…is more wet than you would expect.
Just arrived in Vietnam today and there is an incredible amount of water everywhere. Water in the fields for the rice crops, everywhere around Hanoi, water in the various lakes and rivers, plus some new water pouring down on the streets. I’ve been told that when the wet season ends the amount of rain is actually the highest.
It’s been raining for the last week or so. Bad weather during my entire stay in the beautiful Yangshuo area and bad weather all the way to Hanoi. Here, a typhoon just passed, I think the same I missed in Hong Kong, and another storm just came in. So, the forecast doesn’t look so good for the next days. Still, I will try to stick to the original plan and go from one extreme to another: from a boat trip in the next 3 days to a mountain trek right after that.
Vietnam is an interesting change coming from China. The vegetation changes significantly and the architecture and people as well. Also the level of organization and the general order and cleanliness are quite different. On the negative side, unfortunately. But at least the numbers of tourists will radically drop and also the locals here are less pushy and don’t insist that much on selling you things.
Later edit:
This area was somewhere at the top of my priorities list during the 2 months in Asia. It turned out to be a bit of a disappointment in terms of photography, mainly because of the crappy-dull-flat-featureless-almost-rainy weather. I was in the ancient village of XingPing for 5 days, waiting for the weather to improve and for the Chinese people to settle down during their massive 10 days national holiday. Believe me, you really don’t want to be sharing public transport with one billion people crossing the country (provided you bought your tickets 2 weeks in advance).
On the last day of my stay I climbed a mini-mountain next to the village, just as I did every day at sunrise. Again, no visible sunrise, but I stayed there for a couple of hours, because the view was awesome and because the Chinese photographers who came in the meantime had cookies 🙂
All of the sudden, sun rays cut through the clouds, hitting the ground. Isolated beams of light, visible for a few seconds and then reappearing somewhere else. It all lasted for about five minutes.