Day 72: A Picture Saves You Reading a Thousand Words

There are often, too often, as you know, images of beauty that whizz past you or you whizz past before any photo-taking implement can be grabbed. They have to be remembered rather than captured. Today was capture-challenged. I don't have many good photos to show you so here are some word images of things seen through eyes and memory only. Motorcycles parked under a bridge loaded high with bags of goldfish that refract and distort in their watery bags. Round wicker boats tossed on the blue-green South China Sea like petals on a pond in a rainstorm. Cloud donnas laid gently over sleeping mountains that rise rapidly from the endless flat. A herd of cattle negotiating the downtown traffic. Buses like karaoke bars, dazzling and shiny with lights and alters to god knows what Gods, but obviously required for the near-death overtaking they utilise to get their patrons where they need to go. And either stereotypically beautiful Vietnamese women in conical hats and ao dai (the long tunics with splits up to the waist worn with pantaloons) transporting huge loads of flowers on their bicycles, or, tiny school kids in white shirts with red ties on the bike they will have though to adulthood commuting with a sibling or two on the bike rack.

Today hasn't helped in the protestation I keep making that I am not a hedonistic wanker. We flew down to Da Nang. Business class. What! It was about a hundred and seventy to go economy and two-fifty for business. You'd go for business too, wouldn't you? At what other time would you be able to, at such a reasonable difference. I mean it was just a one hour flight, and it was more like Premium Economy on any other airline, but we got expressed through check-in and boarding, we spent our waiting time in the business lounge and ate cake, and they placed a steward at the border between us and economy to enable us to disembark before the riff-raff started their push off the plane. Not to mention there was linen, crockery and metal with our snack rather than plastic and paper. Hue airport is apparently closed (and don't tell me any different, even if it is true, because I do not want to know we did the trip for nothing), so we had to do another three hour road transfer from Da Nang to Hue. When I thought driving couldn't get scarier, they popped us onto two lanes of heavy truck and bus traffic and then threw in mountains so that there would be a greater disparity of speed between vehicles and more dangerous places to overtake. It was white knuckle. But the hotel at the end of it is most likely the only place that would be worth it. Five star. French colonial cum Art Deco design, a fabulous deep pool, set on the Perfume River. I was so overwhelmed that I got all funny and embarrassed that I didn't fit in—especially when poor V—— tried to play a joke on me and sneak Wesley into the bar. I lost my sense of humour for a few minutes. This hedonistic stuff is a little bad for me. But I will put up with it until the end of the holiday.

Irene's Outfit Shirt: Myers, in the late eighties! Skirt: Op-shopped

List_Addict's Outfit and Distractions T-shirt: Op-shopped Dress: Op-shopped Photos (from top left): V—— and Wesley at dinner at The Governor, La Residence, Hue. (Do you know if you google 'Ikea beaver' lots of Wesley's cousins come up. I am not the only mad woman who travels around with a Wesley—Wesley is the best Wesley though.); Mahi Mahi for me and Vietnamese pork and noodles for V——; Playing pool (lucky run at three:love to me; that will end before we leave); me on the sun lounge on our balcony, room 607 at La Residence, Hue

Photographer de Jour: V——

Who wore it better? Celebrating linking today with:



>

>