Halong Bay, Vietnam

In March, 2007, my family and I (I'm Glenn, by the way) took a trip to northern Vietnam, something we'd been wanting to do for a long time.

I asked some students of mine who had lived in Hanoi for sightseeing recommendations and also looked around the Web for ideas. As it turns out, there is an kind of tourist circuit that people follow in northern Vietnam, and you can see people in one on one day and then say, "Hey there's that couple we saw two days ago in Sapa!" or something like that.

Anyway, one of the destinations on the sightseeing circuit is Halong Bay. Here's a Google Earth satellite picture of it. Those small islands you see sprinkled about are limestone karst formations that are a sight to behold.

We took a "2 days, 1 night" tour of Halong Bay, so it included a night on a boat. If you are considering such a tour, this will give you an idea what awaits you.

Below is a selection of the pictures we took with comments by me. If you just want to look at all the pictures we took, click here.

We were staying at the Camellia Hotel in Hanoi, and they had an ODC Tours desk in their lobby (mail: odctravel@hn.vnn.vn). We booked three different tours with them and were generally satisfied with them as tour operators. We took the Perfume Pagoda tour with Mr. Duong (pronounced Zee-ung) on Thursday, and then we were pleasantly surprised when he was also our tour guide to Halong Bay on Friday. Mr. Duong was knowledgeable, had a ready smile and good sense of humor, and he was mindful of how his charges were faring.

It takes like 3 1/2 hours to drive down to the coast from Hanoi, including the 25-minute rest stop at the souvenir shop.

When you finally do arrive at the coast, you'll find the the tour boats jammed together side by side. As a matter of fact, there are so many that when we returned the boat couldn't get to the shore at all and we had to "tightrope" down the edges of several boats before we could jump down on land. All of the bats look like these, wooden boats made to sort of resemble junks.

After we got out by the islands, the captain cut the engines and we were served a meal, as it was already past noon. There were only 13 of us on the boat, which was only about half-capacity. Since we weren't getting off the boat, all meals were included, but drinks were extra. They had a camp cooler type of ice box loaded with beer and soft drinks on a couple of blocks of ice.

After lunch we set sail again and headed for this cove. I could see quite a few boats anchored in it and something halfway up the side of a island dead ahead.

What I saw was an large cave, and you might be able to make out the group of tourists there on a landing taking in the view and pictures of each other. The mandatory view-from-the-cave picture is next.

While I was snooping around the Net, I found a beautiful desktop picture of Halong Bay, maybe from webshots.com, and I downloaded it and put it on my desktop. I wondered what part of Halong Bay I was looking at. I'm not sure when I realized that I was arriving at where the picture was taken. Unfortunately it was overcast and low tide when we arrived, so the skies look milky and the water muddy.

Anytime you have limestone and water dripping through it you're going to have caves. This one really was huge - it's mind-boggling to think how many millions of years it took to form.

Some of the areas have colored lights, so there are some pretty eerie views in there.

Later we saw a pagoda on top of an island, and Mr. Duong corrected me that it wasn't a pagoda - it was an observation tower. I guess he keeps the word "pagoda" reserved for temples, rather than anything with a pagoda roof. Anyway, he would pay for the tickets if anyone wanted to go up, but the climb to the top was optional. We all went for it. My kids counted the steps: there are 403 steps to the top. I took this one about halfway up.

And this is what you see when you get all the way up there. Again, too bad it was overcast. There was a kid on the top wearing a T-shirt from my kids' rival high school here in Tokyo. Small world.

We spent most of our time on the upper deck of the boat. The kids grabbed some deck chairs. Kelly read a book; Casey played his Game Boy And that's me back there chatting with an Australian gal. She had been to Cuba and was telling me what that was like.

We had to take some pictures of the cabins. The boat we were on wasn't owned by ODC, it was just leased. Whoever owned it was not much interested in putting money into maintenance. The light didn't work in the kids' room, the fan there on the left was about to fall off the wall, the air conditioner leaked water all over the floor, the shower never got warm, and when I went to close the curtains, the whole thing, rod and all, fell off on the floor. That said, we did have a comfortable sleep that night, though.

When the gal we booked the tour from asked if we wanted to go kayaking, we said no. I really wanted to go for a snorkel and see what kind of fish they had. Well, that idea didn't work, because one look told me that the visibility was going to be zero. I also have to mention that there seems to be no sense of protecting there natural environment, either. There was some sections where the current had gathered all the surface trash together, and the water was almost squalid.

Even if you don't pay for kayaking up front, they told us that we could pay on the ship and go for it. Since two of the couples on the boat had paid for it and the ship was going to be anchored for an hour anyway while they went around, my daughter Kelly and I decided to try it. That's us bringing up the rear. Somehow my legs never got used to the angle they had to be in, so I didn't find it that comfortable.

Here's what the boat we were on looked like. There were two of them from ODC, sister ships, and the crew lashed them together at the stern overnight.

Vietnam may be a communist country officially, but let me assure you that there is no lack of entrepreneurial spirit among the people. There are ladies in rowboats that come up and offer to sell you snacks. The tour company warned us that if we bought beer from them and not from the house, there would be a 5,000 dong surcharge! We bought some snacks from one lady, and she refused to take our money - it looked too crumpled. She wanted our crispest bill, and then she wanted to give us bills back in change that were as crumpled as ours! How do you say "chutzpa" in Vietnamese? I wanted to make her walk the plank.

They had a few things other than kayaking for you to do, and one of them was fishing with these interesting circular fishing "poles." The kids tried their luck. No luck.

After that we just headed back into shore, and I've already told you how we got back on dry land. We had a pretty forgettable lunch in a hotel restaurant and then it was back on the bus for the drive to Hanoi. Halfway back we stopped at a different souvenir shop and I snapped this picture of some of the artwork on the walls. There was a painting of "Uncle Ho" and the Chinese character for "safe" (or "cheap").

They also had some really huge pickled snakes with their tails in their mouths. These were up high on a shelf with lots of dust on them and no price tag, so it didn't look like they were for sale. I took this picture with a flash and not too much of the glare bounced back into the lens, so it gives the liquid a kind of eerie glow.

OK, that's that the two-day trip is like. There are also 3 days, 2 nights trips, and I understand some people take tours that include a stay on an island. Maybe next time. While we were in Vietnam, we also took pictures around Hanoi and trips to Sapa and the Perfume Pagoda, so you can see those page, if you're interested, by clicking the links below.