Halong Bay

One of the top ten things I'd hoped to see on this trip is Halong Bay in northern Vietnam. I had read that it's one of the most beautiful places in the world. Now I know.

The bay has nearly 2,000 islands, spread over an area of about 600 square miles. Traveling by boat through the maze of islands is like exploring a mythic realm Tolkien might have imagined.

When I arrived in Hanoi the weather was so hot and humid it was hard to breathe. I spent those two days seeing the city and waiting for my hostel to fix the A/C in my room. They fixed it the day the weather snapped and it became cold and rainy. I had planned on going to Halong Bay but I didn't want to go in the rain. So I waited. The weather underwent another drastic, sudden change. On the second hot and sunny day I booked a two-day tour. You can guess what happened next.

It's about a three-hour drive from Hanoi to Halong Bay. It was sunny when I was picked up in the morning but by the time we got on the water it was cloudy. I would have rather seen the area in the sunshine, of course. Even in the gloomy weather it was spectacular. From a distance the overcast sky gave the islands a ghostly, ethereal look.

We entered into the labyrinth of islands, rows of them disappearing into the mist like a series of receding horizons.


The islands are limestone and thus it's not surprising that there are caves with stalactites and stalagmites. We visited two, which were quite impressive.

There was some sort of official personage in one of the caves with what we all agreed was the World's Coolest Office.


Our tour guide was yet another aspirant to be the World's Worst. He'd giggle like the village idiot as he pointed out all the interesting formations. Dragons having sex with other life forms was a recurring theme...

This is the view from the cave exit. It's safe to say Halong Bay is no longer a well-kept secret.


I got a kick out of listening to other tourists complain that there are too many tourists!

From there we went to another cove to do some sea kayaking. There are fish farms there where fish, sharks, lobsters, crabs and even cuttlefish are raised for my dining pleasure.


This is our junk in the cove.

In the water below is a small rowboat with a floating grocery store. Some incredibly hard-working entrepreneurs row around to the tour boats selling beer, whiskey, snacks, etc.

The prices on the boat are outlandish so another American guy named Colin (who was there with his girlfriend Katy) and I were going to buy a bottle of rice whiskey for 100,000 dong (as opposed to 30,000 for a beer on the boat).

As I was making the transaction a member of the crew shouted down in extremely rude fashion, indicating that we would be charged if we tried to bring the whiskey on board. We were told when we booked the trip that everything was included except for drinks. We were not told we'd have to buy them on the boat until the moment I was handing over the money to the girl in the boat.

She was crushed. I was not pleased.

I would much rather pay a fair price to a hardworking girl in a rowboat than pay out the wazoo to the extortionists on board. Colin had an idea. We ran down to his cabin and waved her over the window. She rowed over and we bought it. Two young British guys pulled the same trick. I'm sure the crew knew. Screw 'em.

I was lucky to be in a fun group. I shared my cabin with a Canadian guy named Marc-Antoni (second from left). In addition to the American couple (center) and the British guys there was a pair of Danish girls. On the table is a bottle of rice whiskey and in between Colin's feet is the bottle we bought from the lady in the boat.




The cabins were surprisingly nice, considering I was doing a cheapo, grungy backpacker-type tour. But it was so cool and pleasant a bunch of us decided to sleep on the sunbeds on deck. I'd like to say it's one of those ideas that sounded good at the time, but even then, through the haze of two bottles of rice whiskey, it seemed like a recipe for disaster. Considering my back was already bothering me it was about as smart as jumping down an elevator shaft with an anvil strapped to my back.

Katy was kind enough to take a picture of me the following morning and you can see how I felt.



The budget tours are for two or three days. I was glad I did because the next day was just plain miserable. We dropped off the three-day'ers at Cat Ba Island. And then boat conked out. We were dead in the water.

Someone had the brilliant idea to have another junk tow us back to port. These aren't tugboats. They're built for slow cruising. It was comical watching the crews trying hooking the tow row up to various points on the two boats and then looking flummoxed when the boats refused to budge an inch. Then we got to watch as the crew of the other boat had to pry out the rope after it got jammed under the planks in the hull. I should run a caption contest for this pic.


I should say it was comical for the first 20 minutes or so. After an hour or so of futility I asked our tour guide if the other boat was going back to Halong City. It is? Why don't we hop on the other boat? He said something to the effect of "What would we do about this boat then?" I resisted the temptation to say "I really don't give a crap" or "That's not my problem" and instead just shrugged.

A few minutes later we were boarding the other boat. Apparently it hadn't occurred to anyone on either boat that we should switch. If I hadn't suggested it I'd probably still be on the boat, surviving by eating the corpses of my starved fellow passengers.