Boats and Rice Paddies

Well, doesn't this look just disgustingly like everybody's idealized vision of Vietnam? Sorry folks, but it exists! These images are from Tam Coc near Ninh Binh, where yet another night sleeper bus (Ops, I did it again!) deposited me this morning at 5 a.m.

A short power-nap later I was on a bicycle and pedaling like the wind towards Tam Coc and a rowing boat ride up the river, floating through three hair-scrapingly low grottos, past rice paddies and limestone mountains. And afterwards more pedalling along red dirt roads through rice paddies (such a definitive green) and more limestone mountains.

The locals have a distinct way of rowing - when they get fed up of rowing by hand, they switch to rowing by feet. Something to practice back home next summer. The rowing boat I was in today was, however, of a regular model, not like the wonderful boats I saw in large numbers in Hoi An and also in the city of Hue, where my sleeper bus North stopped yesterday for six hours of power-tourism (old forbidden palace, check, lunch, check, old fortress, check, sleepy city, check, back on the bus, check).

These boats show that Vietnamese are extremely imaginative people! Now the craft of basket weaving has been around for ages and in all kinds of cultures globally. But normally its uses are restricted to baskets, possibly furniture, wine bottle covers and the occasional statue of a Greek godess (well, I haven't personally seen any, but that doesn't mean they don't exist). However ancient Vietnamese basket weavers not only perfected the art of the pointy basket, which turned upside down became their hat, but also the art of the bloody ridiculously enormous basket, which with a bit of tar or some such stuck in the holes became their boat.

Now I have some boating & technology oriented friends out there. If one of you has a theory about the relative benefits of going out fishing at sea in a perfectly round basket with no keel or visible means of navigation apart from one oar, please do share those thoughts with the rest of us! It beats me, but there are enought of these baskets around to make me think there must be something to them.