Day 7: Duy Hai Fishing Village, Hoi An

We hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas!  We arrived back in the States on December 23, just in time to celebrate Christmas with my family in Memphis.  We even had snow here yesterday!  While it didn't stick much and isn't anything compared to the amount of white stuff predicted on the East Coast today, it was the first Christmas Day snow in Memphis since something like 1913!  J's flight back to DC today was cancelled (and I'm staying here until mid-week anyway), so he'll be fighting the crowds to get home sometime tomorrow.  This will be his 19th flight since mid-November, beating me by two because he was in Texas for work the week before we left for Asia!


Although our trip is officially over, we're still planning to post entries from the other places we visited.  Without further delay, here's our last post on Hoi An before we move back up the coast to Hanoi!


We began our second day in Hoi An with one of the most interesting and rewarding tours of our trip:  a photography tour to a local fishing village with Etienne Bossot, a Frenchman who lives in Hoi An and works as a professional photographer.


As a thank you for my picking up some of the slack on the domestic front during his clerkship, J got me a digital SLR camera (the Canon Rebel T2i) and a few lenses.  I've been wanting to learn a bit more about photography and this trip was the perfect opportunity!  Until this point, we had been shooting on automatic, so the camera was making all of the decisions for us.  After a briefing by Etienne on ISO, aperture, and shutter speed, we started taking more control over our pictures.  We then basically abandoned auto mode, forcing ourselves to learn how to expose pictures (this has led to a few great shots and more than a few missed ones!)


The original plan for the tour was to take a local ferry at sunrise to Duy Hai, a local fishing village, to photograph fishermen returning with their previous night's catch.  Unfortunately, the sky was overcast and the seas rough, so there wasn't much in terms of sunrise or fishermen.  But, since the locals have come to know and trust Etienne, we were able to practice taking portraits in the village.  And we had a stroke of luck on our way back to the boat--happening upon some women harvesting a rice field.  We tossed off our shoes and hopped in the flooded field with them!  Definitely one of the highlights of the trip!


Here are some of my favorite shots from the day.  I also have hopes of learning Photoshop, but at this point my skills are mostly limited to cropping and a few other minor editing functions.

Photographing the kids was one of my favorite parts of the tour!  They were adorable!  And Etienne seemed happy to have a blonde along on the tour because the villagers see so few of us that he hoped I would distract the kids while the others snapped away!

Etienne took us to a small open-air building where a few women make fish sauce.  As many of you know, I'm not a huge fan of fish, and was already a little leery of fish sauce (until the tour, I wasn't 100% sure if it was made out of fish or just used for dipping fish.)  But because it was served with so many dishes in Asia, I tried to ignore my fears and just go with it.  After the photo tour, I could. not. ignore. it. any. longer.  (Later in the trip, I even got busted at a cooking school in Thailand for not adding the appropriate amount of fish sauce to one of my dishes.  Eek!)  If you can't bear the suspense any more (and have a stronger stomach than I), here's the scoop on fish sauce--the baskets below are filled with small fish and salt and left to ferment (such a fancy word for "rot") for six months.  Whatever drains into the buckets below is fish sauce.  Mmmmm.  Etienne assured us that nothing goes to waste, so even the gray matter left in the baskets is fed to the pigs.  Double Mmmmm.  Good thing the T2i doesn't have a scratch 'n sniff function, right?

Next we stopped by a home where a lady was making these delicious little cakes (I was fighting with my camera at this point, so none of my shots of the baker came out...)

We met very nice man with absolutely amazing teeth!

Next, we met one of Etienne's favorite portrait subjects. This man stopped chopping a huge piece of bamboo to pose for our pictures.  He makes the large bamboo ring used in the round boats mentioned in our last post.

At Etienne's encouragement, I tried (with a bit of frustration), to capture moving objects while blurring the background, etc...I didn't ace this portion of the tour, but still kinda like the outcome...

Finally, a few fishermen came in with their catch...crabs!  Basically same picture, but composed two ways...

Hermit Crab out of his shell!

As we were headed back to the boat, we stumbled on my favorite part of the tour--women harvesting a field of rice!  I was a bit hesitant at first to kick off my shoes to join the ladies in the field, not knowing what funky skin ickiness I might pick up in the water.  But my feet didn't fall off, and I left the field with a smile and a few good shots!

Just to give you some perspective...

J watched from the "shore."  Apparently he likes his feet more than I like mine.

Sweet lady...but she kept stopping to smile for the picture while I was trying to get her cutting the rice!

Snails being collected as they harvested the rice...

Rice!

Packaging up the grains after the cuttings had been hand-fed into a machine...

After finishing up at the rice field, we caught a boat back to Hoi An.  Chickens in front, ducks in the back!

Overall, I had a fabulous time on this tour and loved learning how to use our camera.  I spent most of the trip with the camera stuck to my face anyway, but this tour was just the thing I needed to kickstart my new addiction.  Beware if you have young children...I may need to borrow them for future photography practice!