In a new Dabbler travel mini-series, writer and seasoned globetrotter Valerie McTavish offers Snapshots from her current travels in Cambodia and Vietnam.

The sun has risen in the mist over the lush morning of Vietnam. I am 6 hours on the rails south of Hanoi, clunking past nameless villages. We are still north of the infamous and still bomb-pocked Demilitarized Zone where ironically much of the fighting happened during the American War. While most people on the train are fighting to hang on to a thread of sleep as they jiggle in their bench beds, Vietnam has yawned and stretched. Tableaus of urban life click past me like scenes from a Viewmaster. The slides contain a young man surfing on a wooden plank over a muddy field behind a water buffalo as his father hauls on a rope slung through the beast’s snout; a pony-tailed girl squats in the next plot over hacking at the earth with a hoe; a woman in a conical hat folds in half to inspect the grains hidden in her vibrant green rice paddy; a single tomb sits inexplicably in the centre of a farmer’s field, its only mourner the stick-scarecrow in a plastic poncho.

Above the daily toil, groups of children shoulder backpacks as they kick the dirt road on their walk to school. Unlike urban students, they wear no uniforms, only scruffy clothes and plastic sandals. One boy drops his load and chases a scraggly dog down a hill. His mates cheer him on as he launches pebbles at the little mass of fur. The train chugs past the school yard where the student march comes to a boil, only to temper off as we slide down the rails. Landscape gives way to a placid lake where large nets sit suspended like trampolines on four crude tree-poles. They wait to be submerged and gather up all the fish the grey water below will allow. Nearby, paddles sit idle in abandoned wicker baskets floating tethered to the shore.

The edges of the lake lead back to rolling hills dotted with homes. Some are mere shacks with woven bamboo walls and thatched roofs. The sturdier ones are made from wood planks covered by a single slant of corrugated tin. As humble as the homes appear there is pride here. In front of one home, the Vietnamese flag is bowed between a bent-over sapling of a branch. It’s a single yellow star on a blood red background reminding them of their optimistic future and their tormented past.