Latest: We have finally got round to making our choice of the 48 photos we reckon to be the best for their own sake. You can see them here. Even better, we have now made the site searchable! You can search the captions, section titles and blurbs for whatever you type into that little box up there in the top right-hand corner. Have fun!
In November and December 2004, we took a trip to Cambodia and Vietnam. We started at the city for Angkor Wat, Siem Reap in Cambodia, and made our way roughly south east via Battambang to Phnom Penh. From there we continued into Vietnam, first to the Mekong Delta and Ho Chi Minh City (or, as the locals still call it, Saigon), then headed north to Hanoi, Ha Long Bay and Sapa, calling at various places along the way.
Over the five weeks we were there, we took more than two thousand digital photographs, over 1600 of which are here for your perusal. The quality of the photos is distinctly variable: most are mediocre, some are pretty poor but may still have content of interest, and there are a few we're really pleased with - but you can decide into which of these categories each photograph falls.
With the exception of a few panorama-type composites, which required some work to assemble (again, with somewhat variable results), they are all - at the moment - completely uncropped, unstraightened and untweaked, just as they came from the camera (a Nikon Coolpix 3100). We may get round to doing something about this over time, and make some improvements where we think they are needed.
We've divided them into sections according to the progress of our journey, so that you can 'drill down' to greater levels of detail (there are 27 photos of the great bas-relief round Angkor Wat alone if you really want to go through them - and know what you're looking at). We're also cross-referencing many of them by general subject matter: plants, animals, transport, sunsets and so on - see the links on the right.
Also while we were away we sent a series of emails to some close friends, detailing our progress - and followed them up with a couple more after we got home. These seem to have been generally well-received, so they are also here (in slightly edited form with [occasional added comments]) for you to read; and we've linking the emails to individual photos or pages of thumbnails as appropriate.
We hope you enjoy your visit to our visit.
Mary and Chris
For those who don't have time to plough through pages and pages of the damn things, we've also made a slide show from a small(ish: 293 to be exact) selection of our photos, the ones we keep on our laptop to show friends at home. You too can see it! (Might be an idea to read below about the buttons first though.)
How to use this site
Wherever you see a small 'thumbnail' image - such as the ones here for Cambodia and Vietnam - click on it to open a window containing a larger 'slide'. You can choose how large this will be by selecting high or low resolution according to your screen size and connection speed (if your browser accepts cookies, you should only have to make this selection once). Whichever size you choose, the composite images will almost always still require you to scroll your browser window sideways to see them in full: the best way to view these therefore is to download them to your hard disk and resize them to suit your own setup.
To move from one slide to another, click the and arrows. Click to close the popup window (or to return here if you don't have JavaScript enabled - though all this works much better if you do!). If your browser supports access keys, they are B (for Back), N (Next) and X (Close - because the button looks like an X) respectively.
Below many of the thumbnail images (like these two) are text links to related pages of thumbnails.
Note: you may need to disable your browser's popup blocker for this site in order to see the full-size photos, which appear in a popup window. The alternative is to disable JavaScript, but that will give you a less satisfactory experience.