Singapore and Vietnam: Part One
A travel blog and my approach to travel photography
Part One: Singapore, Hanoi and Sa Pa
During April, I had the pleasure to travel to Singapore and Vietnam. I went on a holidays with my girlfriend to see these amazing places in the world. I had never seen South East Asia so I was very excited to see that part of the world.
Planning Before going on holidays, there is always planning involved with any trips, this was no different. Only thing different is that this wasn’t a photography specific trip. I simply wanted to travel and enjoy my time with my girlfriend. That for me requires a mind shift, as usually I am very meticulous in planning everywhere I go. For all our previous travels together, we only stayed once in a planned position for sunset. I completely skipped the planning part, only roughly determining the destinations of our trip. Just go with the flow it seems. Don’t think just do.
Itenary We decided to only book the first few days of our four week trip, since we heard from others in particular Vietnam is easygoing and that is was not difficult to find your hotels and transportation a few days in advance. Some people can’t cope with that, we had no problems with this way of travelling.
What should I bring?Then comes the decision, what do I bring to this trip? I wanted to be as light as possible in terms of camera gear. I was not going to take all my lenses on the plane and on my back for four weeks. In the end I choose to bring only two lenses with my camera body; My favorite lens of all time: the Nikon 24-120 f/4 S and the Nikon 40mm f/2. Along with that I brought my drone (DJI Air 2S) and the action camera (DJI Action 4) and a very lightweight tripod (Sirui Traveller X). I made deliberate choices to not bring anything longer that 120mm or wider than 24mm. As we all know these focal lengths usually bring the heavy weights.
Oh well on to the trip. That’s probably why you are here for. All images are in chronological order.
Singapore After a direct flight from Amsterdam to Singapore, we arrived in the hotel. We had dinner and an early night as we we’re pretty tired of our travels. The next day we had a perfect day to view the entire city, we used the clean but small metros in Singapore to get around and cool off while viewing most of the scenic points in the city. For me it is still a bit reminiscent of familiar European cities, but with a big hint of Asian cities in terms of food and culture as well. It is like a perfect blend of Europa and Asia for that matter, a good gateway into the culture of South East Asia. The city is the cleanest and greenest city I have seen in the world, and ranks highly. It is probably the best city to live in in the world. I am not a big fan of cities, no dreams of seeing the biggest cities in the world. Rather the opposite. The architecture of Singapore is really beautiful and made for a great subject to photograph. I want to take one photograph apart from all the other ones, I didn’t except to photograph such a beautiful tree in the parks of Singapore. I think it will end up my favorite tree shot of the year or be at least very close.
Vietnam: City of Hanoi After two days in Singpare we arrived at Hanoi, Vietnam. We took a taxi to Hanoi city, cars honking everywhere, people driving on motorbikes like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. Let’s just say we were quite happy to be a taxi and not on one of those bikes. W ordered way too many food and I tried Vietnames Pho for the first time, it’s thick noodles with beef and vegetable stew/soup. We also shared the springrolls and the next day we were scouting the streets of Hanoi. The lovely Vietnames food in the city and the next day we were scouting the streets of Hanoi.
Vietnam: Sa Pa Next stop Sa Pa, we took a bus during the daytime to Sa Pa, which was a 5 hour drive. In Sa Pa we had a lovely time relaxing, fantastic food and we explored the city in the evening. The next day we took a guided tour to the top of the Fan Si Pan mountain, the highest mountain in Indo-China. We took the two day hike, although it is doable in one day, we liked the idea of a nighttime walk up the mountain and see the sunrise from the top of the mountain. And this was really the best choice we could make. After a rough couple of hours sleep, we hiked up the mountain. There was absolutely no one on the top of the mountain when we arrived and the cloud inversion gave us some stunning views and a lovely milkyway image as well. We returned in Sa Pa village at 1 AM and had a necessary shower and massage.
Part two will release soon. Please stick around:).
