It has been more than a year since I last poured a little of my life in to this pool, and anyone who has swung by during that period would be well within rights to assume I had plans to let it just dry up entirely; that I'd moved on to other things. I haven't, or not intentionally, but my daily retreat in to silence (or back to just collecting photos, which is no replacement for reflection) weakens the impulse to observe at all. Laziness, loneliness, the absence of audience - I have any number of ways to convince myself that writing this stuff down isn't worth the time, but frankly, I miss it. And so it was no small relief to find a blog post this morning, written by a friend about trip she'd taken years ago, that moved me to the point of acting. This is worth it, the audience be damned.

☂

Huyén Trung Khánh, Vietnam — Three men sit at a squat wooden table, shoulders hunched and hands busy: sip tea, smoke cigarette, take shot. Repeat. Their rhythm is steady. I get the sense that these shots started long before I arrived, and it's late enough in the morning for their hunches to have deepened somewhat, for the thread of conversation to fray as they stare out in to the rain.

It has been raining for three days. Wide puddles carve the street in to an archipelago of muddy slabs, and the noise from the tarp above us drowns out the song of two doves, whose bamboo cage dangles from a nearby tree. The woman who runs things under this particular tarp is older, and the deep creases of her face stretch in to a knowing smile when I catch her poaching an orange from my grocery bag. The cuffs of her black velvet pants have taken on a rusty orange color from the mud, and they almost match her shawl, which is wool and knotted and kept tied up under her chin. It's chilly today, and my fingers are grateful for the warmth of my mug. Teenage girls that I imagine to be the woman's grandchildren stop by every so often, settling in one of the tiny plastic chairs to sit and chat, their umbrellas dangling from the same branch that is holding up the doves.

Today is market day, and the rain doesn't appear to have kept anyone away. The narrow paths of the square have become a thoroughfare of glistening helmets, and beneath each helmet flows a colorful poncho, giving the whole scene an odd uniformity, as though everyone has just stepped in to costume. Tarps of every dimension stretch over stalls of every description - there is no theme. Rows of neon-green cabbage sit next to dented tin pots that are filled with tight little bundles of pens or rice cakes sweetened with honey. Heaps of red spiky fruit pile against squat burlap bags of grain or scratched plastic jugs that I'm guessing contain the same throat-scorching grog that the guys at my cafe have been doing shots of since breakfast. Sitting behind a mound of oranges that could fill a bathtub, a couple of older women cackle as they pluck leaves and prepare bags. There's even a woman here with her sewing machine. Beside her waits a short queue of shoppers, hoping to have their backpacks repaired.

I wasn't planning on staying here for more than a day. As a matter of convenience, I had decided to split the six hour drive from Cau Bang to Ban Gioc (a waterfall on the Chinese border) in half, figuring, thanks to my usual levels of optimistic ignorance, that there would probably be a town closer in where I could spend the night. The cluster of houses that I stumbled upon as the sun was going down - nestled amongst lush green peaks, half erased by mist - is small enough to not register with Google (Huyén Trung Khánh is the name of the surrounding district) but they do have a hotel. I checked in to a room that looks out over the main square and parked my motorbike for the evening, expecting to visit Ban Gioc in the morning. Then it started to rain.

And that's a good thing. You need something to hold you in places like this, to keep you still long enough to settle a bit and find value in the quiet. Without the rain, I would never have struck up conversation with Boi (pronounced bo'he), the retired electrical engineer living downstairs who apologizes for his nearly perfect english and explains that his speciality is Russian, which he learned over the course of seven years in Moscow. I would not have found the guy down the street who sells steaming bowls of duck Pho while his portly little terrier inspects the waste baskets next to each table, gently relocating the larger bones to his grisly little stash near the toilet. I wouldn't have found dinner across the street in the empty market building, where a woman, working under the light of a single bulb, spoons out rice porridge over raw eggs before mixing them with onions and ground beef (to make one of the best, heartiest soups I have ever eaten). I wouldn't have been offered shots of that damnable grog by the men eating with me, their eyes red-rimmed and cheerful as they hoist yet another round to the ceiling. And I wouldn't have had the chance to grocery shop on this beautiful, sodden day, and smile at the old lady in her scarf, as she poaches one more of my oranges.