Photos from the Asian continent • Have Camera Will Travel

Cu Chi Tunnels

I don’t usually have issues with claustrophobia, but this isn’t fun anymore. I find it amazing that people could live down here, spending all day below ground in what were not only hot and wet and stifling, but were infested with rats and provided a near ideal environment for incubating disease.

The Lakes of Hanoi

Hanoi has a lot of lakes. And as you’d expect from a bustling, industrialized city of several million people in a country with a decidedly mixed record of dealing with environmental challenges, most of those lakes are severely polluted. But the lakes provide a respite from the crushing traffic and incessant bustle in other parts of the city.

The Hanoi Hilton

This is not a place of sweetness and light. Hao Lo Prison, better known in the west as “the Hanoi Hilton,” was first a French colonial jail for Vietnamese political prisoners and later used during the Vietnam War for American pilots held as prisoners of war. And it’s a place with an especially grim history.

Vietnam’s Perfume River

I’m standing right above the middle of the river, 25 feet above the water surface. And I don’t smell a thing. The Perfume River, it turns out, is only fragrant at a specific time of the year, in the autumn, when the flowers in the orchards up river lose their blossoms into the water.

The River Outpost of Nong Khiaw

We’d arrived late at night, after about eight hours of driving on bumpy, dusty, windy roads through the mountains of the northern Laos provinces of Luang Namtha and Oudomxai. In the dark, there hadn’t been much to see–it’s not exactly lit up like Times Square. There was a bridge. Somewhere far below was the river. And then we were there. Seeing what Nong Khiaw was like would have to wait for morning.