Floating in Space

A boat on the Mekong River. 

Enter Vietnam... First stop Ho Chi Minh. The city of Uncle Ho.  The city of Saigon.  We landed in the late afternoon and I was swooned by the stampede of motobikes; the bebop rhythmic beeps and honks. Motobike scat if you will.  The exhaust of the trolling bikes... oh the exhaust. It flashed me back to a time deeply etched in the early 70s, when my father worked at a printing plant in Warwick RI:  Jay Printing.  On an occasion my mother would take us to the plant to meet my father at the end of his shift or deliver him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that he'd left on the counter at home.  Walking through those doors was a gassy gateway to an assortment of beautifully pungent wet inks waiting to be huffed out of small brown paper bags.  If it were up to me, as a child I'd huff and puff until the presses were bone dry. But visits were brief, and my mind was only mildly altered to a permanent state of abstract and avant garde quirkiness.  Of all places to think of old Jay Printing... Saigon.  

Saigon... the place that makes New York City sound mausoleum quiet.  Where the vibe is so definitively positive you just begin to smile and don't even know why you're smiling.  Watching the faces of Saigon shine under the glow of the warm sunny diesel haze is so oddly serene.  Amidst all the chaos and aural assault of the thousands and thousands of motobikes nearly everyone is smiling.  This bike honks at that bike, and that bike honks at that one, and that one and that one... and all it means is coming through.  No hostility of ferocious fingers or sloppy slobbering slurs being exchanged at directed honks.  Just a smile and gentle adjustment of the line.  A surreal peacefulness.  

So my first photos of Vietnam come not from Ho Chi Minh, but from the Mekong Delta (see above).  Why no early shots of Saigon?  Well, I've come to the conclusion that in the first 12 hours of dropping into a new zone, I am smitten with a crippling culture shock.   I swallow awe. And photographically I freeze.  My lens floats into one of those mobile phone dead zones.  This is a moment of absolute bliss and frustration.  I have the camera with me.  The camera is out of it's case.  The battery is fully charged. Bubbling with various charged chemistries. I'm bubbling with the expected jet lag awe.  However it's as though someone jammed an Elizabethan collar around my neck and filled it with a bottle of 18 year Glenmorangie.   Result:  No photo in the first 12 hours.