Halong Bay

After spending three nights in Hanoi with my friend Sam, I ventured outside the capital to Halong Bay. Recently pegged by UNESCO as one of the seven modern wonders of the world, Halong Bay is located about 100 miles east of Hanoi in the Gulf of Tonkin.  There are countless tours that bus eager tourists from around the world to the bay -- most of these tours involve an overnight on a boat, as was the one I ultimately decided to do.  It was a fun trip, with friendly fellow travelers, lots of good but highly Westernized and heavy Vietnamese food on the boat, and lots of picturesque sightseeing.  As luck would have it, about 8 Chinese people traveling together were on my trip.  I didn't let on for a while that I spoke Mandarin.  This proved useful when they started making fun of our Vietnamese staffers.  Ultimately, however, I invited one of them in Chinese to sit next to me on the boat.  Everyone was very surprised and impressed.

Halong Bay is home to over a thousand islands, many of them just rock formations that jut jaggedly out of the sea in terrific shapes and angles.  It's a beautiful place, one of the more stunning that I've ever been, and I'm very glad I got to see it when I did.  This is because I'm not particularly confident that it will survive for more than ten or so more years.  If the physical majesty of the bay was the major takeaway from my overnight, a close second would be the glaring environmental concerns posed by all of the human contact the bay has to endure.  Hundreds of ships carrying thousands of visitors sail into the same small circle of water every day.  It is a huge boon for the Vietnamese economy that relies on tourism, but one can't help but notice the damage it causes as well.  The water is visibly tinged with oil, the smell and sound of boats dominate, and there is little to no wildlife to speak of.  My trip ended at around noon, and within fifteen minutes they had another group filing onto the boat that my group had just vacated.  It's a well oiled machine (no pun intended) -- groups are constantly on the bay, to the potential detriment of the bay itself.

So if you have the chance to get to Vietnam, go to Halong Bay.  You might not be able to for much longer!

I wasn't able to capture the crowds very effectively, but this is the entrance to the harbor in Halong City.  Zounds of people mill around until their tour leaders tell them that their boat is ready, at which point they are ushered through the crowds to the docks.

The little houses are used by fishermen and kayaks, which we got to paddle.  Two of the Chinese people who had never kayaked before capsized their boat and fell in.  I tried (and failed) not to laugh.

We visited an enormous cave in one of the rock formation islands.  They had installed funky colored lights throughout the cave, for which I was thankful since we wouldn't have been able to see otherwise.  But for some reason, the lights coupled with the flash made the cave almost impossible to capture effectively on film.  Looking at this and my other cave photos now, I have trouble visualizing how the cave actually looked.  This is the first (and smallest) of three chambers.  It was really much more impressive than this picture makes it seem.

Stalactites.  Or stalagmites?  I recall from somewhere that stalaCtites are the ones that hang down, cause they're on the Ceiling, and stalaGmites jut up cause they're on the Ground, but what do I know.

The bay (and a small fraction of the boats) from the mouth of the cave.

The highlight for most people at Halong Bay is the sunset.  It's certainly what I was looking forward to most.  As far as sunsets go, I think I've seen more impressive colors elsewhere (Montana and Cape Cod both come to mind).  But you'd be hard pressed to beat the setting.  These two were taken on top of a steep mountain on a beach island, which we climbed up to catch the sunset.  Not shown here are the dozens of people jostling for position as everyone tries to snap the perfect sunset photo.  It was pretty funny, actually.  Very few people had any time to just enjoy the sunset -- they were all too worried about getting that postcard photo.

This one was taken from our boat, and is probably my favorite picture from the trip.  As Sam quipped when I got back to Hanoi and proudly showed her this picture, "Everyone becomes an amazing photographer at Halong Bay."

We had a cooking class on board the boat before dinner.  And by "class" I mean our Vietnamese tour guide showed us how to make spring rolls, had us each try once, and then just made more of them herself for us to eat.  My spring roll fell apart, naturally.

A view of the bay the next morning, which was cloudy and rainy (good timing, since we basically just cruised around and ate both breakfast and lunch, until it was time to get off the boat).

And I made some friends!  From left to right, we have Udo and Sara, a German couple, and Patrizia, an attorney from Switzerland.