Halong Bay… A Three Hour Tour

After 3½ hours, we arrived in Halong City.  I guess you could call it northern Vietnam’s version of a beach town.  The first thing I noticed when I got off the bus was that the air was finally actually breathable.  The pollution has been terrible in Hanoi.

I really didn’t know too much about this part of the trip going into it.  I guess I just assumed that our boat would be waiting for us at a dock and we would just walk on board.

It turns out that you arrive at the “ferry terminal” where there are probably a hundred junks anchored in the harbor.  The ferry terminal consists of a set of steep, narrow stone steps, which you climb down so that you can jump onto a dingy that takes you out to your actual boat.  We had to then climb up out of the dingy and over the side of our boat.

When I told my dad we were doing this over-night trip on a boat, he suggested that I pack all of my clothes in Ziploc bags within my backpack so they wouldn’t get wet.  I assured him that this was a large enough boat that I wouldn’t have to worry about that.  I didn’t factor in all of this hopping on and off the dingy. Thankfully both I and my backpack stayed on board the boat at all times.

Our boat stayed in the harbor while we ate lunch, a seemingly endless parade of seafood dishes.  The plates just kept coming and it was hard to tell what was an appetizer and what was a main course.  We learned that when they brought out the plate of fruit, that meant the meal was finished.

Evidently in Halong bay, a government official needs to come on board the boat to “inspect” it with the captain before we can leave the harbor.  The captain then goes back to the office with the officer and gets stamped papers to bring back to the boat.  Our captain looked like he was about twelve years old.

After lunch we started our cruise of Halong Bay.  Unfortunately, it was very foggy and a little on the cold side so we weren’t able to fully experience the splendor of the colors, but we could see the rock formations, especially as we got closer amongst them.  The limestone-karst rock formations reminded me very much of the ones we saw in the Guilin/Yangshuo area of China that we visited in 2008.  The water was a beautiful bluish-green color unlike anything I’ve seen at any of the other place to which I have traveled.

A Vietnamese fable says that the towering formations of Halong Bay were formed by the crash landing of a dragon sent by the prehistoric gods to protect the county from an invading army.    

After cruising for about an hour, we anchored in amongst the mountains and boarded our dingy to explore the area.

A section of approximately 700 islands was designated as an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. We took our dingy to Hang Sung Sot, or “Surprise Cave,” which was discovered by the French in 1901.  The cave was later used by the Viet Cong as a hideout during the war.

The cave has three chambers. After seeing the first two, which were interesting but not spectacular, I was beginning to think that this was more of a tourist trap than anything, like when we visited the butterfly cave in Yangshuo.  But when we entered the third chamber, I was blown away.  It was massive (hence why the French named it “Surprise Cave”). It had an almost otherworldly feel, like I would imagine walking on the moon or through a cave on an asteroid (think Star Wars) would feel.  Definitely worth all of the steps.

From there we hopped back on our dingy.  We had the choice of going kayaking or to another island where we could climb to the top of Dao Ti Top. Since it was very cold, we decided to forgo the kayaking and opted for the mountain instead.

I learned my lesson from my last trip to Asia where my quads were sore the entire trip from climbing so many steps (something we don’t have much of in New Jersey) and made sure that I was in better shape for this trip, so the climb to the top was a piece of cake.  The view from the top was spectacular.  We could see all around the rock formations and the various boats anchored amongst them.

Our dingy met us at the bottom of the mountain to take us back to the boat.  Dien, our guide, taught us to make spring rolls the traditional Vietnamese way using rice paper.  We each took a turn rolling one and the cook fried them up to be served with our dinner.

I’m finding that one of the most interesting parts of traveling is the people you meet along the way.  Since there were only fourteen of us on the boat, we had lots of time to talk and get to know people.  In our group, there was a woman from Switzerland who was doing a one month tour of Vietnam on her own, a young couple from Germany who had each recently finished university and were spending three months traveling all over Southeast Asia, a couple of young professionals from New Zealand who each had taken a month’s leave of absence from work to tour Vietnam and Cambodia, and two girls from New Zealand who were traveling for three months before moving to London.  Both times I’ve been over here, I’ve met very few American travelers.

After dinner, Dien set up Karaoke.  We weren’t much of a Karaoke bunch and convinced our crew to sing some of the Vietnamese songs for us.  The final activity before bed was squid fishing, although I think that this may have been more of a tourist activity.

Our rooms on the boat were quite nice.  We had private bathrooms (which were actually bigger than Robin’s bathroom in Hong Kong) with a hot shower.  The beds were comfortable.  All in all, it reminded me very much of Grammie’s house in North Wildwood.  For the first time since I arrived over here, I was finally able to sleep soundly.  That was until the siren and strobe light on our dingy started going off at 5:00 am.

By 6:16 I had given up on trying to fall back to sleep, so I sat up on the top deck of the boat until breakfast.  After breakfast, we cruised back to the ferry terminal, had lunch at one of the Halong Bay hotel restaurants, and drove back to Hanoi.