Halong Bay

Everyone said that Halong Bay was a must. J doesn't like being on water, no, her semi-circular canal doesn't like it. So I said fine, we'll do other things. But she talked to several people and read the books and all said the water was flat calm. And it was mostly, and the little part that had ripples she got through with no problem.

These are pictures of the bay, our hotel at Catma Island, and back today in the bay again.
We've just started the cruise. There is something wonderfully serendipitous about being on a short tour, thrown together with people you will share a day or two with and probably never see again.

Here's a little boat that came up along side and a

little boy climbed onto our ship to sell fruit.

Getting lunch ready in the boat's kitchen. There was a separate vegetarian table which we shared with an Austrian vetinarian. She and a friend were traveling while their husbands were diving.

We stopped to see a large cave that was only discovered in 1996. I asked why there were no bats. I was told, they got rid of them because of the tourists.

You can get a little sense of the scale by looking at the people in the lower left hand corner. The main room was huge - probably 75 meters high.

Here are J an a couple from near Southhampton, UK.

J hadn't wanted the trip that included sleeping on the boat. So our group got a bus on Catma Island and rode through a National Park to the town on the other side. Here's our hotel from where we had breakfast this morning.

The town from the breakfast deck.

T is from Vancouver. He and J bonded because they were both very sensitive to the water. It was a little ripply this morning so they both got outside.

Then off the boat at Halong Bay for lunch and then back on the bus,
to make our way back to Hanoi.

But not without another pottery stop. Here's T with his Vietnamese-Canadian girlfriend.

Halong Bay itself was pleasant and peaceful, but with grey skies it wasn't quite as amazing as it was billed. Perhaps it's that we've been spoiled by Prince William Sound and Resurrection Bay. The rocky walls looked a lot like those Alaska Bays, but without the snow capped mountains rising above them. And the Bay itself seemed dead. There were raptors flying above the islands and a few other largish black birds, but we saw not one bird anywhere on the water. We saw no animals in the water. There must be fish in there. There was a fair amount of debris floating around.

The rest of the trip was relatively quiet. I had Robert, a Dutch young man on one side. He's been traveling around SE Asia for four months and goes back to Amsterdam in a week or so. On the other side was a Taiwanese engineer who works in Ho Chi Minh City. Now we're at the Star Hotel and tomorrow we're headed for Bangkok where we'll stay with Jim Lehman, an old Peace Corps buddy, and then we'll got back to Chiang Mai Tuesday night. My co-workers are all in Bangkok anyway for the demonstration so I haven't missed anything - well, I missed the demonstration. Maybe we'll have time to go say hello tomorrow.