Adventures of A Tourist without a Camera — Vietnam

By Trina Talukdar

Published in

Global Shapers Bangalore

5 min readJun 10, 2018

My phone was in the same bag as my leaking water bottle, while I trekked on the outskirts of Johannesburg. My battery fried. I had just started traveling on a 4 country — 6 city tour almost immediately and had no time to fix my phone. The hardest part of not having a phone was not, not being able to call or message, surprisingly, because I could easily keep in touch with people using my laptop. The hardest part was not being able to take photos — obsessively capturing every moment of my life, as if without the visual proof no one would believe me I had had these incredible experiences.

But I had. And as I reconciled myself to not taking photographs of every beautiful sight and experience I had, I actually HAD the experiences! I looked around me, with my eyes, and not through a lens, I heard the loudest and softest sounds, I felt the breeze, the sun burning my skin, my hair roots tickling my scalp as it blew in the breeze. I was present, and not trying to capture the present to be able to refer to the past in the future.

Mekong Delta, 17 April, 5:23 am

It was just the fisherman and I rowing in a pattern- two strokes on the left while he rowed right, and then we switched sides, as if we had planned and practiced it like the Harvard all boys rowing team. But we hadn’t. He did it once, twice, I followed, and we kept going until my arms ached, and my muscles started burning with lactic acid flooding them.

By this time, we were midstream the Mekong river’s dark green waters. The fisherman strung his pole, flung it across the dark expanse, pulled his conical rain hat over his face, and promptly went to sleep, his soft snoring in rhythm with the slow rocking of the boat on the river tide.

The Mekong River is rising by 2 millimeters every year. As Vietnam’s growing population of 92 million sucks out ground water, there is another 2 millimeters of land subsidence every year. The Delta has at once seen both its worst flood and its worst drought in a 100 years, in the last 5 years. It’s hard to be a climate change denier when living on a peninsula.

The Mekong river is flanked on either side by the Can Tho city- the touristy high rise hotels, street lights and paved wide roads to the north, and the quaint one or two storied homes to the south of the river. The first row of houses is built right into the river banks on stilts of rotting blackened wood, and the more newly painted houses, where they had made efforts with floral curtains, towards the back. The south bank of the river lay dark and sleeping, not a single light shining through any bedroom window, while the north bank blared its lights.

The first signs of the sunrise on the Mekong river was the solid, bottle green waters turning translucent emerald green in the distance. The emerald water, then, started flowing towards my boat from the far east, penetrating the dark poisoned waters, and converting them into the magical sparkling waters of Disney fantasy films, with dark silhouettes of sting rays spreading their wings and swerving in circles below the surface of the water, while tiny flying fish played with dragonflies on the surface.

When the orange arc of the sun could finally be seen poking its head hesitantly out of the dark womb of the river expanse, it was the largest sun I had ever seen, spanning the entire width of the river’s breadth in its diameter. I felt like a fortune teller, who had had visions as a young child, for this was the drawings of my childhood- a river that meandered, small huts lining its banks, and a half circle sun rising from behind it, with alternating long and short light rays radiating from it.

But the vision I had not had as a child, was one I could have never predicted- a rapid popping up of dark silhouettes of an army of ants against the invincible light of the rising sun. As they approached, the ants took on the shapes of boats, some with sails, some without, some with a few square rooms built on them, some with clothes hanging on lines, and a few two storied cruise boats. And they were all rapidly rowing and revving their engines towards my boat! Was this a pirate attack on small, defenseless canoe, was I going to held captive for ransom from my state?

As the army of boats came into my line of sight, and transformed from dark silhouettes to colour photographs, I was the boats were laden with bright yellow bananas, yellow peeled Durian, red Dragon fruits, brown yams, potatoes, rainbows of flowers- pink, purple, orange. The boats took stock of good spots and anchored themselves. Without warning, as his gift to me, on my last day in the Orient, my fisherman had brought me to the heart of Vietnam’s famous floating markets.

A floating market is a market where goods are sold from boats. Originating in times and places where water transport played an important role in daily life, most floating markets operating today mainly serve as tourist attractions, and are chiefly found in Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. Economically, floating markets help to improve the standard of living by generating jobs, creating income and also employment opportunities.

We clunked together our thick dirty glasses of Vietnamese coffee, dark and bitter, layered on top of creamy condensed milk, bought from our neighbouring canoe for 10,000 Vietnamese Dong- a beautiful polymer fiber emerald green note valued at less than 50 US cents.

In many ways, breaking my phone was a blessing, that enabled to experience my life fully. These moments that I experienced in the last month were those that I wasn’t able to take a photo of, and because I couldn’t, I’ll remember then in the most vivid detail, forever.

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Adventures of A Tourist without a Camera — Vietnam

By Trina Talukdar

Mekong Delta, 17 April, 5:23 am

Written by Nithya J Rao