During the French colonial period in Vietnam, authorities exacted a tax on boats. So the people of the fishing villages got creative: “These aren’t boats. They’re baskets.”
We saw these boats all over the beaches around Da Nang. Sometimes they were upright, as here, but often they were inverted to provide a waterproof covering for items left on the beach. According to our tour guide, some fishing families keep a fishing boat anchored off shore and use these smaller basket boats to travel between home and their larger boat.
For more information about the basket boats of Vietnam, see this article from National Geographic.
© 2023 by Mary Daniels Brown
