Confucious

NO AMOUNT OF PREPARATION OR PRE VISION CAN PREPARE YOU FOR THE NOISE AND CHAOS, HEAT AND FUMES OF THIS PLACE !

Situated about 45 mins north of Hanoi city lies an area called Bac Ninh, home to Hanoi’s infamous steel industry.  This is a small sample of what you can expect if you ever visit it.

I wasn’t sure what to expect before we went to the steel works and certainly wasn’t prepared for the fairly chaotic way and seemingly disorganised way it all operates but I’m absolutely sure it’s perfectly safe. It’s just than in Britain and the West we’d be fairly restricted to where we could photograph for fear of Health and safety regs running riot.  It’s not quite that restricting in Vietnam when you have the right connections and your guides can speak the local language.

Avenues upon avenues of smelting sheds, clanging metal, reversing trucks, hundreds of workers in conical hats and hard hats, porters with hand carts, red hot steel rolling out of steel mills and presses, hot torches being used to cut and carve up freshly milled coils of raw steel and metal.

We took about an hour to wander cautiously amongst the sheds and mills and enjoyed an amazing experience which offered some great opportunities for faces thick with soot and grime, welding torches, grinders, and red hot metal both being made and melted down from raw scrap.

The N. Vietnam tour in October 2017 will revisit the steel yards (for an afternoon) thanks to my wonderful guide and fixer.
More details can be found here