Meeting new friends on the "floating crag" between climbs near #CatBa Island.

#meclimbing #throwback to #2012 trip throughout #Asia, #Vietnam.
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#limestone #tuffas #sea #climbinglife #deepwatersoloing #psicobloc #bouldering #fitness #rockclimbing #Wanderlust #sportislife #theculturetrip #islands #photography #sportsphotography #happy #escalade #outdoor #攀岩 #ロッククライミング#escalar

The Ferry

A ferry. A small part of your journey back. After sand, and sun, and beach, and adventure, it's two hours to get through. Can this thing even swim? It looks and smells and screams like a pile of scrap metal after all. Its corridors are narrow, the steel cooks under the sun. Please let this be rubber burning and not your new shoes! A last good-bye to the island? You did that already. This is not the beginning of the end. It's a random paragraph in the last chapter, between the concrete of the harbor and the concrete of the motorway. Tomorrow you'll be home again, a shower, your bed.

A ferry. It's the last vehicle between you and The Island. There were cars, and planes, and taxis, and buses; hotel beds and airplane seats; hotel staff, security personal, and the lady showing you the way to the shuttle bus for whom you seemed to be just an item to be moved from A to B. But now you are here! You can feel the sun on your skin. (The same sun that you will feel later lying on the beach!) You can smell the water. (The same foreign sea you will soon plunge into!) You can listen to the other strangers whispering and shouting in foreign languages. (Isn't that dark-haired guy over there cute? Will you meet him again?)

What difference a few minutes make, a change in direction for a vessel to ride this way or that way.

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| #vietnam #catba #catbaisland #
| #a7r #voigtlander #voigtlander40mm #manualfocus
| #street #streetphotography #harbor #boat #ship

Harbor

A small harbor in Vietnam on Cát Bà. It's a place hundreds of tourists pass each day. I wonder how many of them take a photo there though.

Taken one day earlier, this image for me illustrates a completely different world of construction from the photo of the Hong Kong-Zhuhua-Macau Bridge yesterday. It's the invisible and quickly forgotten places in-between, the driveways, beltways, and parking places of this world. All that stuff connected to "infrastructure" and "logistics." (The playgrounds for mafia movies, The Wire, and many of Ballard's stories.)

Places like these often violate our aesthetic senses so carefully pruned by photo sharing apps, advertisement, TV. They seem lost, trashed, and forgotten. Being made of concrete and steel, smelling of rubber and petrol, they are the opposite of the green future many imagine. If for some reason we end up there, we hope to leave soon. It's places to cross, not to stay at.

And yet, these places are work places and homes too! There are sun rises and sunsets, plants and birds, colleagues, jokes, and maybe love affairs or rivalries. I remember places like these from summer jobs and research projects. (Not too many though, I'm biographically quite a snowflake when it comes to that.) Thanks to my camera, I learned again to look differently at these places, and I am grateful for that.

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| #vietnam #catba #catbaisland #
| #a7r #voigtlander #voigtlander40mm #manualfocus
| #urban #urbanphotography #infrastructure #harbor