Standard sunset shot with the bulk of the image under exposed, resulting in completely silhouetted foreground and horizon.

This is a scene across the River Mekong as it winds through Ho Chi Minh City, the river is heavily industrialized and a rather muddy hue during the day, but manages to look quite enticing here.

These two girls illuminated by the light from a grass fire caught my attention as I was walking back from watching the sunset. The exposure was a wild guess, but worked out about right.

The famous old Hotel Continental, dating back to French Colonial occupation of Indochina, when a lot of the street names were French and the city was still known as Saigon. Actually it still gets referred to as Saigon by both the expat's who live there and by a deal of the locals, even the airport code remains as SGN.

Scattered around the Vietnamese country, you often find clusters of brick kilns used to make the local distinctive bricks, seen in the foreground of this image. The bricks themselves are smooth without a frog and largely hollow, making them very light. The bricks appear to be fired rather like pottery, rather than 'burnt' as in English practice where in some cases the fuel is partially mixed in with the clay so that it burns during the process. Vietnamese brickwork on close inspection looks like a complete disaster, with bricks pushed in at seeming any conceivable angle with cement oozing out of the joints and left unfinished. This provides the rough key for the subsequent layers of plaster to go over, at which the Vietnamese are undoubtedly experts, as a perfectly flat and smooth surface results, concealing the bricks beneath. Most dwellings are single skinned as heat retention isn't exactly a problem.

Inside the fuel sheds with the kiln mouths to the right. A variety of fuel is used, but amongst wood a large amount of ground coconut husk is used, this can be seen spilling out of the bays to the left. When being used the kiln entrance is physically bricked up, the firing takes two days then a further two days to cool down before the bricks can be removed and added to the store, the whole process can take a week

Inside an empty kiln about to be recharged, looking straight up into the dome and the apex vent.

Sharing a border with Cambodia means getting from Vietnam to Angkor is a simple task. Angkor was the ancient capital of the Khmers but was abandoned after it was sacked by the Siamese over five centuries ago. The jungle rapidly encroached on the site and systematically demolished the ancient cities and they remained largely forgotten until the 1860s when they were discovered by the French. A huge project to clear and partially reconstruct many of the sites began. One of the most challenging is the Bauphon inside the city of Angkor Thom, this was entirely dismantled to reinforce the crumpling innards, the huge carved blocks were laid out in front of the site and carefully documented, this process was terminated at the end of the Vietnam War, when the US supported Cambodian Government collapsed following US withdrawal and Pol Pot and the 'Khmer Rouge' started their orgy of terror. All the records for the archeology were destroyed and all but a handful of the 1000 strong Khmer team were executed.

Now in happier times, a French sponsored team have started where they left off and the task of re-assembling the enormous jigsaw puzzle continues.