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Apture for Travel
Use Apture to show your friends where you've been and where you're going. Show them maps and real footage of life on the ground of far off places.
With Apture you can link and embed:
- Google Maps and MyMaps (with specialized annotations)
- Online videos that bring your stories to life
- Photos from Flickr, Wikipedia Image, Yahoo image search, and ones that you upload directly with Apture
Hanoi: A City Changing
I meant to post this last week, but I crossed Long Bien bridge by foot last Saturday. It’s a long, rickety thing, originally finished in 1902, that is in desperate need of renovation. When trains cross over, the whole structure shakes and the sidewalk panels are often cracked in the corner, revealing the 100 foot drop below.
I rode over it again last night on a motorcycle. The Hong Song, or Red River, was empty, just reflecting the glow of the city lights. The stars overhead were brighter than any you’d see in a U.S. city, but they will still fade as Hanoi’s skyline grows.
In the center of the river is an island where farmers tend to their crops undisturbed by the giant metropolis teeming around them. Tens of thousands of motorbikes pass overhead everyday, yet the farmers on this island live in simple concrete and thatch homes. Vietnam’s agriculture industry is considered among the most vulnerable to an oncoming wave of imported commodities once the country joins the WTO as expected in October.
After the government subsidies and protections are pulled away as pre-conditions for membership, Vietnam’s farmers will have to compete against the rest of the world, where agriculture is far more efficient and less labor intensive. It has the potential to cause a great deal of social and political upheaval because 75 percent of the country’s population is rural. Already, rural-urban migration has accelerated in the last five years or so. I’m not sure what this will mean for the island. I imagine that as the city expands, an island in the middle of a river next to the heart of the city will become increasingly valuable property for development.