The Road to Halong Bay

The poetry of this landscape, the unfathomable simplicity, the blinding green of the rice paddies set in front of a backdrop of jagged, misty hills. Conical hats bobbing up and down, punctuating the air with a perfect symmetry. Thin slices of arms bearing stalks of rice, bearing baskets. Bicycles slipping slowly down dirt roads speckled with generous shadows of banana leaves. Cows etching out an emaciated silhouette, jaws contemplating, ribs sanding down the air with their heaving. The people small in the distance, like phantoms, laboring elegantly under my tourist gaze. I don't want to tokenize this scene, to romanticize it, but it is impossible not to. A speck of a conical hat surrounded by the nourishing lake of the rice paddy is art, a somehow classical archetype, a thing so much more intricate and pristine and filled with back-breaking struggle than a mere tourist snapshot. It is life--unfair, uneven, exquisitely whole and simple life, moving and growing and working and also static and traditional and authentic. Buildings reach above fields like nimble fingers, constrained in width by money rather than space, keeping watch over the paddies like candy-coated sentinels. The fields are freckled with gravestones, the dead enriching the soil, bringing blessings as the workers wind their way slowly around them. Never hurrying. The rice won't tolerate hurry. The digestive system won't tolerate a crop that's been plucked by stressed, impatient hands. And the green just washes over everything until the brain no longer has space to contemplate anything else. It is passive and pervasive, fully present, consuming. The hats mark out a means of navigating this visual ocean like buoys bobbing in the struggle against being swallowed by a vast, vast color.