Postcard from Vietnam (5)

Dear friends,

I write to you from Hanoi, where autumn has arrived and the afternoon sun is paler and lower in the sky than it was. Walking outside is a pleasure now, and not the pain it was when it was hot.

A few days ago Hanh and Gung and I returned to the city from a week away on Vietnam’s south-central coast. One morning I took Hanh and Gung to a spot I’d come across on a trip with surfing friends two years ago, in the hope that it would make a good enough impression on Hanh to persuade her that we needed to visit it often. Also, I wanted to get a surf in. Unfortunately there was no swell when we were there – it came a few days later, with Tropical Storm Mirinae – and the drive from the town where we were staying took two hours by narrow bumpy roads. Gung squirmed and twisted and turned and moaned and groaned for almost the entire drive. At one point Hanh said something like, ‘I can’t see us coming here very often.’

I’ll have to go with surfing friends next time.

The sun was high in the sky and the air hot and dry when we arrived, and when we got out of the car children swarmed around us. I recognised some faces from last time. Gung was silent but wide-eyed, obviously taken aback by all the kids crowding in on us. We walked through the village under an umbrella and stood under a tree to look at knee-high waves breaking over the rocks that line the point. If I had been on my own or with surfing friends I would have sat down and watched for half an hour, but I could see that the heat had got to Hanh and Gung and so after a few minutes I suggested we head back. We clambered down to walk back on the sand and over the rocks rather than through the village, and it was then that I noticed a boy playing on a kind of board not far from shore, paddling using a stick and catching the odd wave, and riding it lying down. I wondered whether he had been inspired to take up surfing by the sight of us doing it two years ago, or had the children of this fishing village always ridden waves? I got out my video camera and filmed for a minute, and thought for a second about hanging around to talk to the boy when he came in.

The picture at the top was taken by my friend Kohei Shirakawa and shows me surfing the point two years ago. Look at the kids watching from the rocks - I wonder if the boy we saw last week is among them.

Yours,

Alex