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The wonderful thing about renting a house and staying in one place is that you get a real feel for where you are. After a month or so everything seems to exhale around you and in the next the breath you are taken up into the rhythm of the days. Matt and I sometimes question our style of traveling, mostly when we meet people who have been to the same country as we have but covered a lot more ground in a shorter period of time. But something always happens to remind us why this works for us.
We don't just meet people, we get to know them. We see them out of context, running into them at the market or on the street. With each interaction we share a little bit more beyond the standard "Where are you from? What do you do? How long are you here?" There is enough time to explore all sorts of things - parts of the city, different types of food, festivals. You get to see the seasons change.
When we arrived in Hoi An the rice was the fluorescent green that only rice paddies seem to be. Every country we've been
to in S.E. Asia structured their paddies differently: in Sri Lanka they were very neat and tidy blocks and only situated in the lowlands as the highlands were reserved for tea plantations, in Bali they were everywhere, terraced and seeping over hills and valleys like water. In Ubud restaurant patios and spa treatment rooms strategically overlook them. You can walk off a busy city street into a comfortable room and relax as you watch the wind rustle the cool green blades of rice. When we arrived in our new home we were struck right away by the way the Vietnamese had organized their rice paddies to service many needs at one time. Water buffalo and cows hang out in the paddies during the day. Duck sheds are built alongside and in the morning fowl fill the canals with their bleats and chortles. Farmers drive their cows along the paths to graze and people use bamboo poles in the canals to catch the small hardy fish that can survive the necessary changes in water flow. Men stand hip deep in the ponds and throw nets to catch the catfish they raise. They are a different species than we find at home
but we can attest that they are delicious! Every square inch of the paddies are used to raise some kind of food - just another example of how industrious and innovative the Vietnamese people are.
Over the last couple weeks we have watched the rice ripen almost right before our eyes - the colour of the fields changed from green to gold to rust and then seemingly overnight the rice was being harvested. On our morning jog through the fields we we were used to seeing a couple of people weeding and tending but suddenly there were groups everywhere, pulling in the harvest almost entirely by hand. The rice is cut, and enormous bundles carried out on the backs of men and women. Several more thresh and pack it and bundle the stalks for other use. In the next few days street were taken over by large tarps spread with rice drying in the sun. Every few hours someone will walk barefoot through the rice, drawing furrows in the grains and turning them so they will dry evenly. At night, the tarps are wrapped up tight and covered with bricks to prevent rats from getting into it. Afterward the
Separating kernels from chaff
This lovely man asked us to wait so he could remove his hat for the photo fields are burnt to accelerate decay and prepare them for planting.
We did see one combine, so mechanized modern farming methods are coming to Vietnam, but it was obviously an attraction as several Vietnamese people had gathered to watch and pointed it out to us as we passed. Generally the whole process was done by hand and mostly by older people with the entire harvest packed into bags carried out on backs, bicycles and scooters, an incredible feat to see.
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Vince n Suz
Slackpackers
Burnt rice fields
Would have loved to have seen the young green rice fields.... think we were perhaps a couple of weeks too late. Our home stay overlooks the fields and they are now mostly burnt out, but it is still beautiful sight nonetheless. It is really cool seeing the rice drying on the road and the respect everyone gives it by driving around it, and not over it.