In spite of more pictures from The Philippines (last batch from the pig roast in the mountains and some final frames around the Island of Cebu before leaving), my location has changed several times since taking them a couple of weeks ago. I flew to Hong Kong, then took a train to Guangzhou (known as Canton in the West, in spite of Guangdong being the State, not the major city, which is its capital and goes by the name of Guangzhou) and buses to Gulin and Nanning across Southern China on my way to crossing into Vietnam. In fact, given the following content, the pictures make a sort of dada counterpoint to the words, some of which are harsh.

After suffering cold and humid since leaving the Philippines, I am finally at the seaside and in a warm place: It's called Nha Trang, on the coast of South Vietnam (it is mentioned in Apocalypse Now) and it seems pleasant, though after the shocking trip to get here, I am still recovering before I make it to the beach: I spent an hour vegetating in front of the tv then decided to try to reconnect to “my world”, which regrattebly I must recognize is mostly virtual, these days, through the internet. Aside from the cultural and psychophysical displacement It of being here, it is hard to travel in the weeks preceding, including and succeeding the Chinese New Year. Masses of people move, with an unpredictable response from the authorities in charge of organizing transport: there may be too many trains or not enough, with delays in both cases, while buses in Vietnam are pretty much the Wild West, for what I could observe first hand. Flights are scarce and booked months in advance. Since Monday, starting at the Chinese border of Dongxing, the trip was a furious gallop of over a thousand miles, most on the train; the first few hundred miles were a halting stop and go on the road, due to buses running only short distances, erratically, and extra-packed with passengers: I counted 45 of us on a minibus with 21 seats. Gouging is the only order when it comes to fares, especially for foreigners who don’t speak the language, but risk their neck with the rest of the local load, in the same conditions The train was no better, the gouging is institutionalized (the tickets bear a “Foreigner” printed on the fare type) but at least it makes steady, if sometime gruesome progress: yesterday we had a very dramatic bump that sent us flying and my Chinese couple pick-up-at-the-border travelling companions said “We hit something”. Sure enough the train stopped, uniformed police were immediately on hand and men in the Vietnam Railways uniform started milling around the car next to mine. I started taking pictures automatically, without really looking for blood, but it was clear that what they were extracting were parts of a male human body, some large, some small. It had never happened to me in my half century on all sorts of trains, or perhaps I should say not knowingly. I “documented” the whole thing, without indulging on the gruesome (down to the car that the vox populi promptly indicated he had come from, or that his relations had chased the train in): what’s visible is what I described, not all the detail and I had no interest in the shock value of the pictures. I took them because both the trip, the conditions, the detachment from the reality I am living and from my normal frame of references, put me in a lucid, allucinatory state that makes it easier to try to relate to my surroundings through the lens of the camera, I have been taking thousands of pictures, though I know that a much fewer number will be usable. I am debating whether I should post the ones of the suicide. I wondered about what pushed this man, probably well off for Vietnam, since the car is new and big, to end his life so. And then I thought we all struggle with untold demons and the words of my teacher A.D. Coleman came to mind: “bearing witness” is what every photographer does, according to him, though I could not think what I was bearing witness to, other than the drama of an unknown man and my personal frame of mind, already frazzled and wary. And perhaps the suicide was going through a lot of anguish and must have thought: it’s only a few seconds, and indeed it must have been, though they must have been terrible ones.

While the train was making its way to Danang (I must note with cyninc accuracy, on time 10 hours or so later) I was frenetically consulting guide books and maps, reformulating possibilities and trying to decide whether trying to continue with my original itinerary, which is seemingly unrelated to reality on the ground as described in the books. I considered the logistics of covering distances disseminated with stumbling blocks such as poor road conditions, bus "schedules", borders that may or may not be open and even restive areas of Vietnam that according to my 2007 book are not accessible to foreigners due to rebel tribes activities and conuterinsurgency. Part of the original plan was to stop in Danang and In the end, I had to make a quick decision (not my specialty) on whether to continue by train down the coast or stop to see the well preserved antiquities in Hoi An, contact the Laotian Consulate (when and if they’d be open) and hope I could find somebody who could tell me if the particular border crossing in the tribal areas I was thinking of using, would be open going From Laos into Cambodia (provided the Laotian crossing from Vietnam is). In the end I decided I did not know how much of this would be feasable, but that I do not have the time (and I hate to come all this way to even think that) but even just the stamina to find out for sure after a detour of a couple of days travel and probably as many to backtrack in case of arrested progress. So I decided that the train makes steady progress and that if want to spend a few days at the beach, I can then board yet another train that after 8 hours will deliver me to Saigon, from where I can take the tried and true route most people take: a bus to go to Cambodia, spend a few days in Angkor Wat, continue on to Thailand and spend the balance of my time on a little Island called Ko Si Chang. It's not too far from Bangkok, from where I fly back to Hong Kong and on to Rome. The rest of the area will still be here if I ever come back.