As one of my last trips in Vietnam (for a while --
click here for 32 photos), in late April I traveled with a friend to his home province of Thanh Hoa, a flat agricultural province along the north-central coast. The trip was short, but my friend showed me his life and family in that roadside small town. We visited the local morning market, where every saleswoman seemed to be a distant relative, and the seafood was abundant and fresh. Everyone tells me how much more delicious the food tastes in the village than in Hanoi, because the travel time is less -- I agreed as we ate piles of mussels, shrimp, fish, and snails. I noticed the pleasant lack of honking motorbikes, and could actually hear the chickens scratching for bugs in the farmyard. The neighbors laughed at my lack of skills when I try to help distribute the shredded wet green tobacco onto the bamboo drying racks. We borrowed someone's motorbike to see the long, sandy beach and the fishermen and women bringing the boats in for high tide.
My friend paid his respects at several family cemetery plots, near the market and near the river dike. Several members of the family have done well with investments and their work and have build colorful new concrete houses; others are surviving on their own physically demanding agricultural production. Though there are impressive dikes along the nearby river, and the irrigation canals are laced intricately among the fields, the river has flooded its banks within the past year or so, damaging homes and rice and tobacco crops. Even when it does not flood, the waters near the house are turning briny -- not from seawater seepage, but because some farmers have converted their fields into saltwater shrimp farms because the shrimp bring much bigger profits than rice or the water pipe tobacco (thuoc lao) grown here. People were happy to see my friend home to visit, and ask about their relatives also working in Hanoi. We carried several bags of fresh food with us on the bus back to Hanoi.
