And Anthony Bourdain slept here
He would hate the comparison, but Anthony Bourdain was a fucking prophet.
Bourdain had a knack for doing something so basic at which most of us fail: he was his authentic self and allowed others to be, too. Bourdain navigated people and spaces that were foreign to him in the way that we should all be expected to do, with curiosity and lack of judgement. This sounds simple enough, but so many of us who travel fail terribly at this. We travel in a way that is ultimately comforting to us. In a way that helps us reaffirm the things we already believe about the world and the people within it. Our idea of “discovery” is more often than not retreading paths that were already laid by countless others before us.
See a photo, recreate a photo, encourage others to do the same. That wasn’t Bourdain’s modus operandi. For someone with a massively popular TV show, he wasn’t an evangelist. In much the same way that Mr. Rogers was a cultural icon, Bourdain let us observe him asking the right questions and letting others tell their own stories.
Fundamentally, he was a guy who led by example and inspired me to be a better, more thoughtful traveler.
We visited Vietnam less than a year after Anthony Bourdain’s death. His love for Vietnam was well known. I can picture his lanky frame hunched over a bowl of pho while sitting on a plastic step stool on a street in Hanoi. His interview there with then President Barack Obama has racked up countless views on YouTube. I found comfort in it, observing two men who have lived all over the world sharing a beer, a bowl of pho, and chatting about things they found interesting.
On the third day of our trip, we followed our set itinerary to Halong Bay where we were to board an overnight cruise among the karsts off the coast of Vietnam. We didn’t know that the boat would be the Emeraude, the same one that Bourdain took during his visit.
The room was small and smelled just slightly of mildew, but the sheets were crisp and comfy and the rocking of the boat was gentle. I woke up at 4:30am to find that my wife wasn’t in bed. Putting on my jeans, I walked out of the room to find her watching shows on her laptop, on the deck. She went back to sleep, but I stayed up for the sunrise with camera in hand.
I wonder if Bourdain woke up early as well, along with the crew, to watch the sunrise and transition from one day to the next.
The following shots were taken on a Konica Big Mini BM-201 and a Nikon F60 (same as the N60, but an international model) with a 50mm f/1.8 lens. The film was a mix of Kodak Ektachrome E100, Kodak Ultramax 400, and Kodak Colorplus 200. At this point, I’m not sure which was which.
It was on this the deck of the Emeraude that I spent nearly two hours talking to a former cop who served the warrant at Rajneeshpuram, the compound made famous in Netflix’s Wild Wild Country.
There were a dozen other boats on the water that day, with a handful racing us to get to different islands were we climbed the hills to see Halong Bay from another vantage point.
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