That is a thought that came to my mind: the best destination in Vietnam is rain. Explaining. Vietnam as a whole is quite an urban cacophony. The country cannot be called a tropical fairy tale, like Thailand, nor can it be said that it is blessed with art and spirituality, like India. But when a downpour starts and everyone puts on a colorful plastic raincoat, you can suddenly get a touch of a light irrational feeling.
If such rain happens in the evening, this feeling becomes more sensible: all neon signs and lamps are on and accompanied by motorbikes' headlights, blinking and blinding, awaking ephemeral shadows.
If this coincides with the full moon/new moon offerings to ancestors, it's even more powerful: people install tables with fruits and incense sticks, they burn stacks of paper along streets to please spirits... Fire, water, shimmering lights, wandering shadows, smells of incense... Vietnamese Varanasi, if you want a bright comparison; it's not where, it's when.
But if you think it's enough to arrive in monsoon season to photograph this quirky spectacle, you are mistaken. You sometimes have to literally hunt rain if you want rainy images even when it's rainy season in Vietnam.
First of all, drizzles and light rains don't work. Secondly, difficult to predict when it will downpour. The Hue Vietnamese themselves cannot predict when it will rain during monsoon season. The sky can tell you nothing about the weather here. In Da Nang, at least, they have a strong gust of wind before rain (though there are false rainy gusts too).
Secondly, the weather changes fast. You think "Okay, the rain was about to start but it didn't for two hours and, now, the sky is getting clear so it's time for shopping". After buying food, you are leaving the hypermarket and seeing that you are going to miss an amazing downpour... You are hurrying to put on a raincoat, take your camera out of the backpack... and then the rain turns into the drizzle and even this stops soon...
But if you have a week and good luck, you have a good chance to photography one of the perfect Vietnamese downpours... Going to share some recent lucky shots of rain here. Although that rain didn't coincide with the full moon/new moon offerings, it was anyway quite impressive.
It started moderately raining around 4:30 pm. I put on my rain poncho and began a photo adventure.
Thanks to Vietnam, I practiced panning a lot. So many things happen on motorbikes in this country, so you have to often use this technique if you photograph street life in Vietnam.
Someone told the woman I was taking images so I got this positive v-image, as a result. Why not, for the diversity of the photo set.
Water dripping from the plastic awnings, tropical fruits, a vendor with wet hair, people in ponchos in the background... I only wish the rain would be heavier at the moment I took the image.
A vendor, selling from the ground, no awning over her, only a raincoat and rice hat.
People who were on the road felt even less comfortable.
It was getting dark. This was at 5:40 pm:
The rain began to slow down...
...only to re-start with more power:
And even more:
Someone is smiling:
And everyone is in flip-flops.
I was wearing a blue plastic poncho, walking from one awning to another, trying to keep my camera away from water.
A pack of napkins in the pocket was helping me in that. However, it was hard anyway since water was constantly dripping from my raincoat even though I was hiding below awnings most of the time.
She looks like a thoughtful bride in a veil but, no, it's a rain cape:
A specialty of Vietnam: if you noticed, Vietnamese use raincoats of a special design to cover the driver with the passengers together with the front of the motorbike.
Okay, it was a fun day 💯 but I want more downpours! And I believe I'll get more considering it's monsoon season in Hue and I ain't leaving tomorrow! 🙂
More stories from Southeast Asia will follow! 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 October 11, 2024, in Hue, Vietnam.