The humidity hit me with a blast as I stepped furtively from my air-conditioned hotel room into pre-dawn darkness, inching my way over the teak threshold so as not to slip on the damp marble steps. Behind me, my husband’s baritone snores synchronized with a songbird’s shrill whistle.

It was a few minute walk to the riverside quay. I was surprised to note that I wasn’t the only person up at this unholy hour. Restaurant staff were setting up the breakfast buffet in the second-floor dining room. I was amused by two elderly ladies babbling away in their song-song banter as they walked briskly past me in their sneakers and sweatpants. No doubt I would later see them squatting and squabbling over bamboo baskets of fruits and vegetables in the market.

As I sat down at the edge of the concrete jetty, I felt someone approaching from behind. In my own country I would have been alarmed – but not here. The man passed by, his arms swinging wildly from side to side as he got his morning workout.

Rowing on the river . . .

I was a few minutes early for my scheduled 5:30 rendezvous. Focusing on the river, my vision gradually adjusted to the darkness and I noticed the movement of small wooden boats passing silently by on the river without benefit of navigational lights. Driving here – on river or roadway – is often done without lights. Scooters and cars swerve and weave in a choreography that slows at intersections but rarely ever comes to a complete halt. Sidewalks are mostly used for parking and lane designations seem to be mere suggestions. In my three days here in HoiAn, on Vietnam’s central coast, I had not seen a single uniformed policeman or fender-bender.

With each passing minute the breaking dawn revealed more of my surroundings. Palm fronds reflected on inky black waters against the cloudy-gray sky. A plastic water bottle wedged between the leaves of a water lily. White almond-shaped eyes watched over me from the painted prow of a wooden fishing boat moored nearby. I recalled our tour guide’s explanation that local fishermen believe that those eyes will scare away bad weather and ensure a good catch.

Morning reflection

Such moments of solitary observation are a rarity for me, as I’m typically on the go from morning to midnight tending to dozens of daily details of the travel programs that I organize and lead. My group is departing for home in a few hours – in good hands with the local tour guide – but I have twelve more hours before my flight departs from DaNang. So I’ve arranged a private tour with a local photographer who I met two years ago. On that visit, I’d taken this same early-morning excursion with him and captured some extraordinary photographs. Or so I recall – I saved them to a folder on my computer hard drive which I’ve never seen since! My companion on that excursion entered one of her images in a photography contest and won a prize.

I wanted to repeat that experience and replicate those photos. Who knows? Maybe I’ll win a prize – and I’ll certainly file them more carefully this time.

Yesterday afternoon, I’d visited Kiet in his gallery on Nguyen Thai Hoc Street where his stunning, professional images included many scenes of HoiAn similar to the ones I’d captured on my trusty Sony NEX 5. My camera – though far from professional, is a perfect fit for how I shoot: fast, frequent and often one-handed. I rarely have the luxury of time to fuss and fiddle with lenses and settings for f-stops and apertures which I’ve never quite understood. My “AutoPlus” setting works perfectly for me.

Kiet and his much more professional camera

I suppose a trained eye would notice the differences, but I always thought my photos were pretty good. After all, it’s hard not to take a great photo when you have such rich, colorful scenes of this picturesque city which was declared a World Heritage city by UNESCO.

The soft hum of a motor grew louder as a small wooden boat approached. Kiet helped me into the boat. As we sped swiftly upriver, I wished I had worn my fleece jacket.

As we motored out past thick groves of coconut palms, I flashed back to news of the Vietnam War, or – as they more accurately call it here – the American War. I was a teenager in Saginaw then, a world away from Agent Orange and the atrocities reported by Walter Cronkite and Morley Safer just before we sat down to dinner at our kitchen table on Glendale Street. Anti-war protests were happening in big cities and universities like Kent State. My oldest brother had gotten a deferment because of his flat feet. At that point I didn’t know anyone who had been sent to Vietnam. It was all very confusing and very distressing.

Left: “Four dead in O-hi-o . . .” Photo credit: John Filo. Right: The horrors know no boundaries. Photo credit: NBC News.

Never would I have dreamed that I would one day be traveling freely around that same ravaged, hellish country that I first learned about on the CBS Nightly News. Never would I have dreamed that I would love it as much as I do – on each and every visit. Never could I have imagined how gentle and friendly the people would be to American visitors.

In doing some research for this article, I found some staggering statistics about that “conflict”:

• From 1965 through 1968, an average of 32 tons of bombs were dropped each hour in the North.
• South Vietnam bore the bulk of the destruction and suffered the majority of the casualties.
• Thirty billion pounds of munitions were spent.
• Seventy million liters of herbicidal agents (like Agent Orange) were sprayed.
• Twenty-one million bomb craters were created in the South.
• Four hundred thousand tons of napalm was dropped (“improved” with plastic to help it stick to skin, and with phosphorus to ensure that it would continue to work in water).

How many bombs had been dropped in this river? How many innocent mothers and babies had hidden in these palm-lined waterways? How many people had died here?

I snapped to attention when Kiet lifted his camera toward the brightening morning sky. This is what differentiates a real photographer from the casual amateur like me. While I watched the scenery, he had been noticing the quality of the dawn’s early light. Taking his cue, I eagerly snapped away, focusing on the scene of a fishing net suspended on bamboo poles above the still water.

Kiet instructed the boatman to maneuver the vessel to allow me to see a row of three such fishing nets – glowing gold in the morning light. Ah – another mark of a professional photographer … seeing a scene from different angles.

Traditional ways of fishing still prevail on these waterways – to the delight of this photographer!

Further upriver, a plain wooden boat floated next to a golden net. The old boatman wore a conical hat and red jacket with his pantlegs rolled up to his knees. He stood in his boat, paddling under the net as Kiet instructed – holding the golden net over his head, striking it with a bamboo pole as droplets of dew showered over and around him. Beyond him, bright shafts of sunlight broke through the cloud cover.

An image to remember from a morning I’ll never forget

The geometry of the resulting photos was surprising. I had been oblivious of the graphical triangular shapes created when he held the net overhead, matching the angles of his conical hat. And of the gentle curves of the droopy net and the bow of his boat. And the spherical shape formed where the bottom of the net dipped underwater. I’m pretty sure that a professional photographer would be keenly aware of all these design elements at the very moment he/she snapped the shutter.

When we finished the choreography with the net, the old man lit a cigarette, and I snapped more pictures as curls of smoke wafted around him.

The old man and his smoke

I took 675 photos on that outing! Some are great, some are good and most should be deleted. But the memory of that peaceful, easy morning will never be erased from my mind.

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