exploring eating capturing
When I travel I am constantly picking up bits and pieces of ephemera all the little bits no-one else wants. This could be receipts, scraps of paper or fabric, packaging, left over money or bits of plants to press anything that evokes that place for …
For this leg of my travels I was travelling with G Adventures. I am very impressed with their ethos and style of travel. They also have projects all over the world that create work for local people and ensures that money from tourism goes back …
Now I think everyone may have gathered by now I am a little obsessed with tea. I am currently sitting in a guest house in the mountains in Myanmar writing this having got the owner to find me boiling water so I could have a large mug of earl grey (I take tea bags and a mug everywhere). You can’t be from Yorkshire and not be a fan of tea it is pretty central to life!
So this in mind I was looking forward to visiting some proper tea houses on this trip around Asia and this one is most definitely my favourite so far. It is run by an organisation called Reaching Out who were established in 2000 to help create work for people with disabilities. The Tea House is run entirely by people who are deaf so is a peaceful and tranquil oasis. They have a well organised process for ordering drinks and nibbles and some blocks on each table with useful words on so you can communicate in silence.
You are served a cup of green tea while you decide what you might like. Everything is served in beautiful china made locally. The sweet treats that are available to accompany your beverage are made by hand and the ones I tasted were delicious and went perfectly with my tea. I had local green tea and two choices of coconut snack one plain and one flavoured with green tea. The green tea one was particularly lovely and I have not managed to find it again on my travels so I assume it is special to them, I would love to work out how to make it…watch this space.
The space was very conducive to drawing and it was raining hard outside so I stayed for an hour or two and really enjoyed the quiet and the tea! This is one of the drawings from that day.
The same group also have a gift shop full of beautifully made local crafts from textiles to silver to ceramics and more. It is only about two minutes walk from the tea shop on the road behind and very well worth a look, they also take credit cards which is helpful and dangerous!
Maybe because of its world heritage status Hoi An is very organised for tourist. You can buy one ticket to cover the six main attractions in town all walkable from each other and its not expensive costing four whole British pounds! I managed three of …
Hoi An is a delightful city in central Vietnam. UNESCO made it a world heritage site in 1999 and it is clear why. The old town is a mixture of traditional architecture with a myriad of narrow streets to wander through which are designated as …
Right at the end of my time in Hue I went to see the beautiful old Thien Mu Pagoda. It was built by one of the first Lords from the House of Nguyen (rulers of south Vietnam) in 1601. It towers on a hill over looking the perfume river which flows through the town.
It was beautiful to see but as I explored behind it I found an active monastery and stumbled across a kind of shrine to a news story involving a buddhist monk back in 1963. It was a jolt for me as I am very familiar with the story my dad would talk of it often when I was a teenager. The monk was Thích Quang Duc who was in his sixties at the time and decided with his fellow monks that as a protest against the alleged persecution of buddhists by the South Vietnamese government he would perform the act of self-immolation, basically setting ones self on fire. My dad showed me pictures and would speak about sacrifice for what you know to be right and about how important it is to make a stand for justice. As a teenager I remember being a little disturbed, to say the least, by the images and they have never left me. Stumbling across this image again all these years later along with the car he drove all the way from Hue and his home at this monastery down to Saigon, nearly 590 miles, transported me right back to listening to my dad and feeling proud about the things he taught me and how he showed me to live life. He is not around anymore so this whole experience was very moving and special. I had another similar experience when I went to Gandhi’s house in Mumbai India but that is another story.
This is the car he drove knowing what he had chosen to do once he arrived in Saigon with an image of the event behind it. The photograph below is one of the photos taken by Malcolm Browne the photographic journalist who was there on that day and captured the whole event. He was awarded the World Press Photo of the Year for the pictures. The images then went viral (in a 1960’s kind of a way) and this one is curtesy of Time magazine.
I felt a little shaken and emotional after all that but as I walked back towards the river the sun had set and there was a beautiful dusk hanging over the river full of calm. So I thought it best to end with that image and a moment of thought for those that do incredible things in the struggle for justice.
Tu Duc was part of the Nguyen dynasty and the longest reigning Emperor of that period from 1848 – 1883. His tomb is in Hue and was designed by himself to make sure it was grand enough! To avoid any enemies digging him up his …
Hue (pronounced Hway) is slap bang in the middle of Vietnam approximately half way between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh cities. I went on an over night sleeper train from Hanoi to get there which was pretty straight forward and took about twelve hours. Hue …
So I had a quick lesson in pearl cultivating.
Seems quite straight forward really. Take an live oyster, prise it open insert a bit from another oyster and a plastic ball…leave for five years back in the sea and hey presto a pearl. How hard can that be?
Quite hard as it turns out only about 30% produce a fully rounded pearl the rejects are ground up and used in face cream amongst other things.
The different shapes and colours are determined by the type of oyster and the length of time left to grow. I’m not sure I’ll be taking up pearl cultivation anytime soon but interesting to see the process. And very pretty to look at, I prefer the grey ones just for the record.
Ha Long bay is in the north of Vietnam. In 1994 it was designated a world heritage site and I can see why. Numerous towering mounds of limestone protrude from the ocean wearing caps of thick lush green forest. It is incredibly picturesque and is …