Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Days 208 - 209: Halong Bay

Photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2064718&l=6ce85&id=1101094

The following morning I left for Halong Bay on a trip organized by my guesthouse. Halong Bay is a portion of the South China Sea that is just off the coast of the cities of Haiphong and Halong, both of which are about four hours from Hanoi by bus, and the area's major draw is the thousands of green, forested limestone islands that shoot quite spectacularly out of the turquoise water.

A few times on this trip I've been satisfied to know that I stumbled upon a place that few other Westerners have seen. This is not one of those places. Halong Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage site, which is good enough to send hundreds of tourists, many of them ageing package tourists, venturing out onto its waters each day. The day I was there, it was more like thousands, due to the fact that it was the beginning of a long holiday weekend in Vietnam. When we reached the Halong City pier, where we'd catch out boat out onto the bay, the scene resembled something akin to a huge parking lot in which everyone has lost his or her car. Westerners, Vietnamese, tour guides, and security guards were milling about with confused looks on their faces, no one quite sure which way to go. We ended up waiting nearly two hours beside the pier to figure out which one was our boat.

While I waited, I struck up a conversation with two girls who were a few years older than me; incidentally, they were the only people I could find who were under age 50 and spoke English. One girl, Sarah, was Canadian; the other, Tamara, was Dutch. I'd spend much of the next two days hanging out with them, and I'd see them again in Sapa a few days later.

We finally boarded the boat, and from then on the experience changed drastically. Our boat was a huge wooden Chinese junk, complete with a kitchen, a dining area, and a large deck on the upper level and private bedrooms on the lower level. The sea was calm, the scenery was beautiful, and the boat proved to be a relaxing hiatus from the zoo we had just experienced on the pier. We spent the remainder of the afternoon sailing past limestone cliffs, crawling through caves, and kayaking into little coves. In short, we all realized just why the excursion to Halong Bay is so popular.

That night after a surprisingly good dinner and an impromptu Texas Hold 'Em tournament between some of the younger passengers, we sprawled out on the deck of our boat and stared up at the stars. The bay is beautiful by night; aided by the moon, we could just make out the karst formations jutting up from the water toward the sky, and when we looked out across the water we could see the glowing lights of the other boats that were anchored nearby. In that moment every hassle and frustration on the pier became well worth the trouble.

After a restful night aboard the boat, we spent the following morning exploring a bit more of the bay before heading back to the pier around mid-day. In Halong City we once again hit a wall of loud tourists; standing there waiting for our minibus to arrive, I couldn't help but wish I had booked the three day trip instead of the two.

Our bus ride back to Hanoi was uneventful for us, but quite eventful for some of the vehicles around ours. Just outside of Halong City, we drove by two trucks that had flipped over the guardrail, and closer to Hanoi we were passed by a motorbiker who, realizing his lane was ending, hit the brakes, slid out on some sand, and slammed his face into one of the guardrail poles, his legs rotating around his head like the hands of a clock. We figure he may have had a bit of a headache the next morning.

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