There are times when you travel and you take a picture that looks good, but doesn’t feel especially interesting or important; then you come back, say a year later and all at once this picture becomes seminal; it seems to encapsulate that trip in that one little image.
I was on a river cruise down the Mekong from Siem Reap in Cambodia, to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. There were only 28 passengers on board and our shallow bottomed riverboat stopped at little villages along the way to tour small family run businesses. We saw a Cambodian woman making large clay pots by walking around, rather than spinning the pot on a wheel. We saw a family run silver smith factory hammering out plates and jewellery by hand. We met a primary school teacher who had lived through the Khmer Rouge concentration camps and killing fields.
But it was this image from the Tra Su Bird Sanctuary in the Mekong Delta, near Chau Doc, that brought all these wonderful memories back for me. This Bird Sanctuary was our first tour stop in Vietnam, and we all piled into 3 vans to take us there from the dock. After a half hour’s rough ride over pot holed roads we arrived at a dock in a swamp where they had these motorized long boats with a large engine at one end of a long shaft and a the propeller at the other. It acted a little like a teeter totter in that the boat driver could push down on the engine and the propeller could come out of the water.
We all piled into 3 boats and the boat jockeys revved up their engines and made a substantial racket. These guys were real river cowboys, and they loved buzzing around through the swamp, zipping down canals between long rows of trees. The swamp was supposed to be a bird sanctuary, but we didn’t see any birds to speak of.
We finally stopped at an isthmus in the heart of the sanctuary where we got out and switched to these woman powered boats. The difference was night and day. These women, one per boat, paddled quietly and serenely deep into the swamp. We finally saw and heard the sea birds, hiding in the bushes and high in the trees. These women checked up on each other, always knowing where everyone was.
None of the women spoke English, but it was a pleasure to see them paddle quietly, elegantly as we glided silently through the swamp. It was this contrast of the noisy brashness of the power boats and the quiet, elegance of the old fashioned human powered ones that for me, characterized this trip and my view of Cambodia and Vietnam.
Not much of a bird sanctuary without lots of birds:-)