What Happens When a Living Culture Becomes a Tourist Attraction?

Part 1

Hello, I’m Jiro, the owner of Sky Tea House, a traditional farmhouse guesthouse in the mountains of rural Japan.

Before flying to the Philippines to reunite with my wife and son after 7 months apart, I decided to spend a few days in Vietnam.

This wasn’t originally part of the plan.

Because the end of the year's schedule of my city council meetings kept changing, I had to cancel my original flight. Since I was already planning to visit the Philippines anyway, I paid the change fee and booked a new itinerary that finally seemed safe from further schedule changes.

The result was an unexpected stop in Vietnam—a country I first visited nearly ten years ago.

Sometimes the best trips are the ones you never planned.

Hanoi’s Famous Train Street

My first stop was Hanoi.

Like many visitors, I went to the famous Train Street, where cafés line both sides of an active railway. Every time a train approaches, customers quickly move their chairs aside before the train squeezes through the narrow street.

The first time I saw it 10 years ago, it felt like one of those uniquely Southeast Asian scenes where everyday life exists right next to the railway.

Today, however, things have changed.

The cafés have multiplied.

Tourists pack both sides of the tracks.

Everyone is waiting for the exact same moment.

Everyone is holding a camera.

In Japan, railway photographers—known as toritetsu—are sometimes joked about as a uniquely obsessive subculture that many foreigners struggle to understand.

But sitting there in Hanoi, I realized something.

Perhaps these tourists are not so different.

Whether it’s a rare train in Japan or the perfect Instagram photo in Vietnam, people everywhere behave surprisingly similarly when a camera becomes the main reason they’re there.

Escaping Ho Chi Minh City

After Hanoi, I flew to Ho Chi Minh City.

I needed to stay for a few days before continuing to the Philippines, but I wasn’t in the mood for another giant city.

Instead, I headed south to Can Tho, the largest city in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.

Although home to more than a million people, Can Tho has a much slower pace than Ho Chi Minh City.

Rivers and canals run throughout the city, and for generations it has served as the commercial heart of the Mekong Delta.

Most travelers know it for one thing:

The floating markets.

From everything I had read, I imagined a place where traditional river life still survived.

Continue to part 2