Saigon Cowgirls

Sad to say but women’s lib hasn’t exactly caught on in Southeast Asia. Women seem to bear the brunt of the labour.. And they’re treated a bit like a commodity, used for, among other things, driving beer sales.

Inner sanctum

My friend brought me to his wife’s village, Tinh Bien, in remote southwestern Vietnam, in An Giang province near the Cambodian border. There is a large Khmer population there. A man let us into a Khmer Bhuddist temple that featured dazzlingly colourful religious murals on every square inch of wall and ceiling.

Maggots for breakfast?

Worms for sale at a street market in the Old Quarter of Hanoi…

More Angkor

More Angkor… because, well, it’s that fucking cool. The Baphuon is a colossal pyramid structure on top of which the Khmer God-kings looked down upon their minions… The Bayon is populated by hundreds of towering stone faces that for ages have stared serenely at temple visitors from every angle. <

Angkor

At the heart of the Khmer empire lies an astounding accretion of monolithic temples. The scale of Angkor is mind-binding… It is difficult to imagine how it was accomplished. As grand as the Egyptian pyramids yet more complex and ornate, the structures are coated in bas reliefs of man, gods and entities in between. You […]

Down the Mekong

Phnom Penh

Fish flops out of a basket in a market stall, never to see the sea again. Pails of curried locust, platters of candied spider… Wild black dogs with an unassailable wisdom of these streets. Many old whites have washed up on the shores of the Mekong, 18 year old Cambodian girls by their side. They […]

Saigon sunrise

Saigon wakes up early: the streets are bustling by 6 am. A large downtown park sees many people out for morning walks and calisthenics. It gets so hot here that early morning is a comfortable time to be out and about.

Trashed

This website is called The Selfcleaning World, but it’s going to take the world a long time to clean Vietnam. I don’t see much evidence of organized garbage collection, a lot of it ending up in ditches, fields and waterways. It gets worse in rural areas. Seems slightly apocalyptic.

Vietnam street barbecue

Papa he grill the pork and mama she assemble the plate. Voila, Vietnam streetside BBQ.