Sepia Saturday: Among the Hmong

Of all the places I have visited, few have fascinated me as much as Vietnam where I travelled in 1992 and 1995, when going there was still a bit "forbidden" and raised eyebrows when I mentioned it.
Here I am on the right, hard at work taking several hundred black and white images (we'll call them sepia for this entry) and a few less hundred slides. I've been sorting through them and other pre-digital images lately as a part of the never ending digitalizing and sorting process.
All of these were taken in Ha Giang Provence on the China border and populated primarily by ethnic minorities that have long fallen out of the economic and social mainstream. It was one of the poorest places I've ever visited, though not as extreme as Haiti.
Sorry that this is more a visual than written entry, but I have written about travels there here earlier and would love to return.

Here's My Dong and Uncle Ho

Since I will be having an unprecedented patch of seven weeks of not flying anywhere, I thought I'd relive this 1996 trip to Ha Giang Province and Hanoi. Yes, I seem to still have a few Dongs left and my boarding pass. Sadly, no photos are allowed inside Uncle Ho's tomb. He looked sort of blue/green.