Oh naive Milly and Mihai from the past, what I could preach to you about Ha Long Bay...
A little background on the Bay (taken respectively from my memory and Wikipedia). It is a world heritage site recognized both for it's natural beauty and its geologically important limestone islands and ecosystems. The name Ha Long comes from an old
Vietnamese legend about a dragon that ended up living in the bay after it had saved the country from invaders. Ha Long means 'descending dragon'. The biggest island of them all is Cat Ba which contains a national park. Unfortunately, we didn't get to experience it as independently as we thought, but nevertheless it was a beautiful side trip that I would go back to see more of. To be honest though, most places on this trip I would venture back to.
After a delightful and somewhat long stay in Hanoi, we departed for a Ha Long Bay tour arranged via the hotel. It was our first experience riding on a bus in Vietnam. Although I didn't bear particularly high expectations for road conditions, this 4 hour journey set the tone for every subsequent bus journey we took in the area. Plenty of crater-sized potholes, random and frequent bus-driver beeping, getting cut off by cyclists, overtaking slow motorbikes at the same time as a militaryish truck while swerving to miss the tourist bus about to head on collide with us...yeah...road safety in Vietnam (and pretty much everywhere else), I can haz? I love it.
Anyway, we knew it was a tourist squeeze 2 hours into the ride when we pulled up at an indoor mini-mall crammed with souvenir stalls and several busloads of other tour-goers milling about outside. The only memorable part of this stop (both there and back) was that it was the first time I'd seen Oreos in a couple weeks. Later I found out that they were readily available everywhere, so that actually didn't turn out to be very memorable. Except that I've just remembered it.
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| Looking out at the tour boat we spent the night on. |
Although I wouldn't choose to do this tour again, I have to admit we saw some cool bits of Ha Long bay. Vietnam was just kind of like that - organized tours and buses and such. I'm not against that at all, but Mihai and I are really not go-go kind of travelers. We fear tight itineraries. We like to be lazy and do things at our own drawn out pace. Anyway, here are some cool pics!
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| Rock that looks like a teapot. Can you see it? |
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| Floating village viewed from Thien Cung grotto |
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| Floating village viewed from kayaks. |
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| Another shot of the little teapot rock cove from the cave entrance. |
In the evening after kayaking we actually swam in this water, if you can believe it. There was so much dissolved salt in there I could float normally with my head dry.
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| Coastin' |
In the end, the best part of this experience for me was cruising around the bay on the top deck in the sun :)
- milly
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