Meeting Young Generation of Vietnamese. Walk Along An Cuu River in Hue, Vietnam

I visited the An Cuu River's embankments west of An Cuu Market quite soon after my arrival. Amazing areas for photography. Focused on the west, I ignored the eastern side for a while. But, recently, I had a walk in this direction at last. No tourist attractions there so that's why the locals don't often meet foreigners there. That is helpful when you are on a photography mission.

This is the An Cuu River with new buildings on the horizon. There are vast rice fields over these buildings, I discovered on Google.Maps, but I haven't yet been that far.

The peaceful river that looks rather like a canal; polluted with trash and sewage but special service daily clean water from floating plastic garbage.

The banks are used for all sorts of recreation, like cycling and fishing.

Lots of kids there, all want to talk to a foreigner.

Many of them know some basic questions like "What's your name?" and "Where are you from?", and they hurry to use this knowledge.

They appeared not at once: the crowd was slowly growing. As soon as one of them noticed me, he asked "Hello, what's your name?", and then more boys were joining. Of course, I answered every question most calmly and friendly to be the perfect foreigner. These children were so polite, they deserved full respect.

But at some point, I felt emotional pressure since more and more uncontrollable kids were surrounding me. So an idea of taking images helped the situation. As soon as I asked if I could photograph them, they started shouting "Yes! Yes!" and were trying to form some kind of a posing group.

There were 10 kids but it wasn't possible to combine them in one frame. Probably, they needed a clear command but I am not experienced in managing children's crowds.

I said bye-bye and could leave them easily. It's actually common: Vietnamese, adults and kids, aren't intrusive, it's enough to say, like, "Okay, so..." and they already know you want to leave (by reading your face, first of all). In this aspect, I feel very comfortable in Vietnam (but can't say the same about Vietnamese way of driving 😄).

I noticed this construction, and wanted to see it from a closer distance:

A fishing net.

It turned out that the construction was managed by kids too, with an adult watching them. It might be that this fishing net is just a public infrastructure of the tiny riverbank park, or it might be private, I don't know.

Kids led by a teenager showed me the fishing process first. Then, they found an adult who could speak English. They wanted me to photograph but didn't know English enough well to ask me themselves.

The catch, a sort of catfish:

And these (no idea what species):

A farewell shot before leaving.

The day was ending.

I was glad to find that a part of the riverbanks turned into nice recreation areas. Also good to know that this is the official politics:

A banner by the river saying, according to Google Translate: for civilized society, for community health, take action to protect the environment and build civilized cities. Sounds great!

Not a tourist attraction, but a river with a certain charm.

I ended my day on the bridge by the An Cuu Market photographing the sunset and people.

Almost no pedestrians in Vietnam, everyone is on a motorbike.

So if you want to shoot the life of streets, you often can only take images of motorbike traffic. A true motorbike nation.

What happened next? I went to a hypermarket Go! to buy my usual set for evening food: freshly baked Vietnamese baguette, avocado, and vegetarian oil-and-chili sate that I eat with bread.

It was a lovely day, happy to share it with you, dear Hivers.

More stories from Southeast Asia are ahead! Check out my previous posts on my personal Travelfeed or Worldmappin map.

I took these images with a Nikkor 50mm on a full-frame DSLR Nikon D750 on September 29, 2024, in Hue, Vietnam.