It’s a misty Sunday morning in Sussex, and most people are still asleep. I’m in my Dad’s car, reaching forward to open the glove box, in the hope of finding a Mars bar or a Marathon. We’re going to pick my Granddad up. My Nan has lovingly prepared a giant’s portion of Marmite sandwiches, and placed them back inside the bread bag. Granddad has a Thermos flask of hot tea, and a pile of rock cakes wrapped in kitchen roll. Nanny gives me a bear’s hug, and sends us on our way.

We’re going to the river. The roads are almost empty. We’re listening to Radio 1 turned down low because Granddad doesn’t really like ‘drum-thumping music’. The town turns to countryside within just a few miles, and we drive beneath the shadows of tree-lined streets, taking the blind corners slowly, anticipating horses or walkers with their dogs.

It’s a bright, glorious morning in Hanoi. It’s 30 degrees already. I wake up in a puddle of sweat, and wonder what time I got home. Downstairs the freezer is beeping, there was a power cut in the night. Outside in the courtyard my neighbours’ children are sitting on the steps to their house, playing. My other neighbour is singing while she sits outside her brick and tin bungalow, washing her family’s clothes under the outdoor tap. I decant some water from the giant bottle in the corner, and a cloud of mosquitoes make a fast and chaotic protest towards me.

I start to pack. I need drawing pencils and paper, Scrabble and dice, moisturised hand-wipes, sun block, a plastic throwaway fan, a big bottle of water. I reverse my motorbike out of the drive, and head to the main road. I try not to graze my knees on the walls of the narrow alley that leads away from my house. There are people everywhere; I look in all directions at the same time, and soon I’m in knee-to-knee traffic, and crawling along at a snail’s pace, passing fruit sellers, women washing their hair in the street, men sleeping on motorbikes and old women plopping ice into cups of hot tea.

The river lays before us like a giant green slippery eel, sleeping with one eye open, breathing in the fresh winter air through its nose. It’s a twenty-minute walk from the car to the water’s edge; at first we chat at a normal volume, always looking down to watch out for logs or stones to trip on. We’re all carrying our own rods, and being careful not to prod each other or to get our rods caught in the trees. An applause of leaves stir up through a gust of wind, and cartwheel past us like athletes at the starting gun. Something catches my Dad’s eye and he stops talking and stands utterly motionless, “over there,” he whispers, and we move only our heads to try and see the deer, which is now leaping over a fallen tree before disappearing from our sight forever.

As soon as we can see the river, everything changes. Talking is kept to a minimum, and if we have to talk it can only be at the volume of a fly’s whisper. Our trek has changed too; our feet land lighter, our movements more smooth. We can see the river, there are ripples of life – another human. Our hearts sink, and we look to find another spot, as far away as possible.

I’m chasing a train along Long Bien Bridge, it rolls along beside me and it’s sound is deafening. I slalom round bicycles loaded with flowers, and slow down behind mopeds whose drivers are occupied by their phones. Women selling corn-on-the-cob hail me to buy from them, and a large fish flaps heroically out of a small basin of water and onto the tarmac in front of me. Soon I’m back on land again, and driving through a market, past noodle stands and cafes, past street-side barbers and key-cutters. I’m veering around chickens that are dancing in the street, and I distracted by a child being scorned for refusing a spoonful of steaming rice.

The alley gets smaller and I find the gate, an old man waves to me and points to the motorbike parking area, he hands me a numbered card and writes the matching number on my motorbike, he points to the path “ở đó” he says, and I start to go on ahead. As I approach the cluster of trees I see a small, fenced enclosure and curiosity pulls me away from the path. I see a pool of stagnant water, some logs, some twigs, and a medium sized crocodile. It lays utterly motionless save for a tiny rumour of exhalation. It’s eyes are closed, it’s teeth yellow like a nicotine-stained miniature mountain range, and the area around it is decorated with empty bottles and plastic bags.

And then the lakes. There are two of them, both hosts to a number of bamboo stilt houses, all of which have walls that can be rolled up or down, and thatched roofs and thick wooden floorboards. It is very, very busy.

On the bend of the river we’ve found our place, our rod rests sink into the soft ground and our fibreglass rods rest on them while we thread our lures. Our boxes are packed with beautifully crafted, age-old fishing tackle; silver spinners, hand-painted floats, ancient reels, tiny weights. Each of us has a palm-sized booklet of plastic sleeves, each sleeve housing a barbed hook, attached to a thin line. Today I’m fishing with maggots. My Dad bought them they day before and they slept in a plastic box inside a paper bag inside his refridgerator over night. I slide the size 8 hook through the loose skin at the base of the fat, wiggling maggot, and then add another one for luck. Together they move like the legs of a can-can girl on stage, and I wonder what they must be thinking. I wipe the flakes of their sawdust bed from my fingers. I consider the weight of the line and the river before me, I tilt the rod gently behind me, checking for any potential obstructions, and then smoothly flick the rod forward. Flipping the bail-arm back into place, I place the rod on the rest, and then sit down on the grass, watching the orange float bob and it gets tickled by the ripples.

In the distance there are cows. A tiny pick-up truck stops at a gate, and the animals move towards the familiar figure of the farmer. Miles away a dog is barking. A swallow plunges down to the river and scoops up a beak-full of water, another follows it shortly after and the bull rushes hiss in the breeze. The sounds all around me are created by that which cannot hear, nature is just moving, without looking, without instruction, cause and effect, cause and effect.

A fishing rod flies from the floor of a bamboo house and lands in the water like a failed javelin attempt. The 60 or so people around the lake squeal with laughter and excitement as a topless young man scales one of the houses stilts, and tries to recover the rod with his outstretched toes. No-one is looking anywhere but at this spectacle now. His friends are taking photos, the girls are giggling uncontrollably and he is sweating and sweating under the sun’s cruel heat. A fishing star for different reasons, he clamps the bamboo pole between his toes and brings it up to his hands and then back onto the house. Everyone cheers.

“Một! Hai! Ba!” echos around the lake and nealy a hundred glasses are clinked. No-one is fishing anymore, no-one but me. My rod is a three metre long bamboo pole. On the end of it is tied a two metre long nylon line, and at the end of that there is a very large battered and barbed hook, on which a lump of sagging dough is impaled. A weight of sorts reluctantly, slowly pulls the line down into the water below, water which is covered in a waxy film, peppered with remnants of matter. A large, dead fish floats by, belly up, it has no eyes. “Một! Hai! Ba! Một! Hai! Ba!” A child throws an ice ream wrapper into the water, and it finds its way to the rest of the litter which has been collecting over time.

An hour passes and there’s no sign of any fish. But the visual symphony on display before us makes the waiting so much more fruitful. Husband and wife swans glide past us, making a V of direction in the water. A grass snake makes an S as it journeys across the breadth of the river. A heron stands motionless for an unknown amount of time, before plunging its neck into the water and coming up with a flapping flash of silver in its beak.

My Dad brings me a Marmite sandwich, he’s looking over at his rod and then down at mine. Hands cupping his elbows, his fishing hat resting perfectly on his head. He looks over to Granddad, Granddad is considering the compartments of his fishing box, he sees us looking at him, and then he nods a hello. Dad goes to talk to him, I eat my Marmite sandwiches, crumbs in my lap, my eyes on the dragonfly at the end of my fishing rod.

There’s a beautiful dragon fly on the end of my fishing rod. It’s the colour of embers and the size of a finger. A water boatman skates across the water in front of me and stops where my line meets the film. I wiggle my rod mildly, to play with the insect, and it skates in a circle around my line and then scurries away. The fish are not biting.

The waitress arrives with a large metal tray, she kneels down and places the food on the ground. Rice, a roasted chicken, steamed vegetables, beef noodles, lemon juice. I pull in my line and take a chunk of the chicken. I pierce the toughest part of the meat with the hook, and gently tug at it to make sure it’s secure. I plop the baited hook back into the water, feed myself some chicken, and wait.

More and more bubbles are appearing around my line, and soon the rod is twitching with interest. It lasts for some minutes and I peer down into the murky depths below and see a score of tiny fish picking away at the chicken. Soon the activity subsides and the meat is gone. I bring my line back in and re-bait, I go through this sequence for an hour.

Suddenly there is music; the sound of terrible karaoke is an aural calamity through distorting speakers. Around the lake other people join in the singing from a distance. Someone’s rod falls into the water. A child draws up beside me and drops his line into the water next to mine, then he challenges me to a sword fight with our rods and I know that one of us is going in.

“Wind in slowly Deb, not too fast,” I think I’ve got a bite. Dad and Granddad gently wind their lines in, and then come over to help me. “Can you feel it pulling yet? … There … There it is Deb, now give it a strike, just gentle but firm, go on, now.” I flicked my hand with purpose and the fish on the end of my line accepts my challenge. It pulls back and dives lower, the line juddering and opposing. The float is under the water and my heart is racing. The line is coming away from the reel and my eyes are chasing it across the river. Dad and Granddad advise me, Dad stands by with the keep net. Soon I’m winding the fish closer, and soon it is within reach. Congratulations and smiles all round, I take the fish into my hands and my Dad takes a photo.

Suddenly my rod is going into the water. I jump up and grab it while there is only an inch of it left to grab. I strike immediately and feel the urgency of the animal on the end of the line. I go for the reel but then my hands remember there isn’t one. I lift the rod with both hands and the glistening fish is flapping in protest. Taking the line in my hands I lift it over the railing; the nylon pressing hard against the skin of my fingers. All around the lake there are congratulatory cheers. Someone has caught a really good size fish. It’s me. On the floor, it looks up at me and says something like “I can’t believe this has happened.” I place my hands over it’s back to hold it still, and try to remove the hook from it’s lip. Time is passing and I’m trying not to panic. I’m aware of a lot of eyes on me, the foreigner, the foreigner with the big fish. I’m thinking about my Dad, and thinking I have to get this right. The hook eventually gives up its grip, and without waiting another moment, I gently introduce the fish back into the water. A collective gasp of disbelief can be heard around the lake, and I feel like a winner.

Rock cakes and biscuits, Marmite sandwiches and hot sugary tea, Mars bars and orange squash. I’m twenty years older now, and I live on the other side of the world from the Sussex rivers and lakes in which I was taught to fish. The love of fishing, the memories of so many trips, and the gratefulness that I feel towards my Granddad, my Dad and all of the fishermen and women in my family, will never leave me. And of course the love of Marmite sandwiches and rock cakes, which could only be made so exceptionally well, by my beloved Nan.

I love Middle Warp.

It only takes about 5 minutes to get from the city to the secret metal staircase. Halfway along Long Bien Bridge, the steps lead down to the island. Sometimes you hardly see anyone there, just a handful of people dotted around, attenting to plants and washing their clothes in the river, but today there were scores of people walking and playing. Most of those people were naked, and all of the naked ones were men. They were standing on their heads, running up and down in bare feet, partaking in strenuous upper body workouts, digging holes, pushing motorbikes, teasing snakes, and pointing and laughing at us. Us who were clothed. Some of them who had managed to find their underpants, joined us in an afternoon game of football, which of course we didn't win. I didn't play, I took photos and sat with a group of about 8 kids who thought everything we did was the silliest thing they'd ever seen. Afterwards, we had a picnic, and a naked man cycled past us nonchalantly, but when it was time to cycle back past us, the chain on his bike broke and he was left peddaling madly, going nowhere, looking stressed, scared and naked as us girls looked on. As I tried to photograph the sunset, another pant-wearing jogger with a torch strapped about his person, ran into shot as I clicked 'go!', and there he is.

Middle Warp. You are number one.

It's 6am and there's a new sound waking me up. The sound of a song I've not yet heard, a morning call I haven't responded to before. My neighbours have recently been buying more and more caged birds, which sway in the breeze outside during the day, and are covered in red cloth over night. One of the new birds meows like a dying cat, and all of the other birds respond by singing harder and louder, and it goes on and on and on ... The children run around outside before school, their mother shouts something at them which I can't understand, they laugh and then cry and then jump onto a motorbike and the sound of it disappears into the labyrinth of the alley beyond. Now only a few birds are singing; they're some houses away from each other but their call and response cuts through the air like light off a series of strategically placed mirrors. Downstairs, a woman is singing and washing her clothes. She's running the items under a tap and then pressing them into the ground to rinse them out. With the bird song, the running water and the singing, it feels like a fairy tale. A gust of wind blows my windows open and it feels like I'm being invited into the world outside, so off I go.

A dog runs in front of my motorbike. I screech to a halt and miss it by inches, when I look back I see that it's wearing a child-sized Spiderman t-shirt. The dog is nonchalant. It looks French. Away from my bike and into the alley, I'm walking to remember what it feels like to love this place, to remember how within every ten metres there's a new story to be told. Two girls are singing to each other down an alley, when they see me they stop singing and start laughing with embarrassment, then they wave and shout hello. A woman is holding a mobile phone to the ear of a very young baby, the baby looks serious, like it's about to make the biggest deal of it's life. Some boy racers fly past me, each with 2 passengers on the back of their motorbikes, they wheelie, cheer, look back and almost collide with an oncoming vehicle. And during that moment no-one dies.

I walk past a church, the bells are so loud. On the other side of the road two men are drilling the inside of a concrete block. Somehow it makes a deep, long, bass sound, and together with the bells it's like some sort of Indian raga. It's one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.

I find a new house, it looks like something out of the Wizard of Oz. It looks like it's about to collapse in a defeated heap, I take a photo while it's still standing.

I'm back on the island. The biggest cabbages I have ever seen grow there. Someone waves to me from a boat made of paper and plastic, I wave back and feel guilty. Just before I leave the island, I blush at the naked men swimming in the Red River.

I'm in hospital. I'm trying to work out if it is real or not. "If you take this medication, there's a good chance you will turn blue, then you'll have to come back for more treatment so we can un-blue you." I want to turn blue, but it's expensive to be turned back again. Dominic is there, I'm very, very cold and my throat is the most sore it has ever been. I can't swallow without fear of pain. I haven't eaten, but only for a day. I'm being rehydrated through an IV and a bill for $800 is placed on the blanket over my tummy. A pen is being waved before me, that pen is now in my bedroom at home. I don't sign it, it's too much. I pay less and a few hours later I'm at home. It's nothing serious, but it hurts and I have the strength of an ant. What dreams I consume when I have a fever. Death by cut finger, a dog for a boyfriend and a haircut I can't face life with.

There's a burning horse.

It's 8am on a different day, the day after, or the one before. One of my neighbours has erected giant speakers in his courtyard, and welcomes us all into the day by singing us a romantic Vietnamese ballad. It's the same one my neighbour on the other side likes to sing before lunch, and one I hear flowing out of karaoke bars around the city.

Downstairs, my landlord has silently left snowy blocks of flavoured sugar and fresh dragon fruit on my table as gifts. For so long he couldn't even make eye contact with me. For so many months he would say 'yes' when I said good morning. He would come to my house to fix something or move something and just shout at me in angry indecipherable Vietnamese. But something changed. Something in the form of a bottle of whisky I took round for him one day, and from then on, everything changed. Now he says 'hello friend' when I say hello to him, and when I try to speak to him he allows a tiny smile in the corner of his mouth, and sometimes a moment of acknowledgement with his eyes.

Outside, the alley is glistening with confetti which is dancing with yellowing leaves and burnt money, and a man shouts 'I love you!' waving to me, as he speeds past on his motorbike. It's warm now, the frogs make their chorus every night and I can still hear them when I fall asleep.

I took these photos around my neighbourhood today. It’s the eve of Chinese New Year, or Tet as it’s referred to ‘round these here parts. Today’s collection includes topless mannequins, bloody chickens and dirty fingers.

We didn't have a great start to our much anticipated bike trip. Tasha was in and out of the bathroom all night with a terrible fever and stomach ache, and by the time the morning of the great adventure had arrived I started to get some kind of sympathy illness and felt quite green. We dosed up on everything we could ingest, including Gatorade, croissants, vitamin C supplements and Ameflu, and left the murky orange hotel room.

I found myself in the back room of a motorbike hire shop, handing over my passport and $260 to a woman who said she could help me buy a one year visa for Vietnam. Her name was given to me on a piece of paper before I left Vietnam, and as I waved goodbye to the items I wondered what fresh adventure would be waiting for me when I returned to collect the items four days later.

Pushing that to the back of my mind, Tasha and I hired two motorbikes and were swiftly on our way. Having lived in Hanoi for almost one year, I thought nothing of driving down the street the wrong way and then traversing across the 'DO NOT CROSS HERE' central reservation. But unfortunately the majority of drivers in Phnom Pen do actually adhere to the Highway Code, and the police who were waiting for two unfortunate souls with no driving licenses to come along were delighted to meet us. After some good-humoured bartering we managed to be back on our way only $15 lighter. Some one hundred metres later I turned the bike back around and swapped it for one which had brakes and a tendency to always want to turn left. But it was the best I could get and finally we were on our way. 

We stopped to ask for directions to Road 4 several times, and although the kindness of strangers is always going to be one of the greatest things about Asia, the general sense of direction is not, and everyone had a different idea about which way we should be going. At one point we took a route which a kindly soul swore was the correct way, only to find a crazy old man who had overheard our conversation come burning it down the road after us, whilst dramatically gesturing 'left!' with his hand and foot, and for us to take his crazy advice and head straight back into town again.

The great open road. It's a cliché but the sense of freedom you experience when you have nothing but a motorbike, a rucksack and a bag of lychees really is a wonderful thing. We stopped only for rice and petrol and sugar cane, and spent hours hopping on and off the road away from trucks and buses which were thundering along the way.

Pepsi bottles re-filled with petrol, giant black elephant sculptures, golden Buddhas, barefoot naked children, shiny apple stalls, rain-beaten umbrellas, sun-tired old ladies sleeping under trees, makeshift wedding venues leaning in the breeze, shoe-less monks wrapped in burnt sienna robes, buffalo nuzzling each other and bathing in muddy pools, corn-on-the-cob sweltering over tiny barbecues ... at every glance each new scene is a mosaic of colour and activity, and as we fly by on our motorbikes it's easy to wonder what else we could be missing.

We have only 2 hours of daylight left. We're on the side of a small country road, drinking iced sugarcane juice and trying not to worry about where we're going to sleep tonight. The old woman who runs the sugarcane stall laughs at everything we do, and when we try to speak Cambodian to her she repeats what we say back to us and then just laughs even more. She fondly waves us on our way and we're soon looking ahead towards Kiriram Mountain, and hoping to get there before nightfall.

The red track before us promises an exciting drive. The trees either side of the track have been coated in red dust and everything has a strange sepia tint to it. We don't now how long this road is or how long it'll take to get to wherever we're going, we don't know anything, aside from the fact that daylight is slipping away from us even quicker than before.

We find a village. A cluster of stilt houses are dotted together on either side of the road, and cows and chickens wander around carelessly through hedges and into bushes and out of sight no sooner than they are seen. A group of giggling locals approach us and ask if we need somewhere to stay. Most of the stilt houses around us are doubling up as home-stays, and within minutes the English-speaking community leader is brought to us. He tells us we can go and eat with him at the community centre, that there are other guests there, we just have to follow him on our bikes. Realising it was now pitch black, and we could hardly even see each other’s faces, we flicked the light switches on our bikes only to discover that neither Tasha's nor mine were working.

Tasha climbed onto the back of the leader's bike. She turned the torch on her mobile phone on, and I followed behind, concentrating on nothing but that tiny light, with no idea of what was either side of me or whether or not I was coming up to any pot-holes or cows. We were exhausted, sickly and at a loss to even guess what was going to happen next, and what happened next was even more surreal than the events leading up to it.

I followed that tiny light for only 1 or 2 kilometres. The temperature changed along the way and it felt like we were driving through a forest. Other than that mobile phone light I really could not see anything else at all, so my other senses were more alert and it felt like we were driving through a more enclosed area. The cicadas were in full song and there was a mild rustle amongst the trees, and then finally there was some kind of structure lit up before us. I clambered off my bike and swore a lot, and then we were ushered into a very small barn. I had spent a lot of time that day wondering what it would be that would kill us on this trip, and after following a total stranger into some woodland on a pitch black night up a mountain in Cambodia, I felt quite peaceful about what felt like imminent death, I was too tired to oppose it now. I thought it might make quite a good film. But then suddenly before us were dancing children. About twelve of them holding polished coconut shells, slowly and light-footedly skipping in circles and clinking the shells against those of their partners, then bowing and circling then going around again. They were dancing to pre-recorded traditional countryside music, and with us sat about ten other tourists looking on adoringly.
After the performance we sat under a bamboo shack and ate a beautiful Khmer curry, and pretty much spent the entire time shaking our heads at each other in disbelief, wondering how things could have just got stranger and stranger throughout the day, only to end with us in a totally unknown place that we couldn't really see.

After dinner the community leader led us back through the woods and towards the village, this time I had my travel torch around my head and a bit more strength with a belly full of rice and vegetables. When we arrived at our home-stay, a group of local children were sat on the wooden decking outside of the house, looking up to a small whiteboard as they took in a late lesson from our landlord who was also a local teacher.

Before I went to bed I looked in the mirror and saw that my face was covered in the red dust from the road, I looked terrifying and wondered how none of those children had cried when they saw me.

The silence of that mountain was deafening. Over the next few days we took the time to stop our bikes to just listen to it in awe. We walked through a bamboo forest and saw tiny black lizards running for cover from our every move. Sometimes when we were travelling through areas where locals had not seen many tourists, we were waved on and cheered at like runners in the London marathon.

Here are some pictures from our brilliant trip and then market pictures back in Phnom Pen on the last day.

One thing you don't really anticipate when deciding to move to Asia, is that you will spend 4 months of the year being really cold. It's a kind of cold which you never entirely commit to beliving in, because you're in Asia, and you feel like it's probably going to just be hot again today, but then it isn't and you're absolutely bloody freezing cold. Sometimes, you're driving through actual clouds and your hands are so cold they become solid chunks of un-maliable metal, just left gripping your motorbike handles forever, your thumb unable to lift itself to flick the indicator or press the bibber. Somehow, it's colder indoors than it is outside. I don't know a single person in Hanoi who has central heating - why would you? In the summer it's so hard to believe it could ever get this cold. During the summer, simple tasks like tying your shoe laces become challenges which have to be approached with dread, because in just moments you will have sweat dripping from your nose and your chin because you did something as strenuous as bending over. When you wear three layers of clothes to bed, plus a jacket, and sleep under 2 blankets whilst spooning a hot water bootle, you just can't really believe that a few months ago it was so hot you wanted to take all of your skin off and sleep in the fridge. In the summer, when it takes only 20 minutes to dry a pair of jeans on the washing line, it's nearly impossible to imagine that later on in the year it's going to take around 3 days to dry your clothes outside, and they're still not dry but you've got to wear something other than your pyjamas under your clothes. I wake up every morning with a thin, waxy layer of dew all over me. My bed sheets begin to gather mould if I don't turn at least once every hour and the bathroom floor never, ever dries after a shower. The walls in my house are coated in a layer of dew, and the steam from my rice cooker never, ever leaves.

It's been around a month since I last saw the sky, and that can be have an impact on one's general state of well being. But there are new injections of colour on this otherwise grey landscape. There's nothing strange anymore about getting stuck behind a bonsai tree on a motorbike in traffic, but as we hurtle towards the Tet holiday, it's becoming more and more common to get stuck in traffic behind beautiful cumquat trees, making their way across the city by motorbike to be a central focus point in celebrating the new year. Next to my house, a cumquat orchard is in full bloom. Months ago the trees were tiny and you could see across the field. But now the beautifully ripe and healthy trees are bursting with eagarness to be transported to a loving home. Miniature trucks, delivery vehicles and motorbikes pull up in a constant stream to take the trees to their new homes.

Every day, more and more sparkly lights are being put up across the streets and being hung from lamp posts. Giant plastic floating lotus flower lights are being placed in the lakes, which create magical scenes at night when they're switched on, and make-shift shops selling trees that are bursting with pink blossom are being set up on every other street. It feels like something is about to happen. A lot of people are going back to their homes outside of this city, and soon it's going to be an eerily quiet place where it might be possible to cross a road without wondering if that's the last thing you'll ever do.

One of the greatest things about living in Hanoi is acknowledging that in order to survive it, you have to regularly escape from it. Recently I did just that and went to a wonderful place called Mai Chau. It's about 4 hours west of Hanoi and when you're there it feels very much like you've stepped back in time. Farmland, mountains, forests, buffalo, and bamboo houses on stilts. It's the only place I know where you can wake up to the sound of wood being sawn at 4am in the morning, along with pig squeals, cockerel crowing and children's laughter. Despite it being a small place with few foreign tourists, people were indifferent and unsurprised at seeing a big white face like mine, and that made it easy to feel relaxed about being a tourist somewhere like that. When you're there it's hard to believe that Gucci and Louis Vuitton shops exist just a few hours away, because in Mai Chau time has stood still and it's like a glimpse into the past.

Hanoi in the winter. It's bloody freezing, dewy and waxy. But while the pho is good and the promise of summer holds true, it's still the best place to be.

 

I recently returned to England for a very short while. Stepping into the cold, bleak Sussex countryside was a terrifying prospect; having been living in dresses and flip-flops for the best part of 9 months I wondered how long it would take to get a cold. And for the first time in my life, experiencing what it's like to be on holiday in my own country and seeing things from the perspective of a visitor. When I left England back in February it was an utterly miserable time with the winter seemingly unwilling to relent, and with the first proper wave of large-scale redundancies and cut-backs taking place there was a real sense of impending gloom. So when I was picturing coming back I wondered how much of that I would step back into, and I was nervous about the initial jolt I might feel, particularly as I've never been out of England for more than a few weeks before.

Well it was a mixed bag of things - England did seem gloomy and low; more of my friends have been made redundant or are struggling to find meaningful work despite their qualifications and years of experience. Many people I spoke to are struggling to find a way to make ends meet with the cost of living rising but jobs disappearing or wages plateauing, and having been almost entirely away from mainstream British press for such a chunk of time, it was also quite startling to see and hear so much TV and newspaper coverage dominated by the state of the economy. It's hard to see how a nation can be optimistic and hopeful about the future when the projection really is just all gloom and doom.

But a beauty remains in England and I will always love it for what it is and what it isn't. I always took for granted how lucky I am to have been born here; to have a British passport and the freedom that comes with that. To be born with English as my mother-tongue is also more of a privilege than I ever properly realised before along with the availability of free health care, schools and wide open spaces. England isn't perfect, but for me it is a great starting point and maybe I just never fully realised that before I went away from it and looked back in.

I went to the wedding of my life-long best friend. I don't recall ever having experienced quite so many varying emotions in just one night. Some things are just too personal to open up about on a blog, and maybe I'll write them down one day and share, but the main feelings were those of total joy for my friends. People are finding each other and building brilliant lives together. Many of my friends are now creating new life and are going to make wonderful parents, some are wonderful parents already and they're just getting better at it all the time. Having a bit of distance from it all has reminded me that we were all once just total douche-bags, barely able to look after ourselves and living precariously, and now things are moving on but somehow we're all pretty much the same, no-one seems to be ageing, we're just getting a bigger collection of stories and more things to laugh and cry about.

So back to Hanoi. Where everything is upside down and back to front and rarely explained. It's a long way away, and it's soon going to be very cold and bleak for a few months. But it's home for now, and we're in love, so that's where I'm going to and that's where I know that for now, I'm meant to be.

Here are some pictures of Tilgate Park, where I spent a lovely day with my Dad and my sister Liv.

And of course, me and the lovely bride.

Tucked away in Hanoi's Old Quarter are a handful of small galleries and art shops which specialise in prints of old propaganda posters. I find them incredibly powerful and kind of beautiful in a sad and dark sort of way. There are scores of different pictures and messages, and these are just a few.

photos by Dominic Blewett

5am is never all that funny. It’s an hour at which sightings are usually observed after a late night out, during a trip back from the airport or after one has been woken up by the commencement of surprise construction. It’s not a time for laughing — for most it’s an hour reserved for sleeping.

It’s no secret that for many Vietnamese, the day begins with exercise, whether it’s badminton, aerobics or running. More recently people have started ballroom dancing by west lake and break dancing in little Lenin park, and it’s no longer rare to see salsa and sexy dancing breaking out in unpopulated areas at daybreak. But now something else has arrived, which is taking the city by storm; move over Tai Chi, it’s time to get silly.

A group of over 250 people are mid-squat in front of the Ly Thai To statue opposite Hoan Kiem lake. I can’t tell if my bleary eyes are deceiving me when I see them all motioning like they are brushing their teeth with giant invisible toothbrushes, while others engage in face pulling, chanting, clapping and giggling. Are old ladies really tapping youngsters on their shoulders before running away in slow motion, like faux pantomime villains? This is laughter yoga — the sport of sheer madness. 

Every morning, hundreds of revellers flock to the square on Dinh Tien Hoang to take part in what can only be described as 60 minutes of total lunacy. And it’s brilliant. One might wonder how it’s possible to laugh at absolutely nothing at all, but as soon as you start stomping, stretching, hand-rubbing, back-patting and shaking-it-all-about, genuine laughter begins to come easily. Before you know it you’re pretty much only thinking about how to make the person next to you laugh even harder. And until you’ve seen a couple of hundred people brushing their hair with invisible brushes, or playing invisible pianos before sticking their fingers in their ears, it’s hard to imagine how it can be funny.

“I got bored of aerobics, this is more fun and the more you do it the more happiness you feel inside your body; it's good for the body but more importantly, it's good for the soul too,” says one participant after the session. 

Laughter yoga originated in Mumbai in the early 1990s and is now practiced in scores of countries with thousands of clubs springing up as the joke spreads. The discipline centres on the human brain’s apparent inability to differentiate between fake and real laughter. What starts as an artificial giggle can transform into psychologically real laughter. According to its practitioners, laughter yoga brings more oxygen to the brain and the body, and with the assistance of yogic breathing and the release of endorphins, it’s easy to feel pleasantly heady and uplifted.

“I was already practising Tai Chi and Kung Fu and decided to go to India for 18 months. That’s where I encountered laughter yoga for the first time,” says instructor Le Anh Son. “I knew that Vietnamese people would love this type of exercise, so I decided to bring it home to Hanoi.” Just 13 people attended his first class in 2007. “People were shy at first, it was a bit daunting,” explains son. “But now we have over 200 people attending every day. The biggest ever turn out was over 600.” Another joker chimes in, “I’ve been coming here for a few months now, and of course it makes you feel good when you're here, but it makes you feel good for the rest of the day as well. When you walk away smiling you pass that smile on to everyone you meet, and the happiness spreads to other people”.

Sixty minutes of near-constant laughing makes tummy muscles ache to the equivalent of 100 sit ups, which means that washboard stomach could be more of a reality if you can just manage to make it along every morning.

Laughter yoga takes place at 6am under the Ly Thai To statue on Dinh Tien Hoang and is free

Rusting mallets, giant oil-stained nails and soot-covered buckets line the walls of what is 52-year-old Nguyen Phuong Hung’s working museum. On a street that onced housed scores of blacksmiths, Hung’s tiny corner workshop is the last remaining business of its kind in the city.

“Blacksmith Street has lost its meaning now, like most of the streets in the Old Quarter,” says Hung. “The names no longer represent what is sold or made there, it makes me sad to see the old city disappearing.”

Around 1990, many of the traditional businesses that inhabited their namesake avenues began disappearing and were replaced by hotels, cafes and souvenir shops. Before, the blacksmith network on Lo Ren Street had felt very much like a family affair. According to Hung, workers had a common interest and could share tools and insights concerning their trade.

As Hung administers another handful of finely chopped charcoal onto his smouldering workshop fire, he explains: “I know most of the shop owners on this street, but we don’t have the same closeness and familiarity that was present when we were all blacksmiths.”

Hung’s scarred, blistered and blackened hands bear the brunt of the wear and tear that this physically demanding job inflicts. He sits amid an array of buckets, drills and saws, effortlessly lifting a heavy metal mallet before thundering it down onto a glowing red-hot pin. His forearms are like those of a giant. To challenge him to an arm wrestle would be as fruitless as an ant trying to push a mountain, and while his clothes are oil-stained, burned and ripped, his spirit is not.
“I know that it’s considered to be a low-class occupation, and I am judged because of my dirty hands, but to me it feels like art; you have to be creative to do this, and that’s the part of me which a machine will never be able to replace.”

Hung is the final successor in a family business that has spanned three generations. He accepts that his children have chosen a different path — one that entails university study and modern life over traditional, labour-intensive work. “My father really wanted me to take over the business when he retired, and I couldn’t say no, so I changed my career plans and started working here in 1991, and although at first I hated it, I grew to love it,” says Hung, who studied engineering before becoming a blacksmith. “Now I understand that to do a job well you have to really love it, and so I want my children to feel the same about what they do.”

In a city where modern buildings are springing up at an almost alarming rate, the job of a blacksmith remains surprisingly relevant. Demand for Hung’s expertise is high with his clients, mostly from the construction sector, who require him to fashion bespoke nails and pins for their projects. “In the West the majority of a blacksmiths work is in making horse shoes, but I can make anything,” says Hung, who remembers when his family did make shoes. “We didn’t have many horses here so we made shoes for the cows. There used to be loads of them wandering around these streets before we had cars and motorbikes.”

Some of Hung’s stranger creations have included making swords and spears for theatre productions. He has even been asked on several occasions to make tools used to disinter graves.

The rusting artefacts, which are crammed onto the ageing shelves inside Hung’s workshop, are derived from various origins. A 1954 Electric Blower is one of the oldest tools in the workshop, and as Hung adjusts its dial, a firework display emerges from the embers and rains down onto the floor around him.

Glistening charcoal dust blankets the workshop floor and the pavement outside. A soot-stained kettle sways and sings above the bright orange mouth of the fire, while Hung slams his mallet onto another red-hot pin, before tossing it into a blackened pot of cold water.

One day, in perhaps another decade or two, there will be no remaining blacksmiths on Lo Ren — the name will be a mere nod to a past tradition martyred to modernity. But while Hung’s first and most important tools are still within his reach, the kettle, the anvil and the hammer will steam, clatter and bang on for another day.

Hung’s workshop can be found on the corner at 26 Lo Ren, Hoan Kiem