Comme d’habitude. The sun rises postcard-perfect over the bay. The disc is an impossible rose pink - a fluorescent hue that no Jimi Hendrix poster has ever quite nailed. The greys are too delicate to classify – (but I’ll try): faded denim blues, snake skin greens, fluxed copper, dusky cinnabar. The obverse of the waves a perfect viridian or Prussian blue. The digital camera is totally unable to reproduce the subtlety.
Soft humps of distant islands half mixed into the grey dawn. Tony Onley serigraphs of yin perfection.
Oh no! The shrimp boats! Here comes the yang. Tiny confections of charcoal with the cliché silhouetted operator languidly guiding the helm. He, striking a pose, hand to mouth with faint plume of cigarette smoke, his foot propped up on a bulkhead. The square-wave chug-chug of their little motors the only audible sound besides the softly hushing surf.
It starts to become physically overwhelming – kind of embarrasing. We’ve been refusing the attentions of the street merchants pimping their little reproduction watercolours in Dalat and Nha Trang. Each ‘same same’ painting with a de facto smear of cadmium sunlight streaked across a flat expanse of grey or blue. And here I find myself taking photos of the same stuff.
Ah the torture of an art education. Balance the composition – dynamic, symmetrical, focal point, golden mean, law of thirds. Wait......for.....it..... Ah! Click. Treacle.
We spend a restful day (compared to what?) at Jungle Beach resort. Soph and I hiked a couple of klicks along a dusty highway: a terracotta gash slicing across the lush jungle landscape. They have finished dynamiting the for the road nearby the resort but, according to the proprietor there has been a dramatic increase in fishing with dynamite since the work crews appeared.
Last night a beach bonfire made from palm leaves and coco husks. The group was a UN of guests: Germans, Brits, Italians, a couple of Finns and Americans. A few locals sang pop and fold vietnames songs for a while then I played for a couple of hours on an old beater guitar. The strings are corroded by the salt air and they cut like a fine saw into my calluses. Someone passed around a ‘zigarette’. It was mellow.
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