeds well over 100 kph and a deluge of rain on offer, Trami qualifies as a big weather event. Being in the path of such a storm gets me interested, in this case, interested enough to download the Windy app so I can track Trami’s movements. From the looks of things, the center of the storm with its destructive high winds and rain will make landfall quite a distance north of Hoi An on Saturday 26 October. Here we are almost certain to get bucket loads of rain over several days – after all this is the rainy season in central Vietnam – but with some good luck we will avoid Trami’s howling winds and the damage they cause. Or maybe we won’t. One report in a Vietnamese publication suggests the storm will turn south after making landfall. At that point it would be headed towards Da Nang and Hoi An. Just have to wait and see. In anticipation, I did a lot of food shopping yesterday.

As some of you know, I just returned from a couple of weeks in Japan. I have loads of photos from the trip, and had planned to get started processing and posting yesterday, my first full day back in Vietnam. That plan was derailed by a ten hour power outage, during which time a crew of a dozen or more guys in orange suits worked on the big power box at the end of my street. Said power box has been acting up for a couple of months now with several outages of short durations, and hopefully the extensive refit it got yesterday has put recent problems to rest. I can at least hope the repairs give me a better chance of having power during the storm. Whatever, I will get started with the Japan photos in the next day or so.

Untangling the Nets, Phan Thiết

Along a street near the big Phan Thiết fish market, a group of mostly men were at work untangling the nets used to catch the fish. These days, no natural fibers in sight – the nets are made of a thread-fine synthetic of some kind. After watching for about 10 seconds, I realized I had no clue how these people went about sorting out and making sense of the huge piles of netting they were working with. Better them than me. I would go off the rails completely in a matter of minutes trying to untangle all those tiny threads.

The Fish Market at Phan Thiết

Phan Thiết, a city of more than 200,000 people, lies on the coast of the East Sea about 165km east of Saigon. For ten or twelve km on either side of its urban center, large areas administered by Phan Thiết stretch along the coast. To the east is Mũi Né, a well-known tourist destination drawing both Vietnamese and international visitors to its beaches, sand dunes and recreational activities.

Phan Thiết has a large fishing fleet and a wholesale fish market that sells the fleet’s daily catch early in the morning pretty much every day. It seemed worthwhile to visit the market with cameras, so my Ke Ga host, Mark, and I got ourselves up and on the road to Phan Thiết by 6am. The market was still active when we arrived around 7am, though there were already signs of people getting ready to pack up and go home.

No shortage of hairy eyeballs targeting the guy with the camera.

This guy gave life to the expression “built like a brick shithouse.” He did not have a warm, friendly look on his face, so I decided a profile shot was the better part of valor.

The market was definitely the place to go in Phan Thiết for fashion statements.

It’s a long, early morning at the market.

Fishing Boats in Early Sun, Kê Gà

There is a fish market that gets going in the pre-dawn every morning in Kê Gà village. I presume the boats in this photo are back from a night of fishing in waters near the coast. As far as I know, Vietnam does not have any of the huge factory-type fishing boats that put to sea from Japan and a number of other countries, but there are some larger Vietnamese boats that operate in deep water for days at a time. Smaller boats like these and the ones I see in Hoi An stay closer to home.

Fishing Boats on the Beach, Kê Gà

I went recently to visit my friends Mark and Phoung who live in the seaside village of Kê Gà about 150 km east of Saigon. The trip by mini-bus from Saigon took around three and a half hours, a good part of which was spent crawling through the traffic generated by Saigon’s vast urban sprawl to get to a new expressway that took me most of the rest of the way. Kê Gà, itself, is a quiet place with residents depending mostly on fishing in the East Sea and the raising of dragon fruit for their livelihoods. The center of town consists of a restaurant or two, a small sample of Vietnam’s ubiquitous noodle shops, and several coffee shops. A number of homestays and a few proper hotels – though none of the big resort variety – are located along the beach or on the highway that runs through town hugging the coast. Visitors it seems are mostly Vietnamese escaping Saigon for a few days of relaxation. Non-Vietnamese faces were few and far between, at least during my stay. Local beaches are pleasant enough, but definitely not of the tropical paradise variety.

To determine how far off the beaten track for foreigners a place is, like many of our kind, I consider the availability of imported Western foods in the area. Mark uses olive oil as representative of all imported foods when making his calculations, and that makes perfect sense to me. After all, you have to draw the line somewhere and being able to buy olive oil seems as reasonable a place as any. In any case, the nearest olive oil to Kê Gà is in a Korean big-box chain store called Lotte located in the small city of Phan Thiết about 45 minutes down the road from Kê Gà. So when you just cannot take another day of steamed rice or bun, you have to plan a drive to get the makings of that eggplant parmesan with penne you are craving.

On the plus side, if you think being out of the house at 8:30 pm constitutes a late night – and I do – then you are almost sure to like Kê Gà.

Kê Gà’s fishing fleet is anchored off shore along various stretches of beach. I presume the covered boats here are also fishing boats or serve the larger, anchored fishing boats in some way, but I do not know their function. That is Kê Gà light house in the background.