VIETNAM: A PARADISE PAVED IN CONCRETE

What a piece of work is man....

Ha Long Bay.

The iconic paradise of verdant islands in the sea. And despite the heavy rotation of tourists tramping up to the top of the hill and marching back down again, the boat after boat after boat, it IS still beatiful.

Less beautiful is the view from my hotel. Concrete for a solid five miles in both directions. The skeletal beginnings of hotel after hotel after hotel. The tourist dollars that Vietnam needs… because we all need more money all the time, right? Except that the average inhabitant doesnt look like too much is trickling down to them. Same as everywhere right? There. Is. No. Trickledown. When will we learn this?

And let’s not even start on the climate-crippling effect of using concrete. Go google it. All that construction is, in reality, and you know it, actually destructive.

But concrete or no concrete, the pollution here is so bad, you cant see what would be an incredible view. You can't climb the mountain to see it anyway because instagrammers have left their shit there and set fires there so often, its illegal to go up there.

We drive for an hour and a half to find an 'authentic village' with the agreement we will stop if we see anything pretty. We dont stop once in 90 minutes. It is soot and concrete and smog and motorbikes and shit the whole way. We get there, and still the smog persists, even in the fields there is concrete and satellite dishes and cables everywhere. I sit on a bench, overwhelmed by what has been done to this place, clearly once an unearthly paradise. I have cried for about an hour now, a grown man of 54. What the fuck have we done to our planet?